According to Aquinas, “[t]he sovereign is said to be exempt from the law; since, properly speaking, no man is coerced by himself, and law has no coercive power save from the authority of the sovereign. Thus then is the sovereign said to be exempt from the law, because none is competent to pass sentence upon him, if he acts against the law.” Building on this observation, Brian Tamanaha explains why the Bush Administration's "systematic ideological . . . screening of applicants for positions in the Justice Department poses such a serious threat to the rule of law."
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Why Alberto Gonzales Needs to Read Aquinas
Monday, May 14, 2007
Benedict Minds the Gap
John Allen reports (here and here) on Pope Benedict's criticism of capitalism in Brazil. If the growing gap between rich and poor is considered a problem by Pope Benedict, does that mean that it should be considered a problem by Catholics? Or is this an example of the pope imprudently speaking about issues that are beyond his area of expertise?
Reconciliation
Over the years, I've posted dozens of times about the nuances of subsidiarity. Apart from Patrick Brennan and a couple of corporate law types who think I'm talking about the regulation of subsidiaries, folks don't get too fired up. This weekend I've learned that the way to light up my inbox is to say something heretical about the sacrament of reconciliation. My question about the exclusivity of reconciliation as the certain path of God's forgiveness prompted a flurry of uniformly helpful (and charitable) responses, all of which concluded that my RCIA training was a bit off the mark. For those who need a refresher, John Paul II explained:
[F]or a Christian the sacrament of penance is the primary way of obtaining forgiveness and the remission of serious sin committed after baptism. Certainly the Savior and his salvific action are not so bound to a sacramental sign as to be unable in any period or area of the history of salvation to work outside and above the sacraments. But in the school of faith we learn that the same Savior desired and provided that the simple and precious sacraments of faith would ordinarily be the effective means through which his redemptive power passes and operates. It would therefore be foolish, as well as presumptuous, to wish arbitrarily to disregard the means of grace and salvation which the Lord has provided and, in the specific case, to claim to receive forgiveness while doing without the sacrament which was instituted by Christ precisely for forgiveness.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Is God's Forgiveness Limited to the Confessional?
I do not believe that God's power to forgive my sins is constrained by a need for a priest to tell me I'm forgiven. That said, I've found the sacrament of reconciliation to be beautiful and powerful because it has been explained to me as the priest standing in the place of the Christian community and facilitating my reconciliation with the community. But then, in today's paper, I see this quote from Bishop Donald Trautman, the chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy: "Only in the confessional do I have the absolute guarantee that God has forgiven me."
Does this still represent the official Church teaching? If so, is it any wonder that many Catholics find evangelical churches more conducive to fostering a personal relationship with God?
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Novak's House is Made of Glass (and so is mine)
Rick is more familiar with First Things than I am. I just want to clarify, though, that a persistent call to sacrifice in order to alleviate some of the suffering of the poor is not, in my mind, the same as a periodic stick in the eye of those who want to use the government to help the poor. I may be wrong, but First Things seems to do plenty of the latter, not so much of the former. Take, for example, this piece from the current issue titled What Should We Do About the Poor? ("Because the reality of the underclass has to do mainly with culture and patterns of personal behavior, what government can do to help is limited.") I do not believe that every journal has to focus on every issue implicated by CST, but I think we let ourselves off much too easily in terms of what the Gospel calls us to do.
I've been reading much of what's been produced by Yale law prof Dan Kahan's "Cultural Cognition" project, which studies our tendency to view disputed matters of fact through the lenses of our cultural identities, so that "where members of society disagree about the harmfulness of a particular form of conduct, we instinctively trust those who share our vales -- and whose judgments are likely to be biased in a particular direction by emotion, dissonance avoidance, and related mechanisms." (This comes from Kahan's wonderful paper, The Cognitively Illiberal State.) We don't like to be pushed out of our comfort zone, particularly when it comes to complicated policy issues, and so we tend to cluster around shared sets of beliefs that are shaped by factors beyond the "merits" of the issue at hand. Our parish, in a politically progressive neighborhood, talks a lot more about poverty than about abortion. I know of parishes in politically conservative neighborhoods that talk a lot more about abortion than about poverty. I suspect that Democrats are more comfortable than Republicans reading Commonweal, and I suspect the opposite is true for First Things. If we think that our level of attraction to each magazine is purely a function of our good-faith, free-standing reading of the Catholic intellectual tradition, we're kidding ourselves. CST is broad enough that it can provide cover for directions in which we were already headed, and our magazines reflect that.
Carozza on International Law and the Common Good
Notre Dame law prof (and former MoJ-er) Paolo Carozza has posted a new paper, The Universal Common Good and the Authority of International Law. Here is the abstract:
This article examines the foundations of international law and the authority of international institutions from the perspective of the intellectual traditions of Roman Catholic social thought and natural law theory. The first half of the discussion focuses on the concept of a “universal common good” which grounds the authority of international law. It identifies four unresolved ambiguities in the idea of a universal common good, which need to be further clarified in order to understand better the role of international law and institutions in the contemporary world. The second part of the article applies the discussion of the universal common good to the analysis of one important aspect of contemporary international law: the authority of international institutions. Using in particular the example of the UN Security Council, the article argues that the decisions of international institutions should be considered to be authoritative in the fullest sense insofar as they serve the universal common good.
Novak Throws Stones (from a Glass House)
Over at First Things, Michael Novak sees a gap in the worldview of "left wing" professors on Catholic campuses:
More and more often on Catholic campuses, left-wing Catholics are hiding their own ideological preferences behind the mantra “Catholic social thought.” To listen to them, you would think that the Catholic social ethic has four main emphatic tenets and five great silences. The four emphases are: (1) pacifism and nonviolence; (2) legal limits on the income of the rich; (3) the extension of the social welfare state for the poorest 12 percent of the American population (about forty million people), until all are lifted by government grants above the poverty line; and (4) the elimination of the death penalty in the thirty-some states that still allow it.
Merely on the terrain of social ethics, this creed is notable for (a) its silence about ending abortion (forty-eight million since 1973); (b) its silence about federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and cloning; (c) its silence about the fourfold increase in violent crime since 1965—committed disproportionately against the poor; (d) its silence about the sixfold increase in father-abandoned families (chiefly among the poor); and (e) its silence about the horrific oppression of Muslim peoples around the world, including the daily assaults on their dignity by secret police, and the normal, regular abuse of their individual rights. We might call these the five silences.
This criticism is a two-way street, methinks. Speaking of notable silences, how many articles in First Things have focused on poverty?
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Promoting Integrity . . . One Lust-Driven Divorce at a Time
One recurring theme of our conversations on MoJ is the degree to which Catholic legal education should produce a different sort of lawyer than the mainstream. Well, our graduates are sure making a mark in the case of the racy "Life is Short. Get a Divorce" billboard. The two lawyers who put up the billboard are both DePaul Law School graduates, and they apparently saw this new marketing angle as supportive of authentic human flourishing. One commented, "It promotes happiness and personal integrity." Reporters looked to a John Marshall Law School grad to label the billboard a "disappointment to the profession and to the institution of marriage, which is something our community holds as sacred."
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
90%
The New York Times reports on a grass roots effort by parents of children with Down syndrome to educate obstetricians and other prenatal counselors on the value of their children's lives. The article reports that 90% of pregnant women who are given a Down syndrome diagnosis choose to have an abortion. While the reporter acknowledges some nuance to the issue, she appears to presume that the parents are motivated simply by concern for their own children:
The parent evangelists are driven by a deep-seated fear for their children’s well-being in a world where there are fewer people like them. But as prenatal tests become available for a range of other perceived genetic imperfections, they may also be heralding a broader cultural skirmish over where to draw the line between preventing disability and accepting human diversity. . . .
A dwindling Down syndrome population, which now stands at about 350,000, could mean less institutional support and reduced funds for medical research. It could also mean a lonelier world for those who remain.
This is undoubtedly the motivation for many parents. But the experience of Down syndrome parents, I imagine, could also drive them to speak on behalf of unborn children with Down syndrome not as statistics for increased lobbying leverage, but as lives of value, period.
We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg, of course. The London Times reported on Sunday that fertility clinics in the UK have received permission to begin screening embryos for "severe cosmetic conditions."
Men for Some Seasons
Over at First Things, James Kerian offers a not entirely convincing criticism of U.S. bishops for, according to Kerian, being more vocal in challenging immigration laws than abortion laws:
It seems unlikely that the American bishops would conclude that our legal code’s allowance of the unrestricted murder of unborn children is somehow more practical, less antiquated, or more in line with “the fundamental rights of persons” than our immigration policy. There must, therefore, be some reason for their new approach to civil authority.
Two rather implausible reasons have been offered to explain this position of the USCCB. Illegal immigrants are overwhelmingly Catholic; some people speculate that there will be some financial benefit to the Church from their continued presence. Alternatively, after the recent publicity over the denial of Communion to certain high profile pro-abortion liberals, some see the immigration issue as an opportunity for the Church to demonstrate its political neutrality. But both of these explanations seem rather unsatisfactory. Despite the abuse scandal, most of the dioceses in America are not in financial duress. And with the positions each has taken on global warming, the minimum wage, and the war in Iraq, neither Cardinal Mahony nor the USCCB is in any need of further demonstrating independence from the political right.
It seems far more likely that after over three decades of succumbing to cultural pressure, our clergy are simply eager to show their courage in the face of the law on the first safe issue that has presented itself. It is far easier for my local pastor in rural North Dakota to demand open borders in Arizona than to demand the rejection of contraception here at home. And even in border dioceses, it is far easier to take a stand on an issue that will earn plaudits from the media, and immigrants rather than on an issue that will earn only the silent thanks of unborn infants. If one is going to stand up to the law, it may as well be a law that many people already ignore.
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