Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Book on Catholicism and Human Rights

From Cambridge University Press, here is a new book on the often forgotten contribution of Catholic thought to human rights law: Catholic Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights, by scholar Leonard Francis Taylor (National University of Ireland–Galway). The publisher’s description follows:

It is because Catholicism played such a formative role in the construction of Western legal culture that it is the focal point of this enquiry. The account of international law from its origin in the treaties of Westphalia, and located in the writing of the Grotian tradition, had lost contact with another cosmopolitan history of international law that reappeared with the growth of the early twentieth century human rights movement. The beginnings of the human rights movement, grounded in democratic sovereign power, returned to that moral vocabulary to promote the further growth of international order in the twentieth century. In recognising this technique of periodically returning to Western cosmopolitan legal culture, this book endeavours to provide a more complete account of the human rights project that factors in the contribution that cosmopolitan Catholicism made to a general theory of sovereignty, international law and human rights.

  • Provides an engaging narrative on the integration of democratic and human rights norms into Catholicism, which in turn promoted those values through Christianity’s global reach
  • A valuable historical survey of Catholicism as a cosmopolitan project from the medieval to the modern era
  • Undertakes to provide a critical narrative of the development and direction of international law as it was characterised by Catholic preoccupations from the medieval and early modern era
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Ben-Johanan, “Jacob’s Younger Brother”

I’m delighted to join Marc in re-starting our Scholarship Roundup feature here on the Forum. The feature highlights new books and articles on law and religion (generally speaking) that we think will interest our followers. A few of you have told us you miss the feature–so now it’s back!

Here’s a new book from Harvard, out this month, on Jewish-Catholic relations after Vatican II: Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II, by Karma Ben-Johanan (Humboldt). The author suggests that, behind the scenes, each side of the relationship has continued to have reservations about exactly what the 20th-century rapprochement between these two great religions means. Here’s the publisher’s description:

A revealing account of contemporary tensions between Jews and Christians, playing out beneath the surface of conciliatory interfaith dialogue.

A new chapter in Jewish–Christian relations opened in the second half of the twentieth century when the Second Vatican Council exonerated Jews from the accusation of deicide and declared that the Jewish people had never been rejected by God. In a few carefully phrased statements, two millennia of deep hostility were swept into the trash heap of history.

But old animosities die hard. While Catholic and Jewish leaders publicly promoted interfaith dialogue, doubts remained behind closed doors. Catholic officials and theologians soon found that changing their attitude toward Jews could threaten the foundations of Christian tradition. For their part, many Jews perceived the new Catholic line as a Church effort to shore up support amid atheist and secular advances. Drawing on extensive research in contemporary rabbinical literature, Karma Ben-Johanan shows that Jewish leaders welcomed the Catholic condemnation of antisemitism but were less enthusiastic about the Church’s sudden urge to claim their friendship. Catholic theologians hoped Vatican II would turn the page on an embarrassing history, hence the assertion that the Church had not reformed but rather had always loved Jews, or at least should have. Orthodox rabbis, in contrast, believed they were finally free to say what they thought of Christianity.

Jacob’s Younger Brother pulls back the veil of interfaith dialogue to reveal how Orthodox rabbis and Catholic leaders spoke about each other when outsiders were not in the room. There Ben-Johanan finds Jews reluctant to accept the latest whims of a Church that had unilaterally dictated the terms of Jewish–Christian relations for centuries.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Tosato on Biblical Interpretation

Here is an interesting new book from the Pontifical Gregorian University’s press, The Catholic Statute of Biblical Interpretation by Fr. Angelo Tosato, newly translated into English by our friend and frequent academic collaborator, Prof. Monica Lugato of LUMSA. Fr. Tosato, who died in 1999, was a professor at the Lateran and the Gregorian Universities, specializing in Biblical interpretation. But the book is accessible to non-experts as well. Among the topics it covers are the concept of the Bible as a set of divinely inspired texts mediated through human authorship, and the distinction between what Tosato calls “the bishops’ judicial interpretation” of the Bible, which may be authoritative for Catholics at any given time, and the “authentic” interpretation, which is known fully only to God. Because a space inevitably exists between the judicial and authentic interpretation, Tosato argues, the former is always subject to rethinking–guided, of course, by Holy Tradition.

Here is the description of the book from the publisher:

A «rigorous and exhaustive study on the official Catholic doctrine in the realm of Biblical interpretation», this work is «defended by heavily equipped garrisons of quotations in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and fortified by walls of Church documents» and based upon a «a profound knowledge of juridical questions and problems». The Author begins by clarifying the definition of the Bible for the Catholic faith, then explores its nature, origin, purpose and functions in relation to its different addressees, finally analysing the prerequisites, criteria, and forms of accurate biblical interpretation. «One detail may draw the reader’s attention. Angelo Tosato asserts, with solid reasons, that the juridical authority of the Magisterium is limited to the actualised interpretation of biblical texts for our world, and has not to deal with the proper exegetical and scientific task of recovering the original meaning of these texts. The Magisterium’s decisions, moreover, can be modified, corrected, and rectified, as every human decision». But this is just one of the many components of the Catholic Statute of biblical interpretation, a Statute that seeks to reveal «the vast and gorgeous panoramas of a truthful interpretation of our Scriptures».

Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by ascarcella

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by ascarcella

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by ascarcella

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Is Vatican II to Blame?

Last week, Pew released a survey showing that fewer than one-third of American Catholics believe that the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ during Communion. You’ve got to take such surveys with a grain of salt; people can misunderstand what’s being asked. And I wonder what percentage of adherents in any religion in America today really knows the religion’s core doctrines. Still, the results are striking. The belief that the bread and wine become the Body and Blood is a major doctrine of the Catholic Church–the Reformation was fought over it, in part.

On Twitter, there was a lot of discussion about the role Vatican II had in encouraging ignorance of Church teaching. Moving to a more modern, accessible liturgy was supposed to increase religious participation and knowledge, after all. Perhaps, by encouraging an informality and lack of seriousness in the liturgy, it has led to the opposite? I’m a liturgical traditionalist, myself (though not a Catholic), so I’d like to believe liturgical modernization is a mistake. But maybe Vatican II can’t be blamed on its own–perhaps other factors played more of a role. A new book from Oxford, Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America Since Vatican II, addresses the general fall-off in observance among Catholics since the Council and suggests the Council was actually more successful than critics allege. The author is theologian and sociologist Stephen Bullivant (St. Mary’s University-London). Here is the description from the Oxford website:

In 1962, Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council with the prophecy that ‘a new day is dawning on the Church, bathing her in radiant splendour’. Desiring ‘to impart an ever increasing vigour to the Christian life of the faithful’, the Council Fathers devoted particular attention to the laity, and set in motion a series of sweeping reforms. The most significant of these centred on refashioning the Church’s liturgy–‘the source and summit of the Christian life’–in order to make ‘it pastorally efficacious to the fullest degree’.

Over fifty years on, however, the statistics speak for themselves. In America, only 15% of cradle Catholics say that they attend Mass on a weekly basis; meanwhile, 35% no longer even tick the ‘Catholic box’ on surveys. In Britain, the signs are direr still. Of those raised Catholic, just 13% still attend Mass weekly, and 37% say they have ‘no religion’. But is this all the fault of Vatican II, and its runaway reforms? Or are wider social, cultural, and moral forces primarily to blame? Catholicism is not the only Christian group to have suffered serious declines since the 1960s. If anything Catholics exhibit higher church attendance, and better retention, than most Protestant churches do. If Vatican II is not the cause of Catholicism’s crisis, might it instead be the secret to its comparative success? 

Mass Exodus is the first serious historical and sociological study of Catholic lapsation and disaffiliation. Drawing on a wide range of theological, historical, and sociological sources, Stephen Bullivant offers a comparative study of secularization across two famously contrasting religious cultures: Britain and the USA.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

What Happened to Catholic Quebec?

This new book from the University of Toronto Press caught my eye for something it doesn’t address, at least judging from the publisher’s description. Quebec in a Global Light: Reaching for the Common Ground, by Robert Calderisi, purports to be a survey of Quebecois society–its commitments and values. Conspicuously absent from those commitments and values is religion, specifically, Catholicism. Quebec went through a Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, after which the Catholic Church, once so important, became something of an afterthought, at best–a phenomenon captured brilliantly by films like The Barbarian Invasions. I have no reason to think the author is wrong in leaving Catholicism off the list. But his doing so suggests how profoundly secular Quebec has become in a short time. Perhaps a similar process is taking place in Ireland today. Here’s the publisher’s description:

To the outside world, Quebec is Canada’s most distinctive province. To many Canadians, it has sometimes seemed the most troublesome. But, over the last quarter century, quietly but steadily, it has wrestled successfully with two of the West’s most daunting challenges: protecting national values in the face of mass immigration and striking a proper balance between economic efficiency and a sound social safety net. Quebec has also taken a lead in fighting climate change. Yet, many people – including many Quebeckers – are unaware of this progress and much remains to be done. These achievements, and the tenacity that made them possible, are rooted in centuries of adversity and struggle.

In this masterful survey of the major social and economic issues facing Quebec, Robert Calderisi offers an intimate look into the sensitivities and strengths of a society that has grown accustomed to being misunderstood. In doing so, he argues that the values uniting Quebeckers – their common sense, courtesy, concern for the downtrodden, aversion to conflict, and mild form of nationalism, linked to a firm refusal to be homogenized by globalization – make them the most “Canadian” of all Canadians.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Memoir from Tomas Halik

Several years ago, at a Forum 2000 Conference in Prague, I had the honor to meet Fr. Tomas Halik. An underground Catholic priest and member of the Czech resistance, Halik was important in bringing down the communist regime in that country. My impression is that Halik’s progressive theology and politics have made him somewhat controversial in the Czech Republic and in some Catholic circles today. Whatever one thinks about all that, one has to admire his great courage and contribution to the end of totalitarianism in his country.

This fall, Notre Dame will release a new memoir by Halik of his days in the resistance, From the Underground Church to Freedom. Here’s the description of the book from the press’s website:

International best-selling author and theologian Tomáš Halík shares for the first time the dramatic story of his life as a secretly ordained priest in Communist Czechoslovakia. Inspired by Augustine’s candid presentation of his own life, Halík writes about his spiritual journey within a framework of philosophical theology; his work has been compared to that of C. S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, and Henri Nouwen. Born in Prague in 1948, Halík spent his childhood under Stalinism. He describes his conversion to Christianity during the time of communist persecution of the church, his secret study of theology, and secret priesthood ordination in East Germany (even his mother was not allowed to know that her son was a priest). Halík speaks candidly of his doubts and crises of faith as well as of his conflicts within the church. He worked as a psychotherapist for over a decade and, at the same time, was active in the underground church and in the dissident movement with the legendary Cardinal Tomášek and Václav Havel, who proposed Halík as his successor to the Czech presidency. Since the fall of the regime, Halík has served as general secretary to the Czech Conference of Bishops and was an advisor to John Paul II and Václav Havel.

Woven throughout Halík’s story is the turbulent history of the church and society in the heart of Europe: the 1968 Prague Spring, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the self-immolation of his classmate Jan Palach, the “flying university,” the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and the difficult transition from totalitarian communist regime to democracy. Thomas Halík was a direct witness to many of these events, and he provides valuable testimony about the backdrop of political events and personal memories of the key figures of that time. This volume is a must-read for anyone interested in Halík and the church as it was behind the Iron Curtain, as well as in where the church as a whole is headed today.