A Missouri court this week convicted Bishop Robert Finn of failing to report suspicion of child abuse by a priest in his diocese, a misdemeanor offense. Bishop Finn is now the highest ranking Catholic cleric to be convicted in the sex abuse scandal. Religion Clause has the details here.
Conference: Catholic Perspectives on Religious Liberty at Georgetown
I’ll be participating in a conference next Thursday, September 13 — “Catholic Perspectives on Religious Liberty” — organized by Tom Farr and hosted by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University Law Center. The keynote speaker is Cardinal Donald Wuerl and the balance of the conference is organized in 3 fairly conversational panels, each of which is devoted to a separate topic. If you are able to come, please stop by and say hi. More details here.
Upcoming Lectures on Catholic Jurisprudence
For East Coast CLR Forum readers interested in Catholic jurisprudence, here are a couple of events to put on your fall calendar. Next Friday, September 14, Villanova Law School will host the seventh annual Scarpa Conference on Law, Politics, and Culture. This year’s theme is “Living the Catholic Faith in Public Life.” Speakers include Helen Alvaré (George Mason), Gerard Bradley (Notre Dame), Patrick Brennan (Villanova), and Peter Steinfels (Fordham). The following Friday, September 21, the Thomistic Institute NYC will kick off a series at NYU’s Catholic Center, “A Public Right to the Truth: A Series on the Natural Right to Religious Freedom,” with a lecture by Russell Hittinger (Tulsa) on “The Catholic Magisterium and Religious Freedom.” The series will continue throughout the fall. Details are here.
Bell on The Status of the Roman Catholic Church and Canon Law in Singapore
Gary F. Bell (Nat’l U. of Singapore Faculty of Law) has posted Religious Legal Pluralism Revisited – The Status of the Roman Catholic Church and Her Canon Law in Singapore. The abstract follows.
By religious legal pluralism we usually mean state-recognised legal pluralism, such as the kind of legal pluralism implemented in Singapore through the Administration of Muslim Law Act. But there is also religious legal pluralism outside State recognition and enforcement. Many religions have very long legal traditions which have survived, often without much support or official recognition by States (Jewish law, for example). In this paper we shall look at one such tradition, the canon law of the Latin Church of the Roman Catholic Church and its implementation by the Church in Singapore, including the establishment of very busy ecclesiastical tribunals in Singapore to administer disputes relating to the possible nullity of religious marriages, for example. The hope is that this example of Canon Law in Singapore will show that there can be very detailed and formal religious laws implemented by formal institutions such as tribunals outside the ambit of the State.
Carozza & Philpott on The Catholic Church, Human Rights, and Democracy
Paolo G. Carozza (Notre Dame Law School) Daniel Philpott (Notre Dame) have posted The Catholic Church, Human Rights, and Democracy: Convergence and Conflict with the Modern State. The abstract follows.
In Pope Benedict XVI’s address to the Roman Curia of December 22, 2006, he made reference to the Catholic Church’s own journey toward embracing human rights and religious freedom.1 Perhaps surprisingly to some, he gave credit for this development to the Enlightenment, which he said could count human rights and religious freedom as its “true conquests.” More predictably to most, he reiterated his longstanding criticism of the Enlightenment’s attempt to ground these principles on positivist and skeptical foundations. He argued rather that a constructive synergy of faith and reason was the best foundation for tolerance, human rights, and the preservation of religious freedom.
Benedict’s thesis points to an ambivalent historical relationship between the social teachings of the Catholic Church and modern political institutions based on human rights and democracy. It is in part a story of convergence. Gradually, over the course of the twentieth century, then far more rapidly beginning with the Second Vatican Council, following upon several centuries of consistent resistance to the momentum of European politics, the Church came to embrace norms of human rights and democracy reflective of those that appeared in international instruments like the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the constitutions of western democracies. As the term convergence—rather than accommodation or adaptation—suggests, the Church did not simply conform itself to what others had long before pioneered. True, as Benedict argues, a dialogue with the Enlightenment did beget Catholic evolution in certain dimensions of rights, especially religious freedom. But it is also the case, as we point out below, that the Church has articulated a tradition of rights since as early as the sixteenth century. Read more
Muslim Students at Catholic Universities
Here is an interesting story about how many Muslim female students prefer university life on Catholic campuses. Though the story somehow still manages to snicker at Catholic higher education — would it be so intolerably wrong, one wonders, to require a single course in Catholic thought or history at a Catholic university? — it conveys the comfort of devout Muslim students within a Catholic university. Though the story does not mention it, President John Garvey of Catholic University once made similar statements about the religious life of Muslim students at Catholic University in response to a cooked-up, and subsequently discredited, controversy.
ECtHR Rules That Ban on Screening IVF Embryos for Genetic Defects Violates European Convention
A chamber of the European Court of Human Rights ruled yesterday that Italy’s ban on testing IVF-created embryos for genetic defects violates Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Italian law permits IVF in limited circumstances, but forbids pre-implantation testing of embryos; on the other hand, Italian law allows women to abort fetuses conceived through natural reproduction if the fetuses have certain diseases, for example, cystic fibrosis. In the case before the chamber, an Italian couple who were healthy carriers of cystic fibrosis wished to conceive through IVF and to have all embryos tested for the disease before implantation. The chamber ruled that the Italian ban violated article 8’s grant of a right to respect for private and family life. The chamber rejected Italy’s argument that the ban was justified, among other reasons, to avoid the risk of eugenic abuses. This was a legitimate aim, the chamber said, but the ban on pre-implantation testing seemed “disproportionate,” given that Italy allowed women to abort naturally-conceived fetuses that showed signs of the disease. In effect, Italy was requiring parents in the applicants’ position to conceive through natural means but then abort a fetus that showed signs of cystic fibrosis, a choice that would bring the parents only more anxiety and suffering. Italy’s IVF law is one of Europe’s most restrictive, a result, in part, of the influence of the Catholic Church. Italy has three months to appeal the chamber decision. The case is Costa and Pavan v. Italy (ECtHR, Aug. 28, 2012), available here (follow the link for the PDF).
Copycats
Here’s an interesting comparative law item. In a gesture of solidarity with Pussy Riot, the Russian punk band currently serving a two-year prison term for staging a “punk prayer” in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, three masked protesters stormed Cologne Cathedral in Germany last Sunday during Mass. The protesters shouted “Free Pussy Riot” and threw leaflets at the worshipers until church guards escorted them outside. Authorities in Cologne now say they will prosecute the protesters for “disrupting the free practice of religion,” an offense with a three-year prison term under German law. “The right to demonstration cannot be set above the right to religious freedom and above the religious feelings of the congregation,” the dean of Cologne Cathedral remarked.
A couple of observations. First, as this episode demonstrates, one can’t simply dismiss the Pussy Riot trial as a symptom of dictatorship. Even in Western democracies, it is illegal to trespass on religious sites, and potential prison terms can be surprisingly harsh. To be sure, it’s unlikely the German protesters will actually serve three years; in the US, as I’ve explained, they probably wouldn’t serve time at all. And the German case differs from the Russian in that the German protesters actually interrupted a religious service. But the basic point is that trespassing on religious sites is a crime, even if one is trying to send a message about a great wrong.
Which leads to the second observation. What, exactly, was the message the German activists were sending? What was the point of disrupting Mass in Cologne Cathedral? Cologne Cathedral is not Russian Orthodox. It’s not even Orthodox. It’s Catholic. However bad the corruption in the Russian Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church bears no responsibility for the Pussy Riot prosecution. It’s not like the Vatican called for throwing Pussy Riot in prison. So, really, it makes no sense to disrupt Mass in a Catholic cathedral because of what the Russian Church hierarchy allegedly did to Pussy Riot. Unless, perhaps, the message is that traditional Christianity anywhere, in any form, should be attacked.
Guy, “Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel”
The author John Guy (whose prior work includes biographies of Thomas
More and Mary Queen of Scots) recently published Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel (Random House 2012). You can click on the link for the publisher’s description, but here’s a useful review of the book by Samuel Gregg, and a bit from the review’s conclusion:
In his public life after death, Becket has assumed an iconic status for those seeking to defend religious liberty per se. Becket himself (like Thomas More) would have found that a rather strange notion. Becket’s concern was with the church’s freedom from undue temporal interference, rather than a more general conception of religious toleration. That development had to await, among other things, the wars of religion and what none other than Benedict XVI has described as one of the American Revolution’s many positive results. In the Catholic Church’s case, it also required careful rereading of scriptural, patristic and scholastic sources in order to recover Christianity’s original affirmation of religious liberty in the sense of immunity from coercion and as a necessary precondition for freely embracing religious truth.
And yet as Islam’s present traumas should remind us, a religion’s capacity to make distinctions between the spiritual and temporal realms makes a difference to the more general growth of freedom. As Guy points out, Henry VIII’s looting and destruction of the sanctuary of St Thomas Becket in September 1538, his burning of Becket’s remains, and the king’s posthumous designation of Becket as a “rebel and traitor to his prince” had a clear political purpose. “Only a monarch not unlike the earlier Henry,” Guy writes, “set on building a regional church under tight royal control, ring-fenced by the coast, as an integral part of a centralized state controlled by himself, could have spoken that way” (348).
It was of course the voice of tyranny, for which libertas ecclesiae and the life of Thomas Becket never cease to serve as constant reproaches.
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.