Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Commonweal on the Bishops’ Religious Freedom Statement

Over the past week, I’ve written about criticism from the Catholic right of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ recent statement on religious freedom. Of course, there’s also been criticism from the Catholic left. This week, Commonweal has a negative editorial about the bishops’ statement. More in sorrow than in anger, Commonweal maintains that the statement veers into political partisanship. The  bishops’ simplistic, one-sided language, the editorial complains, makes them sound more like Republican party operatives than pastors. Young people already are turning away from organized religion because it seems too political and conservative on social issues. Surely the bishops do not want to exacerbate that trend?

I wonder about this criticism. It’s true that the bishops’ statement highlights the Obama Administration’s contraceptives mandate. The mandate is the first on the list of threats to religious freedom the bishops identify, and surely served as the prime motivation for their statement. But the second item on the list is state anti-immigration laws, like the recent Alabama measure forbidding assistance to undocumented immigrants. In criticizing these laws, the bishops are hardly mouthing GOP talking points. Republican politicians often favor such measures, while the Obama Administration has filed a lawsuit challenging the Alabama law.

Even with respect to the contraceptives mandate, the bishops could be forgiven for saying that they didn’t start this fight. The bishops surely knew that objecting to the HHS mandate would have the effect of highlighting the Church’s position on contraception, and that this position is unpopular, particularly with Millennials. But what choice was there? It was the Obama Administration that issued the mandate during an election year. For that matter, it was the Obama Administration that argued this Term in Hosanna-Tabor that the religion clauses did not even apply to a church’s decision to fire a minister, a position that a unanimous Court characterized as “remarkable.” If it’s inappropriately partisan for religious organizations to respond when government takes steps like these, then religious organizations can never defend themselves in public debate. That may be a good thing from a spiritual point of view, but I don’t think it’s a result Commonweal would approve.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

More on the SSPX, the Vatican, and Religious Freedom

A couple of days ago, I noted the negative response of the Society of Saint Pius X, a traditionalist Catholic body, to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ recent statement on the importance of religious freedom. The SSPX criticized the American concept of religious freedom, which the Conference had endorsed, as a more or less Protestant idea inconsistent with traditional Church teaching. I guessed that the SSPX represented a rather small movement within Catholicism, but thought it interesting that the bishops’ stance on religion in public life could draw criticism from the right as well as the left.

It turns out I may have underestimated the importance of the SSPX.  (A lesson: outsiders really should not assume they understand relations at the Holy See). La Stampa reports this week that the Vatican and the SSPX are poised to sign an agreement to make the SSPX a personal prelature of the Pope, like Opus Dei. This is big news. Pope John Paul II excommunicated the founder of the SSPX, the French Cardinal Marcel Lefebvre, for disobedience, but Pope Benedict has been working hard to bring the group back into the fold. One major sticking point has been the issue of religious freedom. The SSPX believes that Vatican II’s famous endorsement of religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, contradicts  earlier papal statements, most importantly the 19th Century “Syllabus of Errors,” which famously condemned the idea that “every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.”

What does this week’s apparent agreement suggest about the Church’s position on religious freedom? According to La Stampa, although the agreement requires SSPX to submit to the Pope on important doctrinal matters, it specifically allows for “legitimate discussion, study and theological explanation of particular expressions or formulations found in the documents of the Second Vatican Council.” Given the SSPX’s long, and apparently continuing, discomfort with Dignitatis Humanae, this language might mean that the concept of religious freedom, at least as understood in at Vatican II, is once again up for debate within the Church. That’s what the La Stampa article suggests. But, as I say, outsiders really should not assume they understand relations at the Holy See.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Outflanking the Bishops Conference on the Right

Last week, we noted  a report from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on the importance of religious freedom in America, Our First, Most Cherished Liberty: A Statement on Religious Liberty. Most of the time, one hears about dissents from the Catholic Left, which disagrees with the bishops on issues like abortion and homosexuality. Last week, though, there was a reminder that dissenters also exist on the Catholic Right.

The Society for Saint Pius X is a traditionalist Catholic body, formed around opposition to Vatican II, with an ambiguous relationship to the Church. Pope John Paul II excommunicated the society’s founder, and the society lacks canonical status, but recently the Vatican and the SSPX have been negotiating a formalization of the society’s place within the Church. It’s noteworthy, therefore, that the SSPX has responded to Our First, Most Cherished Liberty with a statement of its own. The SSPX is not impressed. In fact, it views the bishops’ statement as another example of an Americanist compromise that dilutes the Catholic faith. “Liberty,” the society asserts, is a matter of freely following the will of God, as that will is expressed in the Catholic Church; it has nothing to do with the American notion — strongly influenced, the SSPX argues, by heretical Calvinist theology — of personal freedom. It is precisely this American idea of personal freedom, the society maintains, that has led to things like the HHS contraceptives mandate. The SSPX calls on the bishops to abandon the principles of the Church’s “opponents” and return to the Church’s own.

As Rick Garnett points out over at Mirror of Justice, this argument was settled at Vatican II itself, in the Church’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae. I don’t know how large a movement the SSPX represents within Catholicism, though I suspect it’s fairly small. Still, it’s interesting to think of the bishops as reflecting a middle-of-the-road position — within the Catholic Church, that is.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 1 Comment

The USCCB Statement on Religious Freedom and Widespread Misunderstanding About the State of Free Exercise

Unlike some, I find much to praise in the recent statement by the USCCB Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, which Mark noted here.  This being a legal blog, however, I want to respond specifically to a claim being advanced on some blogs about the state of constitutional free exercise in this country.  It’s one that I’ve encountered many times before, but the response to it needs much more ventilation, as the media in various sorts of fora are just not getting it.  The misunderstanding leads commentators, even law professors, to make grossly incomplete, and unintentionally misleading, statements about whether the Free Exercise Clause may be invoked for infringements of religious liberty.  I’ll focus some of these comments on the HHS mandate, though I do not think the point is limited to that context.  The bottom line, in my view, is that it is very unclear whether the Free Exercise Clause is a viable legal possibility.  If I were a betting man in the mandate context, I’d put the odds somewhere around 60-40 for upholding the mandate.

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Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Catholic Bishops Issue Report on Threats to Religious Freedom

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops today issued a report, Our First, Most Cherished Liberty: A Statement on Religious Liberty, on threats to religious freedom  in America and abroad. The report lists several recent actions by the federal and state governments that endanger religious freedom — including the HHS contraception mandate, state laws that forbid assistance to illegal aliens, and moves by public universities to deny recognition to evangelical groups on campus — and discusses the persecution  suffered by religious minorities, often Christians, in other parts of the world. The report calls on clergy and lay Catholics, as well as adherents of other faiths, “to impress upon our elected representatives the importance of continued protection of religious liberty in a free society.” In particular, the report proposes that Catholic bishops in America organize a “fortnight for freedom” this summer, a fourteen-day “period of prayer, study, catechesis, and public action [to] emphasize both our Christian and American heritage of liberty.”

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Gjerde, “Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America”

Another wonderful looking new book for today, this one by Jon Gjerde (Berkeley), Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America (CUP 2012).  The publisher’s description follows.

Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America offers a series of fresh perspectives on one of the most familiar themes – the nation’s encounter with Catholicism – in nineteenth-century American history. While religious and immigration historians have construed this history in univocal terms, Jon Gjerde bridges sectarian divides by presenting Protestants and Catholics in conversation with each other. In so doing, Gjerde reveals the ways in which America’s encounter with Catholicism was much more than a story about American nativism. Nineteenth-century religious debates raised questions about the fundamental underpinnings of the American state and society: the shape of the antebellum market economy, the transformation of gender roles in the American family, and the place of slavery in an ostensibly democratic polity were only a few of the issues engaged by Protestants and Catholics in a lively and enduring dialectic. While the question of the place of Catholics in America was left unresolved, the very debates surrounding this question generated multiple conceptions of American pluralism and American national identity.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Pope on Redefining Marriage: Reasoned Argument and Pastoral Care

At a meeting with American bishops Friday in Rome, Pope Benedict discussed efforts in Western countries to alter the legal definition of marriage. Not surprisingly, he suggested that Catholics resist such efforts, and do so by making arguments from natural law. After noting “the powerful political and cultural currents seeking to alter the legal definition of marriage,” he stated:

The Church’s conscientious effort to resist this pressure calls for a reasoned defense of marriage as a natural institution consisting of a specific communion of persons, essentially rooted in the complementarity of the sexes and oriented to procreation. Sexual differences cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the definition of marriage. Defending the institution of marriage as a social reality is ultimately a question of justice, since it entails safeguarding the good of the entire human community and the rights of parents and children alike.

When addressing itself to public debate, in other words, the Church should make reasoned arguments, not proclaim revealed truth. Within the Church, however, the Pope suggested a more pastoral approach. “In this great pastoral effort,” he said, “there is an urgent need for the entire Christian community to recover an appreciation of the virtue of chastity. … It is not merely a question of presenting arguments, but of appealing to an integrated, consistent and uplifting vision of human sexuality.” Of course, these two approaches — reasoned argument and pastoral care  — are not mutually exclusive; I don’t understand him to say that reasoned argument is out of place within the Church, or that more intuitive appeals are out of place in politics. The Pope appears to understand, though, that different appeals may be appropriate in the public square and within the Church itself.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Anglican and Catholic Bishops Oppose UK Government’s Plan to Legalize Same-Sex Marriage

Lots of law-and-religion news out of Britain this weekend. Here’s another story: in Catholic parishes in Britain today, worshipers heard a pastoral letter from Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the Catholic primate, warning about the dangers of legalizing same-sex marriage. The letter follows similar statements by Anglican bishops, including Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Archbishop of York John Sentamu; Williams is quoted as saying that legalization would force “unwanted change on the rest of the nation.” The bishops’ statements follow reports that the coalition government of Prime Minister David Cameron is considering introducing legislation to legalize  same-sex marriage in Britain. It’s not clear from the reports whether the legislation would  authorize only civil same-sex marriages or actually alter the articles of the Church of England — adopted by act of Parliament — to authorize religious same-sex marriages as well. I assume the former, but I don’t know enough about Parliament’s role in setting doctrine in the Church of England.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Vatican Office Rules American Bishop Wrongly Closed Parishes

According to news reports, a Vatican office has taken the extraordinary step of overruling a bishop’s decision to close 13 parishes in his diocese. The Bishop of Cleveland, Richard Lennon, ordered the parishes closed as part of a diocesan downsizing three years ago. Parishioners challenged the closings as violations of canon law, and yesterday the Congregation for the Clergy, an office in the Roman Curia, ruled in their favor. According to the parishioners’  lawyer, the Congregation held that Bishop Lennon had failed to follow the canonical procedure for closing parishes, for example, by neglecting to consult clerical advisers and issue a formal decree. Bishop Lennon may now appeal to the Vatican’s high court. This week’s ruling is yet another example of the growing interest in canon-law litigation in the Catholic Church.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Cardinal Suggests Legal Challenge to Contraception Mandate

In a letter he sent Friday to Catholic bishops, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, President of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, stated that, notwithstanding President Obama’s invitation to “work out the wrinkles,” talks between the Conference and the White House on the revised contraception mandate have not gone well. According to the cardinal, White House staff have stated that the Administration will not expand the the exemption for religious institutions and have suggested the bishops listen to more “enlightened” voices within Catholicism. As a result, the cardinal wrote, the Conference is considering litigation:

In the recent Hosanna-Tabor ruling, the Supreme Court unanimously defended the right of a Church to define its own ministry and services, a dramatic rebuff to the administration, apparently unheeded by the White House. Thus, our bishops’ conference, many individual religious entities, and other people of good will are working with some top-notch law firms who feel so strongly about this that they will represent us pro-bono. In the upcoming days, you will hear much more about this encouraging and welcome development.

Hosanna-Tabor  is not directly relevant to this issues surrounding the mandate, of course, but I take it the cardinal is using the case more or less rhetorically. In Hosanna-Tabor, the Court unanimously rejected the Administration’s assertion that the  Free Exercise Clause does  not apply to a church’s employment of its minsters — as the Court stated, a rather “remarkable” assertion that suggests an unfortunate antipathy for the special protection the American Constitution offers religious communities.