Mirror of Justice

"(Communal) Life, (Religious) Liberty, and Property"

I highly recommend Prof. John Infranca's paper.  It's been available on SSRN for a bit, but I neglected to post about it on MOJ.  Here's the abstract: 

Property rights and religious liberty seem to share little in common. Yet surprisingly similar claims have long been made on their behalf, including bold assertions that each of these two rights uniquely limits the power of the state and serves as the foundation for other rights. This Article reframes the conception of property rights and religious liberty as foundational by foregrounding communitarian aspects of each right. Property and religious freedom are a foundation for other rights, but in a different manner than traditional accounts suggest. It is not the individual exercise of these rights that provides a foundation for other rights, but rather the complementary roles these rights play in the formation of normative communities that, in turn, serve as counterweights to the state.

This Article makes three distinct contributions to existing legal literature. First, it reveals the significant similarities in historical and theoretical conceptions of the foundational status of these two rights. Second, it integrates the developing scholarly literature on the communal and institutional nature of these two rights. Third, it builds upon this literature to contend that the right to property and religious freedom can indeed provide important foundations for rights more generally, but only if we sufficiently protect and nurture, through law, the communities and institutions upon which these rights depend. The Article concludes by suggesting new approaches to assessing a diverse set of contemporary legal disputes: religious communities seeking to locate in the face of local government opposition, Native American communities challenging government actions on sacred lands, and Sanctuary churches opposing immigration enforcement by sheltering individuals on their property.

I'll confess to having been feeling a bit "burned out" on law-and-religion scholarship, as so much of it recently has seemed trapped in the third-party harms / "new Lochnerism" / religious freedom v. antidiscrimination track.  Infranca's paper was really refreshing.  Check it out!

Summer jobs and free speech

This weekend I'm speaking at the Canadian Christian Legal Fellowship's national conference in Vancouver, and I'm struck by how little we hear in the US about current religious liberty battles north of the border.  Some of the cases track with themes arising in American lawsuits, but others reflect a much more aggressive role for the state.  For example, the Canadian government has added conditions to a popular and longstanding program funding summer jobs with a wide range of nonprofit organizations.  An attestation attached to the program's application form this year required organizations to affirm that their "core mandate" respects a variety of rights, including "the values underlying the Charter of Rights and Freedoms," and specifically mentions reproductive rights.  Not surprisingly, Catholic and other traditional Christian groups refused to sign, and they lost millions of dollars in funding that they had relied on for years.  Litigation is pending.

Correcting a point in David Henderson's essay at Public Discourse

David Henderson has an interesting essay up at Public Discourse today. It is well worth reading.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/09/22543/

I need to correct Mr. Henderson on one point.  He says:

"[Robert] George’s defense of Fr. [James] Martin lands predominantly on Fr. Martin’s willingness to verbally assent to Church teaching and not on the substance of Fr. Martin’s argument, which remains unaddressed. Several substantive points—including Fr. Martin’s promotion of “Pride” events, his ongoing support of New Ways Ministry and Out at St. Paul’s, and his insistence that the Church adopt LGBT+ nomenclature—do make an appearance at the end of George’s article, but are treated only as minor points of ongoing disagreement. But these issues are not so inconsequential. Taken together, they represent a single critical issue that has yet to be resolved: Fr. Martin’s continued affirmation of sexual orientation as a valid basis of personal identity."

Henderson is absolutely right that the issues he mentioned are not inconsequential. But I didn't say or imply or in any way suggest that they were inconsequential. In fact, the reverse is true. I made a point of highlighting their importance. In the very essay of mine to which Henderson is referring I say, speaking of areas of disagreement between Fr. Martin and myself:

"So where do we disagree? Mainly, I think, on whether same-sex attraction (or other forms of feeling related to sexuality, such as the dysphoria or dysmorphia people have in mind when they use the term “transgender”) is a valid basis for establishing one’s identity, and whether we ought to recognize and affirm identity built around same-sex attraction (or those other forms of feeling). Fr. Martin believes we should. I believe we shouldn’t. This is a deep, multidimensional, and important debate. The right answer will determine, for example, what sort of language we ought to use (“same-sex attracted” vs. “LGBT+”) and whether we ought to affirm celebrations of certain forms of “identity” such as those celebrated in “Pride” parades and other events."

I said--indeed, I have repeatedly stressed--the critical importance of these issues to the pastoral practice of the Church. It is not at all clear to me how Mr. Henderson could have read the words "this is a deep, multidimensional, and important debate," or anything else I have said about the matter in the essay and elsewhere, and concluded that I regard the issues as being merely "minor points of disagreement" or "inconsequential." 

What's more, again in the article to which Henderson refers, I called on Fr. Martin (as I have again since) to refrain from endorsing putatively Catholic ministries that reject the Church's teachings on sexual morality and marriage. Here is what I said:

"I would appeal to Fr. Martin to reconsider his support, which has been enthusiastic and vocal, for organizations such as New Ways Ministry and Out at St. Paul’s—organizations that unambiguously contradict and seek to undermine the Church’s teachings on marriage and sexual morality. His support for these organizations—motivated by his laudable desire to reach out in a welcoming spirit to those whom they purport to serve—leads people to wonder whether he is being honest in saying that he does not himself reject the Church’s teachings. New Ways Ministry has twice been severely rebuked by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Out at St. Paul’s has explicitly claimed that Pope Francis is “wrong” to reaffirm the Church’s teaching on marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife. Fr. Martin stands with the Pope and the Church, as I do. But that cannot be done consistently with an endorsement of Out at St. Paul’s."

New release this month - Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome

Robert George and RJ Snell have edited a book of interviews, set for release by TAN publishers on October 31st, entitled, "Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome." The volume includes the conversion stories of such luminaries as Bishop James D. Conley, Sister Prudence Allen, Adrian Vermeule, Fr. Thomas Joseph White, and Hadley Arkes. Honored to have my own story included too.

From the inside flap: 

In a series of fascinating interviews, a cradle Catholic (Robert P. George) and an adult convert (R. J. Snell), offer the stories of sixteen converts, each a public intellectual or leading voice in their respective fields, and each making a significant contribution to the life of the Church.

Mind, Heart, and Soul is a Surprised by Truth for a new generation. It will reinvigorate the faith of Catholics and answer questions or address hurdles those discerning entering the Church may have…by people have had the same questions and the same road.
 
While some of the converts are well-known, their stories are not. Here they speak for themselves, providing the reasons for belief that prompted these accomplished men and women to embrace the ancient faith.
 
Included are interviews with a bishop, a leading theologian and priest, a member of the International Theological Commission, a former megachurch pastor, a prominent pro-life scholar, professors from Harvard and other universities, as well as journalists and writers, novelists and scholars. Each are interviewed by another leading scholar, many of whom are themselves converts and familiar with the hesitations, anxieties, discoveries, and hopes of those who discover the Faith. 
 
These conversion stories remind us that the Catholic Church retains her vitality, able to provide answers and reasons for hope to new generations of believers, always sustained by the Holy Spirit. It is all too-easy to become discouraged in our day and age, but God never fails to call people to Himself, as evidenced by these remarkable stories.

Upcoming at Harvard: Peter Berkowitz on Mill and Education, Sr. Mary Madeline on the Wisdom of St. Catherine, and Justice Gorsuch on Christianity and the Common Good

Some exciting upcoming events at Harvard University, aptly responsive to current crises in academia, the Church, and our nation.

First, the Abigail Adams Institute's Third Annual Lecture will feature Peter Berkowitz next Thursday afternoon on "John Stuart Mill's Liberal Education." From the announcement: 

It is increasingly rare for colleges and universities to explain to students the purpose, structure, and content of liberal education, let alone provide one. John Stuart Mill's writings on liberty of thought and discussion, Socratic inquiry, and the aims and substance of liberal education provide an excellent introduction to the subject and illuminate the importance of the reform of higher education to liberal democracy. 

That same evening, the Thomistic Institute will host Sr. Mary Madeline Todd on "The Wisdom of St. Catherine in Times of Crisis." Sr. Mary Madeline is a Dominican Sister of Saint Cecilia Congregation who serves as Assistant Professor of Theology at Aquinas College in Nashville.

Finally, on October 19th and 20th, the Thomistic Institute will host a conference at Harvard Law School on "Christianity and the Common Good." Justice Gorsuch will keynote the event on Friday afternoon, followed by a full day of presentations on Saturday. Register here.

Speakers and panelists include the following:  Prof. Gerard Wegemer (University of Dallas), Prof. J. Budziszewski (University of Texas, Austin), Prof. Gladden Pappin (University of Dallas) Prof. Sarah Byers (Boston College), Fr. Dominic Legge, OP (Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception and the Thomistic Institute), Prof. Jacqueline Rivers (Harvard University) and Prof. Adrian Vermeule (Harvard Law School). 

On the importance of "Social Infrastructure"

I enjoyed this piece in The Atlantic, on the importance and vulnerability of America's "social infrastructure."  Here's a taste:

Social infrastructure is not “social capital”— the concept commonly used to measure people’s relationships and networks—but the physical places that allow bonds to develop. When social infrastructure is robust, it fosters contact, mutual support, and collaboration among friends and neighbors; when degraded, it inhibits social activity, leaving families and individuals to fend for themselves. People forge ties in places that have healthy social infrastructures—not necessarily because they set out to build community, but because when people engage in sustained, recurrent interaction, particularly while doing things they enjoy, relationships—even across ethnic or political lines—inevitably grow.

The author's focus is on "physical places."  So, when he talks about churches, it is in terms of their being places where people (physically) gather, etc.:  "Nonprofit organizations, including churches and civic associations, act as social infrastructure when they have an established physical space where people can assemble, as do regularly scheduled markets for food, clothing, and other consumer goods."  This is fine, so far as it goes, but in some of my own work, I've tried to explore the "infrastructural" role that churches play as (quoting Paul Horwitz) "First Amendment Institutions."  Take a look, here, here, and here.

Weigel on the "China-Vatican Deal?"

For a different "take" than the one by Adrian Vermeule and Gladden Pappin, which I posted the other day ("China and the Vatican:  Principles for the Rationally Ignorant Catholic"), see this piece, by George Weigel.  Weigel contends, among other things, that the "deal" being discussed would represent a deeply regrettable failure to learn lessons from the failure of the 1933 Reichskonkordat and would violate the Church's law which states that "no rights or privileges of election, appointment, presentation, or designation of bishops are conceded to civil authorities."

On Masterpiece--and Romer--for Cato SCT Review

I have an essay (available here) in the new Cato Supreme Court Review (the issue reviewing the 2017-18 term), entitled "Masterpiece Cakeshop: A Romer for Religious Objectors?" It explores the idea that Masterpiece was written--for the moment--as a narrow decision, based on official decision-makers' hostility in the particular case rather than on a broad assertion of religious objectors' free exercise or free speech rights, and in that sense is similar to Romer v. Evans (1996), the first gay-rights ruling. Romer struck down Colorado's Amendment 2 on the ground that it reflected animus toward gays and lesbians; the Court thus avoided (and did for almost 20 years) saying anything about heightened scrutiny for gay-rights claims.

From the abstract:

This essay examines Masterpiece and the unresolved religious-liberty questions through the lens of the similarities with Romer (and potentially with the later, more-expansive gay-rights rulings). Part I describes the resemblances between the two rulings, among other things that in both, animus or hostility serves as a “minimalist” holding that avoided committing to broad implications for future cases. But that modesty comes with a cost: To find animus, the Court must denounce the decision-makers in the immediate case as especially unjustified, even malicious, and that conclusion can cause equal or greater anger compared with broader holdings, such as declaring a suspect classification or fundamental right. In the final parallel with Romer, I sketch how the finding of unequal, hostile treatment in Masterpiece might provide the basis for further protection of religious traditionalists’ right to decline to facilitate same-sex marriages, at least in an appropriately limited set of circumstances. [E.g. solidifying Masterpiece's holding that when the state allows social liberals to refuse to provide goods or services with messages that offend against their conscience, it must also allow religious conservatives to refuse in analogous circumstances. And perhaps future rulings adopting more religion-protective readings of Employment Division v. Smith--TB]

       I then turn to general parallels between gay-rights and religious-freedom claims—parallels that call for sympathizing with and protecting both sides. Those parallels depend less on the improper motives or attitudes (animus/hostility) of the regulators, and more on the seriousness of the interests and predicaments of those harmed by government action (same-sex couples denied marriage rights, religious objectors penalized for following their beliefs). Developing sympathy for their respective predicaments, I argue, is more likely to calm our society’s serious problem of negative polarization—while condemning others for animus is more likely to aggravate such polarization. That in turn, I suggest, makes an argument for relying on heightened-scrutiny rationales in these cases, rather than findings of animus or hostility.

China and the Vatican: Principles for the Rationally Ignorant Catholic

The following post was co-authored by our own Adrian Vermeule and Prof. Gladden Pappin (Univ. of Dallas):

China and the Vatican: Principles for the Rationally Ignorant Catholic 

Gladden J. Pappin and Adrian Vermeule 

There is news that the Vatican is on the verge of finalizing an agreement with the government of the People’s Republic of China, restoring official relations that were severed in 1951. The terms are as yet unclear, but the reports indicate that, in broad outline: the PRC government will recognize the Holy Father as the head of all Chinese Catholics; bishops will be chosen through a joint approval process, in which the Chinese government will propose nominees and the Vatican will have, at a minimum, veto power and possibly some exercise of choice; the so-called underground churches will be recognized; and a group of seven excommunicated bishops, validly consecrated though without papal mandate, yet who have requested regularization, will be legitimated and restored to their sees. (Again, these provisions are as yet not finally settled, but the precise details are not critical for our analysis.)

What is the busy, ill-informed Catholic to make of this? Denunciations have been swift from the neoconservative Right of American Catholicism, who speak of Pope Francis’s surrender to Communism and abandonment of the underground churches, and who seethe about the failures of Ostpolitik. Yet these denunciations have an odd time-capsule quality to them, as though it is always 1989, even though the Chinese regime has clearly evolved away from “Communism” per se to a kind of neo-Confucian authoritarianism. They are also oddly selective, overlooking the long, complicated, varied history of concordats between the Vatican and various regimes. One suspects at a minimum that matters are more complex than the neoconservative view suggests. In particular, there seem to be real trade-offs or even dilemmas, in this space, among competing aims, goals and principles—political, ethical and diplomatic. How to think about all this, without any real expertise? 

We are not China hands. Indeed, the fact that we lack the competence or information to evaluate the first-order merits of the arrangement, relative to the feasible alternatives, is (for us) fully rational, in the sense that it is too costly (at least in an opportunity-cost sense) to acquire the relevant expertise. We are rationally ignorant Catholics. But we can at least suggest some principles of low-information rationality—heuristics or rules of thumb—that are useful in such situations.

Who decides? A simple idea is that rather than attempting to evaluate the difficult trade-offs that afflict all first-order policy choices in this area, one should attempt to identify who is best positioned to evaluate those trade-offs. Here is a simple schema, merely for purposes of illustration. One might defend the Vatican’s decision by observing that “one should not allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good.” One might oppose it with the rejoinder “the good must not become the enemy of the still better.” Life teaches that sometimes one of these maxims is apt, sometimes another, depending upon circumstances. Which is most relevant here? It is highly plausible that the Vatican, which has a worldwide perspective on these matters, is better positioned to decide.

Dueling experts. Another strategy of low-information rationality is to rely on expert opinions. In principle, this is extremely helpful in such situations. The problem for the rationally ignorant Catholic, however, is that there are dueling experts in this space, and it is difficult to perform a meta-evaluation of their knowledge. In administrative law, the typical response to this is to say that where credible experts disagree, a decision-maker may rationally rely on any one of the competing views. In this sense, it is hardly unreasonable for the Vatican to listen to those of its experts who counsel some form of compromise with the regime.

Rationality review. A related point is best explained by analogy to rational-basis review in law, which is a typical approach to situations in which the decision-maker has information or competence that the evaluator lacks. The Supreme Court recently invoked a form of rationality review in Trump v. Hawaii to evaluate executive action bearing on foreign policy and security, as the Vatican’s diplomatic decision here surely does. The bedrock principle of rationality review is that the decision-maker should uphold the relevant action if any rational grounds for it can be identified or even conjectured. 

Here there is a mistake that Western observers may easily commit. The circumstances of churches under liberalism easily lead to a confusion of appropriate standards for evaluating the relations of sovereign powers. Religious agents in liberal regimes can, within narrowing limits, take actions (e.g., establishing churches, distributing propaganda) immediately on the basis of sincerely held beliefs—behavior explained by thick or belief-driven models of rational behavior. Sovereign powers engaged in treaty-making negotiations act with considerable external constraints not captured by the thick-rationality models instinctively used by commentators in countries with liberal policies toward sects. Viewing bargaining with suspicion may itself result from a liberal model of interaction among sects.

To make matters more complicated, negotiations between the Holy See and civil governments also do not fit the two-level-games model often used to analyze international agreements with reference to both international and domestic concerns. Instead a polycentric model of China-Holy See negotiations would be needed to describe the multiple levels at which games occur in dealings between an “ecclesiastical polity” and a state, as well as the different arenas of choice affected by any final concordat. Negotiation over concordats and similar ecclesiastical-political conventions adds several levels of action (each with interaction effects) beyond, say, the recent U.S.-Mexico trade agreement.

An account of the distinct, intersecting levels of negotiation would require a much longer treatment. “Citizenship” or membership in the Church functions differently from citizenship in a civil regime. But while ecclesiastical and civil citizenship are easily distinguished in liberal political contexts (in which the liberal polity takes no official cognizance of ecclesiastical status), nonliberal regimes frequently give rise to questions of overlap and exclusion: Who are members of the Catholic Church in China? What civil status is accorded to such members? What is the jurisdictional structure of the Church in China, and how does it relate to existing quasi-ecclesiastical bodies established by the state but frequently in the context of valid sacramental order? On top of this, any negotiation between China and the Vatican is implicitly triangular given the disputed status of the Republic of China.

In this extraordinarily complicated context, we can imagine a number of rational grounds for a concordat between the Holy See and China. Rational does not mean there are no trade-offs or even tragic dilemmas, nor does it necessarily entail a maximization of some welfare function. We use it in a relaxed sense, meaning just that a roughly reasonable authority could think that, on balance, prudence weighs in favor of an agreement. Consider the following possibilities: 

— Circumstances of evangelization. One might think that Christianity is exploding in China, that Protestantism is ahead in this race, that the main obstacle to Catholic evangelization is the problem of the Church’s status, and that it is best to regularize that status—even in a distinctly nonideal way—in order to allow the pace of Catholic evangelization to quicken. By the same token, if Catholic evangelization is bound to quicken in any event, the Church may perceive an increasing urgency to seize the means of clerical formation for the sake of that continued evangelization.

— Departure from prior conditions. During the initial, post-1951 period of the intense persecution of Chinese Catholics, practice of the Catholic faith went underground. In the long period following the establishment of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, however, there is not a one-to-one mapping of “members of the Catholic Church” onto either unregistered Catholic churches or to the CPCA exclusively. Here the complexity of negotiations turns on the Church’s claim of jurisdiction over the baptized, with the added fact that it has not presumed ordinary faithful in the CPCA to be schismatic. The Church has thus continued to claim, by virtue of their baptism, jurisdiction over Catholics in the CPCA, yet lacks the ordinary exercise of that jurisdiction—an incoherent and intolerable situation requiring resolution.

— Resolution of original errors. Relations between the Holy See and China were severed in 1951 by China and not by the Holy See. The Holy See had established relations with the Nationalist government on Taiwan, and so it was rebuffed (for this reason among others) by the Communist Chinese government and its internuncio was expelled. Given that the Chinese government has sought the restoration of relations, in various ways, from the early 1980s onward, the possibility of resolving an original error may suggest to ecclesiastical negotiators the prudence of reaching an agreement. Further, failure to seek resolution of the original error for which it disclaimed responsibility could be perceived by Vatican negotiators as taking ownership of the original condition.

— Divergent evaluation of trade-offs. Perduring political institutions, of which the Church is a salient example, evaluate trade-offs differently than civilian religious actors. Even in ancien régime France, for example, the Church consented to royal prerogative in episcopal appointments governed by the Concordat of Bologna and signed in 1516 by King Francis I and Pope Leo X. The concordat, however, specified certain preconditions likely to lead to benign selections, and also reserved a veto power to the pope. (Ironically, the Church did not enjoy noninterference in episcopal appointments till after the Loi de séparation of 1905.) What citizens of liberal democracies view as a departure from the norm may be viewed by negotiators as a departure from a recent norm or even the revival of an older arrangement, with which the Church as an institution has centuries of experience. Accordingly, from the Church’s uniquely long-term perspective, any potential concordat with China may be more easily understood with reference to preliberal European concordats.

— “It is more important that the applicable law be settled than that it be settled right”—so that it can be unsettled later. Even on a more contemporary view, the Church currently tolerates and has recently tolerated a civil role in the selection of bishops. In 1966, the Vatican agreed to a concordat with François “Papa Doc” Duvalier of Haiti concerning the civil government’s role in the nomination of bishops. It was precisely this first agreement that, after the death of “Papa Doc,” eventually led to the Church’s liberty in selecting its own bishops. At present the Church already acknowledges a role for the government of Vietnam in the selection of bishops, an arrangement which may be seen by negotiators as sufficient precedent for reaching such an accord. Combining the two examples, Vatican negotiators may consider the value of recent examples (with unsavory regimes) not well known to a Western audience, as well as the value of establishing some agreement which would, in turn, be open to future modification.

— Ideal and nonideal decision-making. Although some commentators have cast the resolution of relations between China and the Holy See in terms pejorative to the current pontificate, negotiators may eventually conclude that the necessity outlined by previous popes (e.g., the Letter of Benedict XVI to the Catholic Church in China, Pentecost 2007) has come due. Since the reopening of negotiations between China and the Holy See in 1987, the apparent direction of civil liberties in China, and consequently also of the libertas ecclesiae, has changed. The consolidation of CPC rule under Xi Jinping suggests that unrealistic hopes of unilateral Chinese state liberalization may at least be rationally discounted against the urgency of resolving jurisdictional problems for Chinese Catholics. Diplomatic actors may rely on multiple criteria in evaluating potential consequences, whereas strident critics pick out a single dimension and absolutize it to preclude the possibility of negotiation. Put differently, the neoconservative critics often seem to assume that the alternative to the Vatican policy is some ideal of Chinese capitulation. Given that there is no evidence whatsoever that such an ideal can be attained, however, the Vatican faces a choice between distinctly nonideal futures.

— Recognition regimes. A question often neglected by American writers concerns the role of the Church in sovereignty recognition as well as the Church’s needs in the same sphere. China’s desires for sovereignty recognition are well known; by the same token, the Holy See’s diplomatic mission in Taipei is, at least in part, an accident of events belonging to a different political context. While the Holy See’s ability to offer sovereignty recognition may appear to be a minor aspect of ecclesiastical function within a liberal religious context (in which liberal principles have obviated the need for and the effects of recognition regimes), negotiators may view it as essential for operation in nonliberal regimes, and nonliberal regimes may value political recognition by the Church. In the context of disputed sovereignty, diplomatic recognition may have high exchange value and low cost for multiple diplomatic actors, particularly in the case of negotiations modeled as polycentric games.

— Foresight. Rather than being a relic of a Cold War past, it is possible that the nonliberal “political theology” of the Chinese regime is a harbinger of a more frequent tension between the Church and newly religiously assertive civil powers. While a future exchange of agreements between sovereign powers may no longer be between the Church and Catholic political agents, earlier historical examples of diplomacy between the Church and civil powers may hold the key for understanding an agreement between the Vatican and China. By the same token, such an agreement may reflect a calculation about the growing tendency toward religiously assertive civil powers (for example, the Philippine government under Duterte). Paradoxically, concessions regarding episcopal appointments may reflect a return to jurisprudence from before the secular abandonment of episcopal appointments to ecclesiastical interest.

*****

Our aims in advancing these conjectures are limited. We don’t know, or even assert, that the foregoing claims about the Vatican’s posture vis-à-vis China are true. Certianly, none of this is to claim that the Vatican’s emergent China policy is just clearly correct, in a first-order sense. Our point is that there are ample grounds to believe that the policy is entirely rational, given nonideal circumstances. We don’t know whether it is ultimately right, but we also doubt that the neoconservative critics know either, and its rightness or wrongness will ultimately be determined by unpredictable circumstances. In this sort of uncertain environment, reliance on strategies of low-information rationality suggests that, for Catholics, a broad measure of deference to Vatican decisions is sensible.

St. Francis Xavier, pray for us. 圣方济各 沙忽略, 请为我们祈祷。

Prof. Munoz on free speech, Charles Murray, and Catholic character at Notre Dame

Public Discourse has published my colleague Prof. Vincent Phillip Munoz's recent remarks at the U.S. Department of Justice Forum on Free Speech in Higher Education.  Well worth a read.  Here's a bit:

I am sometimes asked whether academic freedom exists at a Catholic university such as Notre Dame. I have never been at a university that offers more academic freedom, and I have been a faculty member at a large state research university and a small private elite liberal arts college. As a Catholic university, Notre Dame is committed to the unity of faith and reason. Indeed, because God is understood to be the author of all that is true, the university is confident in and can offer reasons for its commitment to seeking the truth.

Universities are either committed to truth-seeking through reasoned inquiry, or they are committed to something else. If they are committed to truth-seeking, free inquiry and free speech will be safeguarded. If they are committed to something else—be it social change or overcoming historical oppression or job training or whatever—that something else will inevitably trump free inquiry and free speech if and when it requires it. It’s not that complicated.