The late Richard John Neuhaus used to emphasize that the priest sexual abuse scandal was about "fidelity, fidelity, fidelity," and George Weigel makes the same point now. At one level, I agree. On another level, though, "fidelity" is too simplistic. Most of my sins stem less from a deliberate lack of faithfulness, and more from a failure to come to grips with my own tendencies to justify my behavior through mental gymnastics that in the end amount to self-delusion. Giving myself a pep talk every morning about "being more faithful" only goes so far. That's why relationships of accountability are so important.
My guess is that most of the bishops who ended up facilitating abuse by keeping serial abusers secret, mobile, and working as priests would never have identified their decisions as a failure of fidelity. They may have been naive, but a clearer focus on faithfulness to their calling would not have done a whole lot to avoid the crisis. I think it's important to identify the blind spots that allowed the bishops to mistake their decisions for fidelity, and to persist in that mistaken belief for years and years without correction. Yes, it is about evil decisions that individual priests made. Yes, it is about horrible decisions that individual bishops made. But it is also about the entire Church -- not in the sense of playing "gotcha" journalism to try and bring down Pope Benedict -- but in the sense of asking, what are the Church's blind spots, how did those blind spots contribute to this crisis, and do those blind spots continue to compromise the Church's witness to the world?
A few more specific questions come to mind along these lines: 1) in an age of greater institutional transparency, to what extent does a continued emphasis on secrecy threaten the Church's witness and the well-being of its members? What are the implications and limitations of a more transparent Church? 2) if women bring a complementary set of gifts, inclinations, and sensibilities to our shared life, what is the cost of excluding them from leadership roles in the Church -- i.e., might these abuse cases have turned out differently if women were part of the conversation? (I think Lisa has asked this question before) and 3) why was the Church slower than much (but certainly not all) of the rest of society in recognizing the gravity of child sexual abuse and the limitations of therapy? Are there other areas where Church practices fall behind the sociological and scientific reality?
RELIGIOUS LEGAL THEORY CONFERENCE: RELIGION IN LAW AND LAW IN RELIGION
Center for Law, Religion, and the Global Community
St. John’s University School of Law
New York
November 5, 2010
This annual symposium, to be shared among different law schools and now in its second year, addresses a broad range of topics.This year’s theme, “Religion in Law and Law in Religion,” encompasses papers on traditional religion/state questions as well as papers that discuss the concept of law in different religious traditions.Possible topics include: coherence and incoherence in American Religion Clause jurisprudence; comparative approaches to religion/state issues; doctrine and precedent as legal and religious concepts; and the role of authority in law and religion.Confirmed plenary speakers include Steven H. Shiffrin (Cornell) and Steven D. Smith (San Diego).
Please submit abstracts (500 words) and inquiries to Professor Mark Movsesian ([email protected]; 718-990-5650) by May 24, 2010.Accepted speakers will be notified by mid-June.For presenters, group rates at a hotel in Manhattan will be available; conference meals and transportation between Manhattan and the St. John’s Queens campus will be provided.There will be an opportunity for presenters to publish papers in a forthcoming issue of the St. John’s Law Review.
This year’s conference is being hosted by the Center for Law, Religion, and the Global Community at St. John’s University School of Law.The conference is being planned by Professor Movsesian and Professor Marc DeGirolami ([email protected]; 718-990-6760).
By increasing the government's sheer size and role in the provision of health care, does health care reform really violate Catholic teaching as a matter of principle? Greg writes:
My opposition to the unwarranted emphasis on big government solutions in the 2010 health care legislation goes beyond prudential concerns about efficiency and cost to the public, although those factors obviously are important and contribute to the lack of economic viability for the plan . . . .As a matter of principle, grounded in Catholic teaching about liberty, human dignity, and human thriving, I regard this plan as dangerously fostering dependency on government, as suppressing our liberties in making economic and health care choices independent of government guidelines, and as enhancing the power of government employee unions that convert government itself into a special interest contrary to the common good.
Greg is certainly not alone on this point. More and more I seem to notice conservative Catholics advocating for small government as though it were a principle of Church teaching, rather than a prudential judgment regarding the policy measures that may or may not be most conducive to human flourishing under a particular set of circumstances. I understand that the totalitarian state does violate Church teaching in principle, but that's not what we're talking about here. It simply cannot be true that fostering reliance on the government when it comes to the provision of health care violates Church teaching as a matter of principle (or that supporting government employee unions does). I have no problem with Catholics opposing the European welfare state (a state that was shaped in significant part by Catholics), but I've understood that opposition to be grounded in an empirical judgment that the European welfare state does not work very well, not that the European welfare state is contrary to Church teaching.
As I've argued on MoJ before, I suspect that many (most?) of our opinions on these matters are shaped by our life experiences occupying a whole bunch of identities (we are "bundles of hyphens," to quote Laski) not just as the bearers of some purely distilled essence of a Catholic worldview. I'm not saying the health care debate regarding the role of government is prudential judgment all the way down, but it's close.
The New York Timesreports on new documents showing that Cardinal Ratziner failed to respond to an American bishop's requests that a priest who admitted molesting 200 deaf boys be defrocked. (The requests apparently were made years after the abuse occurred.) Even apart from the incalculable human costs inflicted by these priests -- and by the Church leaders who failed to take action to stop them -- this scandal is wreaking havoc with the Church's moral witness, and it appears that it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I fear that the 2010 edition of these scandals is just ramping up. Two sets of questions come to mind: First, is a pastoral response -- focusing on the spiritual dimension of this crisis and the need to put our trust in Christ -- sufficient, or does there need to be more candid discussion of the extent to which certain of the Church's institutional tendencies and power dynamics contributed to the crisis? Second, if a pastoral response is most appropriate here, should that response include repentance by the Church leadership as a whole, perhaps even including Pope Benedict? I've read commentary suggesting that Pope Benedict cannot admit mistakes given the doctrine of papal infallibility. That's wrong, of course, but it's still a matter not to be taken lightly. Even if the failing is paying insufficient attention to these matters in Munich and during his time heading the CDF, wouldn't that go at least part of the way to defusing the accusation that the Church is primarily concerned with maintaining the perception that its leaders can do no wrong?
Given the understandable attention paid to the health care debate, we have not had any conversations (of the MoJ sort, at least) about what appears to be another wave of scandal in the Church's seemingly never-ending struggle with the fallout from the sexual abuse of children by priests and some bishops' apparent faciltitation of that abuse. I found Pope Benedict's letter to the Church in Ireland to be a powerful reaffirmation of hope in Christ in the midst of heart-breaking human failings. E.g.:
We are all scandalized by the sins and failures of some of the Church's members, particularly those who were chosen especially to guide and serve young people. But it is in the Church that you will find Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today and for ever (cf. Heb 13:8). He loves you and he has offered himself on the cross for you. Seek a personal relationship with him within the communion of his Church, for he will never betray your trust! He alone can satisfy your deepest longings and give your lives their fullest meaning by directing them to the service of others. Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus and his goodness, and shelter the flame of faith in your heart.
And I understand (I think) the urge to focus the letter specifically on the Church in Ireland, since attention to "the local" matters greatly in Church teaching, both practically and aspirationally. At the same time, I wonder if "the local" matters as much in this context, or to put it differently, I wonder if the Church needs to spend more time acknowledging and articulating the reality that this is not just a local problem, and that many of the same institutional tendencies that exacerbated the problem were the same in Ireland, the United States, Germany, and elsewhere. Pope Benedict writes that "the problem of child abuse is peculiar neither to Ireland nor to the Church," but I wonder whether it would be helpful to speak more forcefully and more deliberately about child abuse as a problem within the global Church, rather than focusing case by case by case. The Church's witness could benefit, I think, by more and deeper conversations about how an unhealthy emphasis by some (many?) Church leaders on secrecy, power, and a desire to maintain a public perception of clerical infallibility may have contributed to these problems. Should we expect, or hope for, a letter on this subject addressed to all men and women of good will?
From the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (para. 149):
Human nature . . . is based on a relational subjectivity, that is, in the manner of a free and responsible being who recognizes the necessity of integrating himself in cooperation with his fellow human beings, and who is capable of communion with them on the level of knowledge and love.
It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject.
“We found this so interesting, because it could have gone the other way — it could have been, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ — as long as you surf on the shallow level of life you’re happy, and if you go into the existential depths you’ll be unhappy,” Dr. Mehl said.
But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.
In the New York Times, Robert Wright complains that Christian missionaries are at least partially responsible for Christian-Muslim tension when they try to establish common ground with Muslims in order to bring them to Jesus. Some of the missionaries even call themselves "Muslims" because it means "one who surrenders to God." Then Wright asks:
Let’s put the shoe on the other foot. Suppose you were a Christian parent in America and you heard that someone who called himself a Christian had bonded with your son via genial Bible talk and then tried to convert him to Islam. That would be annoying, right? Might even lead to some blowback?
Would I find it annoying? Maybe, depending on how old my son is and the context of the conversation. Blowback? Hmm . . like seeking to restrict non-Christians from using the word "God," rioting and killing Muslims? Probably not. I won't defend every tactic employed by Christian missionaries, but if we cannot draw any meaningful distinction between the efforts by some Muslims to impose a set of truth claims through law and/or violence and the efforts by some Christians to persuade non-Christians to embrace a set of truth claims through personal evangelism, we have a problem.
Get Religionnotes that the trial and conviction of Harlan Drake, killer of anti-abortion protester James Pouillon, received curiously little media coverage.
Peter Smith and Bob Tuttle have posted a new paper, Biblical Literalism and Constitutional Originalism, in which they note that proponents of biblical literalism have generally embraced constitutional originalism when they enter the judicial-political sphere. A snippet:
[B]oth critics of originalism and literalists who urge originalism as an approach to constitutional interpretation have failed to identify the fundamental differences between the two approaches. For literalism, interpretation is an act of faith in a God who is just and good. Accordingly, for the literalist, obedience to the biblical text - the Word of God - is the highest human good. Originalism, in contrast, demands loyalty to the text regardless of its moral quality; just or good results are accidental rather than necessary features of originalist interpretation.
I won't normally cross-post here from the Law, Religion, Ethics blog, but MoJers might be interested in this post about the possible inverse relationship between social tolerance/diversity and the strength of religious belief. In particular, you should read Steve Smith's (not surprisingly) thoughtful comment.
