In reponse to Rick's question about the Church's activity during Argentina's "dirty war," my friend Andy Connolly, a diocesan priest in New York, writes: "As so often happens in Latin America and elsewhere, The Church (hierarchy & some laity) and the Church (some priests, religious and laity) are split. There were some real Christian martyrs who died defending the defenseless. Then there were members of the hierarchy who were fundamentally supportive of the military dictatorship from the outset and did nothing to stop the murders, torture, disappearances, etc." (I gather from him that although there is not a lot of information accessible on the web in English on this subject, there is quite a bit available in Spanish.)
Monday, January 14, 2008
The Church in Argentina
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Religions Institutions and Student Groups
I agree with Rick that it "is not the kind of discrimination the state should care about when a religious institutions makes decisions about membership on the basis of that institution's religious commitments. My question in the context of the University of Montana law school situation is whether that means the school has to fund the organization with no regard for what is contained in the Statement of Faith required to be adhered to as a condition of membership?
In this situation, we are not talking about the decision of a religious institution. Rather, presumably the current student leaders of the CLS have adopted a Statement of Faith that captures their understanding and interpretation of the Christian faith. (And a different group of students leaders might very well have come up with a Statement of Faith that was not identical to the one adopted.) There may be any number of students who call themselves Christian who share some but not all articles of the Statement of Faith.
I have no hesitation in saying that a university should provide funding to a CLS that restricts its membership to Christians. But while I'm not prepared to express a firm disagreement with Rick and Steve on this matter, I have to confess that I pause a little here, where we are talking about protecting restrictions based on some group of students' interpretation of Christianity, which interpretation excludes others who are Christians. Isn't there a difference between saying the state should not interfere with a religious organization's determination of what is required for its faith and the protection on religious grounds of whatever the current group of students in charge determines Christianity means?
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Health Care Reform Proposals
While we often disagree about what Catholic Social Thought means regarding specific public policy proposals, no can disagree that it is unacceptable that over 40 million Americans are uninsured, and therefore lack access to affordable health care. In the hope that health care reform will be an important issue in the upcoming presidential election, Americans for Health Care has prepared a detailed comparison of the health plans of the various candidates, available by signing up here. Americans for Heath Care is the largest grassroots health care reform organization in the U.S. Its aim is to make health care for all Americans a priority in the 2008 presidential election.
In a related vein, recognizing that no plan to increase coverage can be effective without efforts to reduce health care costs, the Commonwealth Fund has just issued a study examining 15 policy options with the potential to reduce health spending. The report is available here.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Climate Change and the Poor
One thing I did not see reflected in the recent back and forth between Rick and Eduardo about climate change is any mention of the concern expressed in a recent UN Human Development Report about the disproporationate impact of climate change on the poor. Although climate change will affect everyone, the poor will “face the immediate and most severe human costs” in the form of malnutrition, water scarcity and loss of livelihood. As discussed in an article in this morning's NYT, it does appear that the climate change talks currently under way in Bali are focusing some attention on this issue.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
More on the Church and the Modern World
Robert Araujo has raised concerns in several recent posts (see here and here) about efforts to force Catholic institutions to conform to norms that threaten their religious beliefs and faith. Although I am still not convinced that the decision of the city of Philadelphia in the Boy Scout case is a step toward totalitarianism, there is certainly pressure on Catholic insitutions to conform to behaviors antithetical to the faith in a variety of ways.
Sister Margaret John Kelly, D.C., director of the St. John's University Vincentian Center for Church and Society, had this to say about a bill just approved by the Wisconsin state senate that, with no opt out ofr religious beliefs, would require hospitals to inform rape survivors that emergency contraception is highly effective at preventing pregnancy and to dispense the drug if requested:
"It seems to me that we are being forced into that "Mennonite Future" that Bryon Hehir cautioned us about. The choice seems to be homogenization or marginalization because the pressures against Catholic integrity are mounting at a time when the Church is most vulnerable and financially challenged in many areas. However, neither choice is acceptable if we are to remain faithful to both the tradition and the vision of our social service agencies and our hospitals. Perhaps this is a Thomas More era calling for a time-out for broad, serious reflection on Catholic identity. We may also need to do a cost-benefit study of the Church as sponsor of service institutions, a model which served well the Church of the 19th and 20th centuries. It may also be the time to go back and study again Dulles' models of the Church and Burghardt's application of those models to health care. I suspect we will find in them affirmation , inspiration and even direction."
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Donating Rice at Twenty Grains a Word
We all take breaks during the day. Here is a suggestion for your next one: For each word you correctly define, FreeRice donates 20 grains of rice through the UN to help end world hunger.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Philadelphia and the Boy Scouts
I have read with interest both Robert's post and the New York Times article about the Boy Scouts and the decision by Philadelphia not to continue allowing the Boy Scouts to rent city property.
The Boy Scouts clearly have a right to define their own membership and should not be coerced or pressured by the state "to abandon their beliefs and their liberties." However, my understanding from the NYT piece is that Philadelphia has an ordinance prohibiting discrimination and requires that those leasing city property agree to nondiscriminatory language in their lease. The question, it seems to me, is whether the city is required to exempt the Boy Scouts from the ordinance. It may be that there are good policy reasons for them to do so (Boy Scouts serve many in the inner city, providing after-school activities and mentoring, etc.) and there may be arguments that they ought to be grandfathered given the origins of their use of the property and the fact that they built on and improved it. But that is different from saying that a failure to exempt them impinges on their consitutionally protected belief.
Having framed the question the way I think it ought to be addressed (or at least in a way that I think raises an interesting question), what is strange about the NYT article is that it reports that the city of Philadelphia is willing to allow the Boy Scouts to remain as full-paying tenants. If the ordinance in fact requires that tenants agree to a nondiscrimination clause, compliance with the ordinance would seem to oust the Boy Scouts regardless of the amount of rent they pay.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Government Role in Promoting Development
MOJ-friend Robby George sent the following observation in response to my post about the impact of the Malawi government's decision to subsidize fertilizer and seeds to its struggling farmers:
"I think the comments you posted on MoJ this morning concerning the positive role government assistance and foreign aid can play in promoting development are right on the mark, as is the pointed question you raise at the end. Inept government policies in this area and others have given libertarian ideology an unjustified plausibility. Government, when it recognizes that its role is subsidiary, not primary, and when it respects the principles of local autonomy, family authority, and personal responsibility, can be part of the solution. (Otherwise, of course, government worsens the problems it proposes to solve, and leaves our libertarian friends in the position to say "we told you so")."
Feeding the Poor in Malawi
We've debated the role of the government in addressing various social ills. There is good reason to be skeptical of government handouts that merely reinforce the cycle of poverty by allowing people to remain reliant on further handouts. However, not all government aid is created equal.
The New York Times today contains a front-page story on what has been described as an "extraordinary turnaround" in Malawi, which has experienced a sharp reduction in actue child hunger and is actually exporting food to other nations rather than begging others for food. What did its government do to help effectuate this turnaround? Ignoring the advice of the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government of Malawi made a decision to subsidize fertilizer and seed to its population.
The government of Malawi had long favored subsidies for fertilizer, recognizing that its "impoverished farmers could not afford to let their land lie fallow or to fertilize it," with the result that "their depleted plots yielded less food and the farmers fell deeper into poverty." Nonetheless, Malawi failed to provide such subsidies in the recent past, "acceed[ing] to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention." The AID has been a strong promoter of the role of the private sector in delivering fertilizer and seed and has been concerned that subsidies would undermine that effect. The government finally decided it could no longer give in to donor wishes.
Clearly leaving things to market forces didn't work. Equally clearly, the subsidized fertilizer is having a dramatic positive effect - not only can do people now have enough food to feed themselves, but they have food to sell to other countries. Are government subsidies perfect? Probably not, and doubtless there is some displacement of commercial fertilizer sales. But government programs aimed at helping people become self-sufficient are a different matter than those that simply hand someone a bowl of food.
As a side note, what does it say that the U.S. has shipped $147 million of American food to Malawi since 2002, but has only contributed $53 million to help Malawi grow its own food?
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
One Response to Priest as Icon
I forwarded Steve's post to several priest friends of mine asking for their reactions. One of them sent the following:
"The interpretation of the priest as icon of Christ is much too literal. The priest does not "become" Christ. God forbid! Who would be worthy? No, the priest stands "in persona Christi." That is, he stands in the person of Christ. The priest is called to reflect the presence of Christ in word and action. While not losing his individual personality or neglecting his unique gifts, which are in themselves a gift from God, he is to become transparent - pointing only to Christ. In fact, the priest is one of the four presences of Christ in the Mass, the others being the Word, the species (bread and wine) and, of course, the congregation. The worst criticism of a priest I ever heard was from an old nun as she was leaving a Mass celebrated by a very popular priest who had a distinctive style of celebration that included many personal adaptations, "He gets in the way of God."
"The stuff about the vestments strikes me as wrong. I have never heard that they refer to Christ as King."
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