Mirror of Justice

More on "Deus Caritas Est"

In today's New York Times, former Commonweal editor Peter Steinfels has some interesting comments on Deus Caritas Est and its reception in the media.  To read Steinfels'  "Beliefs" column, click here.
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In response to my post below, Statements of Faith:  Are They Appropriate? (here), I received this interesting response:

I have experienced these statements of faith as a seminarian preparing
for the priesthood.  It strikes me they are useful from the perspective
of establishing intent.  They are, however, in my humble estimation, not
appropriate or productive as a means for enforcing orthodoxy in
instruction.  The only thing that can perform that function adequately
is oversight with authority.

As someone who entered the seminary after a career in systems
engineering, it occurred to me that an approach similar to establishing
a trademark on the use of the term Catholic (with a capital C) would be
a more effective mechanism to ensure against the misuse of the term than
any other mechanism that might be employed in the western world.

Naturally, this would be highly controversial.  It would not be
problematic for the Roman Catholic Church to establish priority of
ownership, but it might very well be problematic to establish a case for
exclusivity.  Given a successful case for both by the Roman Catholic
Church, groups such as "Catholics for Free Choice" and publications such
as the "National Catholic Reporter" would be required to drop the name
"Catholic."  Universities that failed in the obvious requirements for
fidelity to Catholic teaching and formation would be required to give up
their pretense to Catholic affiliation.

Barring success in this approach, perhaps it would be easier to
establish exclusivity for "Roman Catholic."  It would be interesting to
see how the various and sundry organizations responded.

Of course, there is no likelihood that this approach will be attempted
by the Church, not because it could not work, but because the Church
does not approach enforcement in this way.  Thus, organizations that
fall from grace do not always fall from general public credibility.  It
is very much that way with all product warranties of safety and
authenticity today.  Knockoffs, though illegal, are ubiquitous.  Tainted
products or products that make false claims of some benefit manage to
evade regulatory authorities and mechanisms all of the time.  Its a sign
of the times that people are generally left to their own devices for
protecting themselves from shysters of every stripe.

Fr. Larry Gearhart
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Jurisprudential Legacy of Pope John Paul II

Some of you may have received a "save the date" card for St. John's University School of Law's upcoming symposium on the Jurisprudential Legacy of Pope John Paul II, which be held at the law school on March 23-24.  The four panels will explore both the theoretical underpinnings of the thought of Pope John Paul II and his views of justice as well as the application of his thought to different areas of the law.  Papers will be delivered by a number of theologians and law professors, including MOJ bloggers Robert Araujo, Mike Scapalander and Greg Sisk.  Commentary on the papers will be delivered by MOJ'ers Michael Perry, Rob Vischer, Amy Uelman and myself.  John Allen, NCR's Vatican correspondant, will be our keynote speaker.  I look forward to welcoming you to St. John's for what I know will be an exciting and informative program.

 

Conference on the Preferential Option

While I'm at it, I might as well mention that we have selected a date for the Journal of Catholic Social Thought's 2006 annual symposium on CST and the law. It is Friday, October 27, at Villanova, and the topic is: What Does the Preferential Option for the Poor Mean for Law?   I'll be sending out a more formal, detailed Call for papers shortly, but feel free to get in touch with me if you have ideas or questions.

--Mark

Clarification: Hochschild & Wheaton

I received this note today from Joshua Hochschild -- and am posting it with his permission -- regarding my post on higher education and religious identity from the other day.

Dear Professor Garnett,

Since your post yesterday on the Mirror of Justice quoted relevant sections of Mr. Oakes’ recent essay on higher education and religious identity, I feel compelled to correct Mr. Oakes’ mistaken description of my own views.  He says that I do not “stand behind Wheaton for courageously affirming its commitment to its own founding principles.”  In fact I do.  As the Wall Street Journal article correctly reports, I expected to lose my job upon converting to Catholicism, and I acknowledged the College’s right to exclude Catholics.  I have never challenged this right, and I have made this position even more clear in interviews with the Chicago Sun-Times, and Inside Higher Ed.

Mr. Oakes apparently concluded otherwise by reading, out of context, this quotation: “I see no reason why I should be dismissed from the College upon joining the Roman Catholic Church.”  I think it is clear from the Journal article that this line is the conclusion of an argument made in response to the position, advanced by Wheaton’s president, that Catholic teaching is inconsistent with what is articulated by Wheaton’s Statement of Faith, and that therefore I should resign.  If I had been shown that Catholic teaching were inconsistent with the faith statement­, or that I had in any other way violated my contract with Wheaton, ­I would have resigned.  But in fact, as I explained in the detailed letter mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article, based on careful consideration of Catholic teaching I could in good conscience affirm Wheaton’s faith statement.  (There are by now several worthwhile conversations on the web, most notably at Amy Welborn’s blog, about the consistency of Wheaton’s faith statement and Catholic teaching.) 

Wheaton’s President was not persuaded, and so I was terminated.  Although I think he misunderstands Catholic teaching and I disagree with his manner of reading Wheaton’s faith statement, the decision was within his right, and that is why I did not fight it.

Mr. Oakes is right to point to my college editorial about the importance of educational institutions vigilantly guarding their founding religious principles.  Far from changing my mind, that is a position that I have maintained consistently to this day.

I hope you will consider making this clarification available on the Mirror of Justice site.

Thank you,
Joshua P. Hochschild
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Mount St. Mary’s University

Cardinal Dulles at Villanova Law: The First Scarpa Conference at Villanova Law

I am happy to pass along the following announcement by my colleague and fellow MOJer Patrick Brennan regarding Villanova Law's inaugural Scarpa Conference in Catholic Legal Studies. Patrick will be joined by his coblogistas Rick Garnett and Amy Uelmen at the conference here at Villanova Law on September 15, 2006. We will be sending out a more formal announcement with details down the road:

"The Chair established by John F. Scarpa is to offer an annual conference on a topic in Catholic Legal Studies. The first Scarpa Conference is set for September 15, 2006. The topic is "From John Paul II to Benedict XVI: Continuing the New Evangelization of Law, Politics, and Culture." This turns out to be particularly apt and timely in light of particular teachings in Pope Benedict's first encyclical, which was published just two days ago.

I am most grateful to be able to announce that His Eminence Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., has accepted my invitation to deliver the keynote address at the first Scarpa Conference. The Cardinal is arguably the most respected Catholic intellectual in the United States. He is, in any event, the only American theologian ever to be created a Cardinal of the Catholic Church. Most Cardinals are bishops of major dioceses. Cardinal Dulles is not a bishop. He is a Cardinal in virtue of the twenty-two books and more than seven hundred articles he has published since graduating from Harvard College in 1940. His visit here will be a great honor to Villanova.

Also delivering papers will be Richard Garnett (Lilly Endowment Associate Professor, Notre Dame Law School) and Amy Uelmen (Director, Institute on Religion, Law, and Lawyer's Work, Fordham University School of Law), and Brennan.

Please save the date for what promises to be a rich exploration of the place of faith in the public square. If you have questions or suggestions regarding the conference, they will be gratefully received."

-- Mark

Pro-Life Progressivism at St Tom

I would follow up on Tom Berg's announcement of the publication of St Thomas'  symposium issue on prolife progressivism. It is definitely worth getting hold of. My article is probably the slightest of the contributions. The others are thoughtful, usefully interdisciplinary, and most important, represent some highly divergent viewpoints. The symposium's greatest contribution was to remind us that there is indeed such a thing as "prolife progressivism."

--Mark

Law & Economics, CST and Yale

Sometimes coincidence is scary. Just before reading Eduardo's post on his CST course at Yale, I spent an hour with an applicant to Villanova Law who recently had finished an M.Div. at Yale Divinity School. While there, she took a course in the law school entitled "Theology and Law," which she said was about 50-50 law and divinity students. She reported that most of the law students took a strongly negative view on the relevance of religion to law and discourse about law. It's good to see that Eduardo is finding something a bit different. But I did want to weigh in on the CST/law & economics issue that Eduardo and Rick have noted. I think that Eduardo has put his finger on the central difficulty in talking about CST in the American legal academy: the contrast between CST's premises and those of law & economics. Given the profound influence of L&E in the academy, proponents of CST need to grapple over the tension between the two world views -- and they are really quite different world views that do conflict in important ways.  I don't think that the conflict is over the concept of "efficiency" per se, and as Rick says, there is nothing Catholic mandating inefficiency (though Catholic colleges and universities may be empirical evidence to the contrary.) But that is not quite the point. The real conflict is between the CST concept of the common good and the neoclassical, law & econ conception of social welfare, understood as the aggregation of preferences or utilities. While the tool kit of law econ remains very useful, its essentially utilitarian prescriptive assumptions reject much of the Western tradition's basic assumptions on the nature of the good -- whether expressed by Aristotle or Aquinas. Instead of blathering on about this, I will point you to the sidebar, where I have posted a draft of my "Utility, the Good and Civic Happiness: A Catholic Critique of Law and Economics," which was published in the first issue of St. John's new Journal of Catholic Legal Studies. The final version (as distinct from this draft) can also be found under my name on SSRN.

--Mark

Paying for the Gospel

I assume that Vatican officials have been hanging around too much with lawyers.  What else can explain the Vatican's very public dispute over fees it wants to charge for the use of Pope Benedict XVI's written work?  Given the Great Commission, shouldn't we be encouraging widespread piracy and unauthorized publication of papal encyclicals and other documents bringing the Good News to the masses?  I understand wanting to limit scandalous mischaracterizations of the work, but why are we talking about money in this context?  The Church, in my estimation, should make money in order to disseminate its teachings as widely as possible; this current debate gives the appearance (accurate or not) of disseminating its teachings in order to make money.

Rob

Deus Caritas Est: The True Face of Catholicism?

This early reaction to Deus Caritas Est is sound, I think.  From  the January 28 issue of The Tablet [London]:

Editorial
The true face of Catholicism

Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical confirms him as a man of humour, warmth, humility and compassion, eager to share the love that God “lavishes” on humanity and display it as the answer to the world’s deepest needs. On his election last spring, the former Cardinal Ratzinger was widely assumed to have as his papal agenda the hammering of heretics and a war on secularist relativism, subjects with which he was associated as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Instead he has produced a profound, lucid, poignant and at times witty discussion of the relationship between sexual love and the love of God, the fruit no doubt of a lifetime’s meditation. This is a document that presents the most attractive face of the Catholic faith and could be put without hesitation into the hands of any inquirer.

Unlike his predecessor, Benedict is not instantly comfortable as the focus of a huge crowd. But John Paul II, so charismatic in the flesh, was often hard to follow when he turned to the word. His encyclicals were wonderful intellectual journeys that repaid the great effort needed to understand them. Benedict’s Deus Caritas Est is by comparison an easy read, full of well-turned arresting sentences. “The epicure Gassendi used to offer Descartes the humorous greeting: ‘O, Soul!’ And Descartes would reply: ‘O, Flesh!’,” the Pope remarks. “Yet it is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves: it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves. Only when both dimensions are truly united, does man attain his full stature.”

About the only flaw in the English text, indeed, is its non-use of inclusive language: for “man” read “man and woman”. But he makes no other sexist point; there is no attempt to distinguish female sexual love from the male version, no flirting with the madonna-whore dichotomy, no judgemental talk of what sexual love is ordained for, nor even of exploitation and sexual sin. Men and women who leave eros in the domain of their animal natures, without regard to the spiritual, are simply told that they are missing the true greatness that God intended for them; a lost opportunity rather than the road to perdition.

The second part of the encyclical, which is said to owe something to an unfinished project of the previous Pope, ties up a loose end in Catholic social teaching by addressing the question how, in a world seeking social justice, there is still room for charity. The answer is a compelling one. But this is still Ratzinger rather than Wojtyla, with his warning that it is not for the Church to take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. “She cannot and must not replace the State,” he insists. Yet at the same time she must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice. Thus is a careful line drawn with regard to efforts by Catholic prelates, most notably in the United States in the last presidential election, to tell politicians which laws they may or may not pass.

This is a remarkable, enjoyable and even endearing product of Pope Benedict’s first few months. If first encyclicals set the tone for a new papacy, then this one has begun quite brilliantly.
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