Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Catholic Church’s Mediating Role in Cuba

Here’s a very interesting piece about the relations between Cuba and the Catholic Church (h/t John Barrett).  It highlights the mediating role that the Church has taken with the Castro regime, and how taking “the long view” seems to have been both shrewd and effective in various political and cultural ways.  A bit:

When Pope Benedict XVI visits Cuba next month, he will once again reinforce a strategy that the Vatican has allowed the local Catholic Church there to pursue for more than three decades: diligently avoid any political confrontation with the Castro regime, collaborate with Havana to combat the U.S.-led embargo, and support the Cuban government’s incremental economic reforms. In exchange, the Church has been able to maintain a certain amount of autonomy on the island, allowing it to rebuild its presence and position for the possible post-Castro economic boom times to come.

It is a controversial balance. Cubans in the exile community vigorously criticize the Church because they think Church leadership on the island should challenge the dictatorship. But the Vatican takes the long view. Rather than overtly push for change, the Church has come to pursue a strategy of “reconciliation.” It has inserted itself as mediator between the regime and its most daring opponents, both those imprisoned and those out in the streets. The Church is present and persistent, but it is nonpartisan. The attitude harkens back to the ostpolitik it practiced during the Cold War — in most communist countries, especially in those where Catholics were a minority, clergy hunkered down, ministered to the faithful, and survived. Today, in countries ranging from Albania and Montenegro to Romania and Ukraine, Catholic communities are thriving.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

We Could Have Told You That

On Saturday, Pope Benedict named 22 new cardinals, including Archbishop Timothy Dolan of the neighboring Catholic Archdiocese of New York, now Timothy Cardinal Dolan. While in Rome, Cardinal Dolan went out of his way to assure the Vatican that New York is not an entirely irreligious city:

“New York seems to have an innate interest and respect for religion and I’m going to bring that up because I don’t like that caricature that New York is some neo-Sodom and Gomorrah” he told reporters after celebrating Mass on Thursday in Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica…. “[T]here are instances of secularism and materialism and paganism in New York as there are everywhere … but I have found the New York community to be very religious and innately respectful of religion, interested in religion,” he said.

Cleary, more Vaticanisti need to be reading CLR Forum.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Journal of Church and State Issue on Historical and Contemporary Challenges to Catholicism

The Oxford Journal of Church and State has published a very interesting looking series of articles on historical and contemporary challenges to Catholicism.  The authors include Jo Renee Formicola (Seton Hall), Christopher Beneke (Bentley University), and others.  Unfortunately the issue is behind a pay wall because the articles look well worth checking out.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Puzzling

As my colleague Marc pointed out Friday, there are some pretty serious questions about the Administration’s new contraception-coverage mandate. I don’t mean that rhetorically. I mean it’s genuinely unclear what the answers are, even after a weekend in which Administration officials and liberal Catholic commentators like EJ Dionne went on the airwaves to claim that the President had resolved the controversy. Two questions, it seems to me, are crucial:

  • Are insurance companies really going to absorb the costs of employee contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients? Some commentators reason that because these services are cheaper for insurance companies than pregnancy care, the companies will be glad to foot the bill. Does that make sense? Have insurance companies made any representations about this? (As of this morning, there was nothing on the website of health insurers’ umbrella organization, “America’s Health Insurance Plans,” or AHIP). Why wouldn’t insurance companies find a way to pass the cost of these services on to the employers who purchase the insurance contracts?
  • What about religious institutions that self-insure? According to the Becket Fund, thousands of such institutions exist.

Until one knows the answer to these questions, it’s hard to see how this “compromise” changes anything in substance about the original mandate.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Contraceptives and the Complexities of American Catholicism

There’s word this morning that the Obama Administration plans to announce a compromise on the new HHS regs that require religiously-affiliated entities to cover contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients in employee health insurance plans. (When stories start to leak about how the Vice President opposed the regs, you know the White House is in political trouble). It’s not clear what the compromise is, exactly, or whether it will satisfy religious leaders.

For the moment, though, I’d like to focus on something this crisis reveals about American Catholicism. Some proponents of the HHS regs have been shocked at the negative reaction from many American Catholics, large numbers of whom use artificial birth control. Surely Catholics who use artificial birth control should have rallied to the Administration’s side. As Ross Douthat points out in an insightful column, however, religious belief and practice are rarely so clear-cut. One should not, he says,

gloss[] over the complexities of religious faith and practice, which ensure that many Catholics’ relationship to the teachings of their Church is more complicated than a simple “agree or disagree.” There are Catholics who accept the Church’s view on contraception but simply don’t live up to it. There are Catholics who respect the general point of the teaching while questioning its application to every individual case…. There are many American Catholics, as Daniel McCarthy noted in a perceptive interview recently, who are neither devout nor dissidents — Catholics who practice their faith intermittently, drifting away and then being tugged back, without having any particular desire to see its teachings changed to suit their lifestyles. And then there are Catholics (and this is a large category) who do explicitly dissent from Church teaching, but who also don’t want to see secular governments set the rules for what Catholic institutions can and cannot do…. If this issue a matter of conscience only for the “formal hierarchy of the Catholic Church,” then why is the White House taking so much criticism from Catholics with a reputation for disagreeing with the hierarchy — from Commonweal Catholics and National Catholic Reporter Catholics, from famous Catholic liberals like E.J. Dionne and Chris Matthews, Catholic Democrats like Tim Kaine and Bob Casey, Jr., and so on? The answer can’t be that they’re all afraid of the bishops, since we’ve just established that most Catholics don’t agree with the bishops on this issue. Something else is going on here.

“Neither devout nor dissident” — that phrase probably captures the way most people feel, most of the time, about their faith traditions. It surely describes many American Catholics today. When one takes into account the complex social reality of American Catholicism, and the still-profound sense Americans have that government should not interfere with religious conscience, the reaction to the new HHS regs is not too surprising, after all.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 1 Comment

Moore, “The War on Heresy”

A fascinating looking book by the medievalist R.I. Moore (Newcastle) will be published in April, The War on Heresy (Harvard 2012).  Religious heresy is in some ways the ancestor (though a still-living ancestor) of religious dissent, and so it may be interesting to reflect on how the history in this volume might shed light on contemporary concerns.  The publisher’s description follows.

Between 1000 and 1250, the Catholic Church confronted the threat of heresy with increasing force. Some of the most portentous events in medieval history—the Cathar crusade, the persecution and mass burnings of heretics, the papal inquisition established to identify and suppress beliefs that departed from the true religion—date from this period. Fear of heresy molded European society for the rest of the Middle Ages and beyond, and violent persecutions of the accused left an indelible mark. Yet, as R. I. Moore suggests, the version of these events that has come down to us may be more propaganda than historical reality.

Popular accounts of heretical events, most notably the Cathar crusade, are derived from thirteenth-century inquisitors who saw organized heretical movements as a threat to society. Skeptical of the reliability of their reports, Moore reaches back to earlier contemporaneous sources, where he learns a startling truth: no coherent opposition to Catholicism, outside the Church itself, existed. The Cathars turn out to be a mythical construction, and religious difference does not explain the origins of battles against heretic practices and beliefs.

A truer explanation lies in conflicts among elites—both secular and religious—who used the specter of heresy to extend their political and cultural authority and silence opposition. By focusing on the motives, anxieties, and interests of those who waged war on heresy, Moore’s narrative reveals that early heretics may have died for their faith, but it was not because of their faith that they were put to death.

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Noah on the Role of Religion in End-of-Life Decisions

Barbara A. Noah (Western New England University School of Law) has posted The Role of Religion in the Schiavo Controversy. The abstract follows.

The brief life of Theresa Marie Schiavo and the dispute over her end-of-life care captured public awareness in a way that few such cases have done. The reasons for the nearly unprecedented public attention to her case are two-fold. The decision by various religious groups and governmental entities to intervene in the dispute surrounding her care in order to promote conservative causes (some of them only tenuously related to her particular medical circumstances) prompted unusually intense media coverage. In addition, the ensuing publicity surrounding Theresa’s tragic condition — an unexpected cardiac arrest left her in a permanent vegetative state at the age of twenty-six — provided a vivid and poignant reminder of the very precarious nature of life. Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Santorum, Catholicism, and Politics

An interesting and farily extensive story about Rick Santorum and the role he sees for Catholicism in politics, which the author characterizes as something of the inverse of John F. Kennedy’s view of the issue.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

How French Catholicism Accepted Liberalism

Princeton University Press has published a posthumous work by the late  Cambridge lecturer Emile Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy: An Essay in the History of Political Thought (Richard Rex trans. 2012). The publisher’s description follows.

Catholicism and Democracy is a history of Catholic political thinking from the French Revolution to the present day. Emile Perreau-Saussine investigates the church’s response to liberal democracy, a political system for which the church was utterly unprepared.

 Looking at leading philosophers and political theologians–among them Joseph de Maistre, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Charles Péguy–Perreau-Saussine shows how the church redefined its relationship to the State in the long wake of the French Revolution. Disenfranchised by the fall of the monarchy, the church in France at first embraced that most conservative of Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Rick Santorum and Evangelicals

Last night, Rick Santorum finished second in the Iowa Republican caucuses, a mere eight votes behind Mitt Romney, propelled by strong support from Evangelical voters. According to entrance polls, Santorum received the votes of a third of Evangelical voters. You might say that’s not a big deal, since two-thirds of Evangelical votes went to other candidates. The thing is, Santorum is a Roman Catholic, and the Evangelical/Catholic divide was traditionally a strong one in American politics. The idea that a Northeast Catholic would get strong support from Midwest Evangelicals — far more than Evangelical candidates in the race like Michele Bachman and Rick Perry — shows how much the politics of American religion has changed in the last two generations. On many politically-salient issues, Evangelicals and Catholics today make common cause. The results from Iowa offer more evidence that the  divide in contemporary American politics is not so much between religions, as between voters who have traditional religious commitments and voters who don’t.