Following is an excerpt of a letter written to the St. Thomas University community by University President Fr. Dennis Dease (which I post with his consent).
"I am writing to you today to explain the University of St. Thomas' decision not to co-sponsor an April 2008 PeaceJam conference for high school students.
"Last spring, a representative of our Justice and Peace Studies program advised my office of an opportunity to invite Archbishop Desmond Tutu to speak at St. Thomas during the PeaceJam conference. I discussed the matter with my staff and decided not to take advantage of this opportunity.
"Later, I learned that Youthrive, an Upper Midwest affiliate of Denver-based PeaceJam International, had invited Tutu to speak at St. Thomas without my knowledge or that of other senior administrators.
"(Metropolitan State University has agreed to host the conference, which will be held April 11-13, with Archbishop Tutu as the featured speaker.)
"St. Thomas receives hundreds of proposals to sponsor speakers and events, and we often decline for a variety of reasons. Why was this the case for the Archbishop Tutu opportunity?
"We became aware of concerns about some of Archbishop Tutu's widely publicized statements that have been hurtful to members of the Jewish community. I spoke with Jews for whom I have great respect. What stung these individuals was not that Archbishop Tutu criticized Israel but how he did so, and the moral equivalencies that they felt he drew between Israel’s policies and those of Nazi Germany, and between Zionism and racism.
"I was under no pressure from any pro-Israeli groups or individuals, nor did I receive any requests from them, to refrain from inviting Archbishop Tutu to speak.
"I am not in a position to evaluate what to a Jew feels anti-Semitic and what does not. I can, however, take seriously the judgments of those whom I trust by not putting St. Thomas in a position that would add to that hurt."
The United Nations has declared October 17 as the international day for the eradication of poverty. The world calendar of events and other information promoting the initiative can be found here.
This is a good time to remind ourselves that almost half of the population of the world lives on an income of less than a dollar a day and that every five seconds a child dies of hunger and other related causes. In the words of Alfredo Becerra V., C.M., "May the Lord give us the strength and courage to commit ourselves every day to the eradication of poverty around us!" (Fr. Becerra's letter to all members of the Vincentian family on this subject, including the World Bank statistics cited above appear on the famvin website here.)
Update: Zenit news reports that Pope Benedict XVI will participate in the international day for the eradication of poverty. It also reports that a Declaration of Solidarity, which will be delivered to the Secretary-General of the UN on Oct. 17, can be signed on-line here.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Predictably (at least in my view), the Supreme Court declined to grant cert. in Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Albany v. Serio. Like a similar California case, which the Court also declined to review, the New York Court of Appeals had upheld the application of a state law requiring employers who provide any prescription coverage to also provide prescription contraception coverage to Catholic Charities. The New York decision is here. We've blogged here on Mirror of Justice on this issue in the past and I discuss the issue of requiring religious organizations to provide such coverage an article linked on the side bar. (State Attempts to Define Religion: the Ramifications of Applying Mandatory Prescription Contraception Coverage Statutes to Religious Employers.)
Saturday, September 22, 2007
One of fascinating papers delivered yesterday at the Villanova CST symposium was that of Robert Pecorella, a political science professor at St. John's University in New York. Pecorella believes, as my earlier post suggests I do, that to be consistent with CST, market economies require careful balancing of the social values of efficiency and equity. But he also suggests that although Catholic thought includes a set of individual economci rights that may well require state-enforced redistribution, that such a state approach is not the preferred response to inequity. Rather, he argues in favor of other remedies that take into account the principle of subsidiarity in service of solidarity.
In the portion of his paper in which he outlines "other remedies" to market inequalities, he suggests a path to an institutional form of commutative and contributive justice. Because it already has an active commitment to commutative and contributive justice and because it has a workable diocesan structure arranged within the existing structure of state boundaries, he looks to the Church in the United States as the institution promoting change. Pecorella suggets that it may be time for the US Church to move from making general statements about social justice to making "operationally clear assertions" of what is expected within the Catholic community. He argues in favor of defining both economic floors beneath which no one should be allowed to fall and economic ceilings which define the point at which people of good faith "simply have enough." He acknowledges the complexity (not to mention controversial nature) of such a proposal, and suggests that in order to secure voluntary compliance by economically well off Catholics, the ceilings on economic outcomes likely will need to be initially set artifically high. He calls for organizational eforts within the dioceses to implement a floor and ceiling economic transfer program.
Leaving aside the complexity of picking an amount, the need to take into account regional differences, and whatever questions people may have about using the diocesan structure to effect change, the proposal is an intriquing one. Perhaps my own reaction is affected by my views about executive compensation and the gap in pay between executives and rank and file workers, a subject about which I have written in the past. But the idea that, not only that everyone deserves to have enough to flourish as a human person, but that there is a point at the upper end that is enough and beyond which is simply too much for a person of faith, is one worth thinking about.
Although I'm not sitting at a gate at the airport, I thought I'd add to Rob's post about yesterday's wonderful symposium at Villanova on Catholic Social Teaching on the Market, The State and the Law. I am a firm believer that CST has something real to say about the market and economic matters. While I don't disagree with those who maintain that CST leaves a lot to prudential judgements rather than proposing specific solutions to many of the particular questions that were raised during the day, that does not diminish the force of the teachings.
The third panel of the day included presentations by Mark Sargent on the divergence of the secular corporate social responsibility movement and CST, Rob Vischer on questions of conscience and corporate identity and myself contrasting a secular and CST vision of human work, the worker and the relationship between the employee and employer (and also very helpful commentary on the papers by Lyman Johnson and Julian Velasco). During the question and answer session following the presentations, someone argued that the free maket is the most efficient wealth creator and that corporations are an efficient structure in the free market. Therefore, on what basis, he asked, could we justify imposing constraints on the corporation to behave in a moral fashion that might weigh it down and make it less efficient. Of course, none of the speakers were arguing for jettisoning the free market. However, while it may be true that the free market is the most efficient wealth creator, it clearly is so for only a segment of the population. I recognize that there are many who believe that the rising tide raises all ships, but my own view is that is patently false. If a significant portion of the population is being left behind as the tide rises, then there is a problem from a CST perspective; efficiency in wealth creation can not be the only criteria for judging a system.
The question of what implications CST has for how and to what extent the law should step in to force more just outcomes in the market is, of course, the difficult one. Lyman Johnson observed during his comments that I seemed more hesitant to invoke legal mandates in the paper I wrote for this conference than I was in my 2004 Wake Forest article ("Using Religion to Promote Corporate Responsibility - the link to which is posted on the right sidebar) and he wondered why that was. I certainly have no difficulty theoretically with the idea of a government mandate on corporate entities, for reasons I have discussed in some of my writings. But he is correct that I have become increasingly nervous about direct government mandate, in part due to concern about the content and scope of norms that would be imposed on corporations if that were the route taken. (For an example we have discussed on this blog and on which I have written - when it comes to the question of the wellbeing of employees, many believe that the interest of employees is served by forcing all employers - including religious employers - to provide prescription contraception coverage to their employees, a mandate I oppose.) Another part of my hesitation is the belief we are at a point where some aspects of the workplace that are inconsistent with CST - for example, the fact that significant and increasing numbers of workers and their families lack access to affordable health care - are perhaps best dealt with outside of the employer-employee relationship.
Whatever position one takes on these matters, all of us who were present yesterday can agree that it was a wonderful, thought-provoking day. Hopefully we'll manage further posts to share about the fine keynote by David Hollenbach, the second panel, which featured two papers - one on the development of American CST (Zachary Calo) and the other on the reconciliation of the American dream and God's dream in Economic Justice for all (Patrick Flanagan, C.M.), and political scientist Bob Pecorella's proposal during the first panel for remedies for market inequalities, including the attempt to specify economic floors and ceilings.
Monday, September 3, 2007
From The Writer's Almanac. The numbers speak for themselves:
"Today is Labor Day, first celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882. The holiday was the idea of the Central Labor Union in New York City, which organized a parade and a picnic featuring speeches by union leaders. It was intended to celebrate labor unions, call for the eight-hour workday, and to recognize the achievements of the American worker.
"Many of the labor laws those early activists wanted were passed in the 1930s, including the eight-hour workday and the 40-hour workweek. Most sociologists predicted that in the coming decades Americans would work steadily fewer and fewer hours. But in fact, the opposite has happened. Today, more than 25 million Americans work more than 49 hours each week. And 11 million spend 60 hours or more at work each week. Americans also take fewer vacation days than employees in any other industrialized nation, making Americans the hardest-working (or most overworked) industrialized nation on the planet."
