St. John’s University will host a lecture, “Civic Kinship: A Christian Ethic of Immigration,” on March 4. The lecture, the fifth annual Catholic Studies Lecture, will be delivered by Professor Kristin Heyer (Santa Clara). Details are here.
Makdisi on the Principle of Totality and Integrity in American Case Law
June Mary Makdisi (St. Thomas U. School of Law) has posted Application of the Principle of Totality and Integrity in American Case Law. The abstract follows.
God presented each of us with the gift of human life, for which we each have a duty of stewardship. The complementary principles of totality and integrity provide moral guidance for decisions on whether specific acts are consistent with this obligation. Totality directs that anatomical completeness must not be sacrificed without proportional justification. Integrity focuses on maintaining basic human capacities and provides a hierarchical ordering of higher functions over lower functions for use in decision making. The decisions of secular American courts rely heavily on statutory authority and case precedent. This essay explores whether the moral principle of totality and integrity is reflected in judicial opinions. The first part examines judicial decisions in cases in which the plaintiff’s desired outcome was consistent with the principle of totality and integrity. The second part analyzes judicial decisions in which the desired outcome was not consistent with this moral principle.
Panel Discussion: “Why Morality-Free Economic Theory Does Not Work”
On October 18, Fordham’s Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer’s Work will host what looks to be a fascinating panel discussion, “Why Morality-Free Economic Theory Does Not Work: A Natural Law Perspective in the Wake of the Recent Financial Crisis.” Speakers include Luigino Bruni (Milan-Bicocca), Michael Baur (Fordham) and Russell Pearce (Fordham). Details are here.
Brooks on Traditional Conservatism and Catholic Social Thought
David Brooks has an interesting column this morning. I don’t have much to comment about with respect to the substance other than that this statement caught my eye: “But there was another sort of conservative, who would be less familiar now. This was the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching.”
There certainly is something to what Brooks says (and as to Burke, de mortuis nil nisi bonum), but it’s worth adding that Catholic social teaching is not a sub-category of traditional conservatism. Within Catholic social teaching, there are political strains of all kinds, from left to right. There are even writers who take themselves to be interpreting the Catholic tradition who are squarely in the economic conservative camp (for example, Michael Novak and Stephen Bainbridge among many others, though the reasons for their economic conservatism are complex). And there are influential writers in the tradition who espouse what would today pass for conventionally liberal or even radical political views. Nevertheless, if the particular points that Brooks is making about traditional conservatism’s concern for cultivating and maintaining social structures for the support and well-being of the working class are cogent (a view as to which, in this post, I express no opinion), then it is true that those concerns do substantially overlap with many key documents and ideas in the tradition of Catholic social thought.
Woodyard & Marzen on A Catholic Perspective on Modern Usury
William Woodyard and Chad G. Marzen (both of Florida State U.) have posted Is Greed Good? A Catholic Perspective on Modern Usury. The abstract follows.
In an era of increasing financial complexity, the Catholic legal and intellectual tradition offers not only a symbolic moral witness to the policy debates concerning lending, but a voice that offers real solutions to the problem of modern usury. The duty of those in the economic world to safeguard the weaker, more vulnerable parties in society as articulated by Pope Benedict XVI in Caritas in Veritate can best find its expression in vigorous adherence to the unconscionability doctrine of contract law. In addition, the Catholic legal and intellectual tradition promotes microcredit lending programs and community credit unions as strong economic alternatives to modern usury.
Maritain on Ecclesial Liberty and the Nonbeliever
In my Catholic Social Thought class, we are reading a portion of Jacques Maritain’s Man and the State (1951). Maritain was a Catholic liberal (by which I mean that he was a Catholic for whom liberty and equality were fundamentally important rights) writing primarily in the post-War period. His writings deeply influenced the proceedings of the Second Vatican Council. Here is an interesting passage about the nonbeliever’s reasons for affirming the liberty of the church (from Chapter 6 — “Church and State”). It is written in a style that assumes a certain degree of consensus, an assumption which may well have been a product of its times (this makes it even more interesting as a subject of study). One particularly striking feature of the passage is that Maritain begins not with a discussion of a value such as liberty or equality, but by considering what “the Church, or the Churches” ought to represent for nonbelievers. That is, Maritain begins with the concrete institution rather than with the abstract value:
To begin with, what is the Church for the unbeliever? In the eyes of the unbeliever, the Church is, or the Churches are, organized bodies or associations especially concerned with the religious needs and creeds of a number of his fellow-men, that is, with spiritual values to which they have committed themselves, and to which their moral standards are appendent. These spiritual values are part — in actual fact the most important part, as history shows it — of those supra-temporal goods with respect to which, even in the natural order, the human person transcends, as we have seen, political society, and which constitute the moral heritage of mankind, the spiritual common good of civilization or of the community of minds. Even though the unbeliever does not believe in these particular spiritual values, he has to respect them. In his eyes the Church, or the Churches, are in the social community particular bodies which must enjoy that right to freedom which is but one, not only with the right to free association naturally belonging to the human person, but with the right freely to believe the truth recognized by one’s conscience, that is, with the most basic and inalienable of all human rights. Thus the unbeliever, from his own point of view — I mean, of course, the unbeliever who, at least, is not an unbeliever in reason, and, furthermore, who is a democratically-minded unbeliever — acknowledges as a normal and necessary thing the freedom of the Church, or of the Churches. (150)
Eliot on Education and Religion
In my Catholic Social Thought course, our first class was occupied by what I call “meta-issues” — questions involving the nature of the course, its place in a law school curriculum, and its relevance to the lives of future lawyers. One of the difficult questions involves the relationship of academic inquiry, academic freedom, and the authentic association of an institution of higher learning with Catholicism. We read Ex Corde Ecclesiae, and we also read material in some tension with it; I particularly like a couple of Stanley Fish’s chapters in Save the World on Your Own Time as one type of counterpoint.
This evening I read an interesting old essay by T.S. Eliot called, “Modern Education and the Classics,” which I may use in the future. Modernists like Eliot and Pound can be useful on these sorts of questions, as they were occupied with their own varieties of ‘aggiornamento’ (“make it new!”). Here is one helpfully complicating passage, at least to introduce some doubt against the general skepticism that any relationship does or could exist between education and religion:
Questions of education are frequently discussed as if they bore no relation to the social system in which and for which the education is carried on. This is one of the commonest reasons for the unsatisfactoriness of the answers. It is only within a particular social system that a system of education has any meaning. If education today seems to deteriorate, if it seems to become more and more chaotic and meaningless, it is primarily because we have no settled and satisfactory arrangement of society, and because we have both vague and diverse opinions about the kind of society we want. Education is a subject which cannot be discussed in a void: our questions raise other questions, social, economic, financial, political. And the bearings are on more ultimate problems even than these: to know what we want in education we must know what we want in general, we must derive our theory of education from our philosophy of life. The problem turns out to be a religious problem.
The Paradox of Catholic Social Thought
Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate has thrust Catholic Social Thought into the American presidential campaign. A practicing Catholic, Ryan argues that Tea Party economics are compatible with the Church’s social teaching. This pleases many on the Catholic Right, but greatly displeases many on the Catholic Left; when Ryan gave a speech at Georgetown last April, 90 faculty members and priests signed a letter in protest. The disagreement was evident in the media this week. In the Wall Street Journal, William McGurn defended Ryan’s free-market views as consistent with Catholicism. In the New York Times, by contrast, Maureen Dowd cited Catholic bishops who have termed Ryan’s proposed federal budget “immoral.”
As an outsider, I’m not in the best position to comment on an internal Catholic debate. The best analysis I’ve seen so far, though, is this very powerful essay by Fr. Robert Barron, which Marc noted yesterday. Barron writes that Catholic Social Thought equally embraces two conflicting principles, solidarity and subsidiarity. Solidarity emphasizes the collective. It teaches that people have responsibility for one another, that society’s rich have a moral obligation to share their wealth with society’s poor. (“We are all members of one another,” St. Paul wrote). Subsidiarity, by contrast, emphasizes the local and individual. It allows private property and suspects concentrated, centralized power. Somehow, Barron writes, Catholic Social Thought must affirm both these principles, without compromise.
Barron’s essay seems to pose an an impossible intellectual task. The reason the essay seems so compelling to me, though, is that it embraces what I understand to be the essentially paradoxical nature of Christianity. As Ross Douthat recently has written, Christianity always asks the believer to accept seemingly incompatible assertions: Christ is at once God and Man; the world is at once good and evil; the Christian must at once care for the world and focus on eternity. For non-Christians, these are nonsensical pairings; but for Christians, they help define the mystery of faith. If there is to be a Catholic — or, more broadly, Christian –social theory, it must somehow endorse community and individuality, in Barron’s words, “with equal vigor.” It must embrace the paradox that Christians are called to be in the world but not of it — an undoable something that somehow must be done.
Fr. Barron on Subsidiarity and Solidarity in Catholic Social Thought
Here’s an interesting column by Fr. Robert Barron about the concepts and complementarity of subsidiarity and solidarity in Catholic Social Thought. A bit:
Catholic social theory involves the subtle balancing of these two great principles so as to avoid these two characteristic pitfalls. It does, for example, consistently advocate the free market, entrepreneurial enterprise, profit-making; and it holds out against all forms of Marxism and extreme socialism. But it also insists that the market be circumscribed by clear moral imperatives and that the wealthy realize their sacred obligation to aid the less advantaged. This last point is worth developing.
Thomas Aquinas teaches that ownership of private property is to be allowed but that the usus(the use) of that privately held wealth must be directed toward the common good. This is because all of the earth and its goods belong, finally, to God and must therefore be used according to God’s purpose. Pope Leo XIII made this principle uncomfortably concrete when he specified, in regard to wealth, that once the demands of necessity and propriety have been met, the rest of what one owns belongs to the poor. And in saying that, he was echoing an observation of John Chrysostom: ” If you have two shirts in your closet, one belongs to you; the other belongs to the man who has no shirt.”
In his wonderful Orthodoxy, written over a hundred years ago but still remarkably relevant today, G.K. Chesterton said that Catholicism is marked through and through by the great both/and principle. Jesus is both divine and human. He is not one or the other; nor is he some bland mixture of the two; rather, he is emphatically one and emphatically the other. In a similar way, the Church is radically devoted to this world and radically devoted to the world to come. In the celibacy of its priests, it is totally against having children, and in the fruitful marriage of its lay people, it is totally for having children.
In its social teaching, this same sort of “bi-polar extremism” is on display. Solidarity? The Church is all for it. Subsidiarity? The Church couldn’t be more enthusiastic about it. Not one or the other, nor some bland compromise between the two, but both, advocated with equal vigor. I think it would be wise for everyone to keep this peculiarly Catholic balance in mind as the debate over Paul Ryan’s policies unfolds.
“Can you be a Catholic and have a questioning mind?”
That is the title of Peter Berger’s latest provocative column, in which he considers four recent cases of radical dissent, three from the left and one from the right, from the official teaching of the Catholic Church by organizations and/or individuals within the Church. The question itself was put this way by Sister Pat Farrell, a Franciscan nun who is embroiled in one of the controversies discussed by Berger involving the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. I look forward to talking about the column with my students in our fall course, Catholic Social Thought and the Law.
Here is a bit from the conclusion of Berger’s piece:
[T]he four cases have in common to what is at the very core of Roman Catholicism—the authority of the papacy and its official teaching (the so-called magisterium). The Catholic Church has a long history of accommodation and compromise with deviant groups, from the radical Franciscans centuries ago who despised the worldly splendor of Rome and thus its civilization, to the Anglican converts of our own time who want to retain married priests and the use of the Book of Common Prayer. What the Church can never compromise on is obedience to the authority of pope and magisterium: If the Roman Catholic Church compromised on that, it would give up the very core of its identity—it would cease to be itself.
Back to Sister Farrell’s question: Can Catholic faith be combined with a questioning mind? History suggests an emphatic yes. Catholic civilization has nurtured some of the best minds ever, some very questioning indeed. But Farrell’s question is misleading: The issue is not what one thinks in private, but what one says publicly that is contrary to the magisterium. Roman canon law contains a very important proposition: De occultis non iudicat Ecclesia—“The Church does not judge secret matters”—such as the private ruminations of a questioning mind. What is more, when these ruminations are publicly advocated in opposition to the teachings of the magisterium, the Church has the authority to condemn them and to discipline Catholics who advocate them.
Many of the Catholic dissidents in these stories mention conscience as an authority. There is indeed a Christian tradition which puts conscience (though as guided by God’s Word) over the authority of the Church. This tradition is known as Protestantism. My late friend Richard John Neuhaus (while still a Lutheran, before what he called his “ecclesial transition” to the Roman Catholic Church) once put it very succinctly: There are Christians who view the Church as a vehicle for faith, others as an object of faith. Amicable ecumenical dialogue (such as the Catholic-Lutheran dialogue about the doctrine of justification) is useful and even admirable. But it neither should nor could deny this fundamental difference.
The dichotomy between private belief and public advocacy that Berger emphasizes doesn’t, at least to my mind, get things quite right, because it neglects several issues. First, it’s hard to know what “condemnation” consists in here. Surely it is appropriate for those with authority in any church — or for that matter in any association of civil society — to condemn (that is, to express public disapproval of) teachings or ideas that they feel run contrary to those of the church. Is there an additional sense of condemnation at issue in this context that is less congenial to the questioning mind? If so, I have difficulty seeing it. Second, the column neglects the issue of role. There are plenty of believing Catholics who have expressed disagreements with the Church’s views throughout history. The Church, as a general matter, does not discipline them. But there are other sorts of challenges to the authority of the Church which do merit greater attention. All of the examples cited by Berger refer to prelates or clergy within the Church itself who claim to be speaking on behalf of the Church (in the case of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, the issue seems to be the “pontifical” imprimatur) (an aside: I am very curious how my students will react to the liberation theology reading on for our class on the economic order). An ordinary, lay case of dissent is not the same thing as dissent on the part of a cleric claiming the mantle of true Catholicism. One’s role and institutional position as a dissenter matters. Third, the nature of the challenge matters. A dissenting opinion on, say, the issue of the morality of abortion does not hold the same status as a dissenting opinion on, e.g., the morality of capitalist fiscal structures. Again, there is nothing unusual in this arrangement. Social and cultural institutions of all kinds look upon expressions of dissent differently depending on the subject matter at issue.