Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Upcoming Panel: Displaying the 10 Commandments in Public School Classrooms

Later this month, the Mattone Center will co-host its annual symposium with the St. John’s Journal of Catholic Legal Studies. This year’s panel will address Roake v. Brumley, the 5th Circuit case on the constitutionality of displaying the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. We’ll hear from Christopher Lund (Wayne State) and Eric Rassbach (Becket Fund). We’ll post a video of the event later.

Space is limited, but if interested, please email Center Director Mark Movsesian at mark.movsesian@stjohns.edu. Thanks!

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Wearing Religious Symbols in Italy

The US doesn’t have too much trouble with people wearing religious symbols in public places. In Europe, though, this has been a consistent controversy–famously in France, but in other jurisdictions as well. A new book from Routledge, Secularism and Freedom of Religion in Italy, addresses the approach of Italian law. The author is political scientist Maria Cristina Ivaldi (University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli). Here’s the publisher’s description:

The display of religious symbols in the public space has been the subject of much debate. This book provides an overview of the presence of religious symbols in Italian public institutions from a legal standpoint.

The situation is analysed from the perspective of the principles of laicità/secularism, as defined by the Constitutional Court, and freedom of religion. It is argued that while the display of religious symbols in public institutions has been widely investigated doctrinally, the wearing of religious symbols in Italy has generally been neglected. Key cases are examined in light of national jurisprudence as well as intervention by the European Court of Human Rights and relevant judgments from foreign courts regarding this issue. Finally, the work considers the presence of religious symbols that transcend national borders, as in the case of arts, sport and advertising. A comparison is made with the French system which takes a very different approach. The book outlines possible ways forward in light of the growing interculturality of European societies.

It will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the areas of law and religion, and comparative law.

Posted on by Daniel Vitagliano

Around the Web

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

Posted on by Daniel Vitagliano

Around the Web

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

Posted on by amnania

Around the Web

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

Posted on by Daniel Vitagliano

Around the Web

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

Posted on by L&R Forum · 2 Comments

Legal Spirits Episode 002: SCOTUS Grants Cert in the Peace Cross Case

Peace Cross 5
The Peace Cross, a World War I Memorial, in Bladensburg, Maryland

 

In this “Legal Spirits” podcast, Center Director Mark Movsesian and Associate Director Marc DeGirolami talk about the Supreme Court’s grant earlier this month in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association, the Peace Cross case. The Court will decide whether a 90-year old war memorial in Maryland, pictured above, violates the Establishment Clause. Mark and Marc discuss the ins-and-outs of the case and speculate whether the Court will finally clear up some of the confusion surrounding religious displays on public property.

 

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Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Jensen, “The Cross”

A few years ago, the European Court of Human Rights took up a case involving the display of the crucifix in Italian public school classrooms. A claimant argued that displaying a religious symbol in a public school interfered with her right, under the European Convention on Human Rights, to educate her children in accordance with her own, secular humanist beliefs. The Italian government argued, somewhat implausibly, that the crucifix was really a neutral symbol that reflected secular, cultural values. (Hey, that’s what the Italian national courts held). The Court sidestepped the issue of what, exactly, the crucifix represented, but held that, even if the crucifix were a sectarian symbol, its display was permissible under the Convention.

The meaning of the cross has thus been a matter of great controversy recently, a least in a legal sense. A interesting-looking new book from Notre Dame theology professor Robin Jensen, The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy (Harvard) addresses the various meanings of the cross throughout history and up to today. Here’s the description from the Harvard website:

9780674088801-lgThe cross stirs intense feelings among Christians as well as non-Christians. Robin Jensen takes readers on an intellectual and spiritual journey through the two-thousand-year evolution of the cross as an idea and an artifact, illuminating the controversies—along with the forms of devotion—this central symbol of Christianity inspires.

Jesus’s death on the cross posed a dilemma for Saint Paul and the early Church fathers. Crucifixion was a humiliating form of execution reserved for slaves and criminals. How could their messiah and savior have been subjected to such an ignominious death? Wrestling with this paradox, they reimagined the cross as a triumphant expression of Christ’s sacrificial love and miraculous resurrection. Over time, the symbol’s transformation raised myriad doctrinal questions, particularly about the crucifix—the cross with the figure of Christ—and whether it should emphasize Jesus’s suffering or his glorification. How should Jesus’s body be depicted: alive or dead, naked or dressed? Should it be shown at all?

Jensen’s wide-ranging study focuses on the cross in painting and literature, the quest for the “true cross” in Jerusalem, and the symbol’s role in conflicts from the Crusades to wars of colonial conquest. The Cross also reveals how Jews and Muslims viewed the most sacred of all Christian emblems and explains its role in public life in the West today.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 1 Comment

Faith or Tradition? A Bolognese Easter Controversy

Here’s an interesting story about an Italian controversy concerning the giving ofGIOSUE-CARDUCCI a blessing at the public Giosuè Carducci Elementary School in Bologna in advance of Easter. Apparently there is an objection by a parent to the blessing that has generated a law suit against the school. In a lovely exemplar of the privatization of religion, the objecting parent opined, “Everything has a place, and the school is not the place for these blessings.” One wonders whether the public square is the place for San Petronio. And in a clear echo of the “endorsement test’s” concern for offended feelings and excluded sensibilities, there is this: “‘Is it fair that everyone has to see this, even if some students are Muslims, Buddhist or atheists?’ asked Adele Orioli, legal adviser to Italy’s Union of Atheists and Rationalistic Agnostics.” There is also some dispute among the school board members about where the blessing should be given, whether in a central garden location or instead in a less central (and probably danker and less sweet smelling) gymnasium. Finally, there is this from the Reverend Raffaele Buono, who oversees religious education in Bologna’s schools:  “It is not a matter of faith. It is a matter of belonging to a tradition.” Must it really be either/or, Reverend Buono?

Welcome, Italy, to issues that have plagued the United States for the last quarter century! You had your first taste with Lautsi, but believe me when I tell you that these will be sources of limitless acrimony and contention for you. We over here are waiting with bated breath to see whether Bologna will be compelled to rip down its statues of San Petronio and house them in privately owned palestre. (parenthetically, Carducci himself (pictured), a late Risorgimento nationalist writer whose poetry I have generally found to be abominably pompous, would almost certainly have held the Christian blessing in the greatest contempt).

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Guerres de Noël

US-LIFESTYLE-HOLIDAY-DECORATIONS

I used to think that the annual Christmas Wars were strictly an American thing, like corn dogs and and attorneys’ contingency fees. Only in America, I thought, do people seriously argue about whether to allow Christmas trees in public parks or to permit public school choirs to sing “Silent Night” at holiday concerts. The issues become more and more bizarre. This year, a Maryland school district decided to remove even a reference to “Christmas” in the school calendar–as though the reference amounted to religious oppression and removal would make people forget what holiday comes round every 25th of December.

Our Supreme Court, whose Establishment Clause jurisprudence focuses on factors like the presence of plastic reindeer and talking wishing wells, bears much blame for this state of affairs. But judges in other countries seem eager to replicate our model. Last week, a French administrative court ruled that the town of La Roche-sur-Yon–located, appropriately, in the historically royalist, counter-revolutionary region of the Vendee–must remove a Christmas crèche from its city hall. The court held that the crèche violates the 1905 French Law on the Separation of Church and State, which, according to the court, forbids religious displays like crèches on public property. According to news reports (in French), the court concluded the display was incompatible with the principle of state religious neutrality, or laïcité.

I don’t know enough about French administrative law to evaluate the decision. What I find fascinating, as an outsider, is how closely the French debate tracks the American. The lawsuit seeking removal of the crèche was brought by a secularist group called the “Fédération de la Libre Pensée,” which, I gather, is analogous to American groups like the Freedom from Religion Foundation and American Atheists. The group argues that the crèche “fails to respect the conscience of the citizen” by “imposing” on him a religious display whenever he enters city hall. In response, the town’s supporters evoke cultural traditions more than Christianity. Religious neutrality, they say, does not require abandoning longstanding French customs. What’s next, they ask? Church bells and Christmas lights? They’ve started a popular hashtag campaign, #TouchePasAMaCreche.

Each side has to live with its ironies. Notwithstanding the rhetorical commitment to laïcité, French law allows a great deal of entanglement between church and state–more, in some respects, than we would tolerate in the US. (Guess who owns Notre Dame and all other church buildings that existed as of 1905? Hint: it’s not the Church). On the other hand, the defense of tradition in this case rings somewhat hollow. La Roche-sur-Yon only began displaying the crèche 22 years ago.

The city has vowed to appeal the decision. I’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, here’s a thought. If France has adopted the Christmas Wars, can Black Friday be far behind?

Photo: Le Figaro