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Sex Abuse and Women's Ordination: The Plight of the Liberal Catholic

Father Roy Bourgeios, a prominent activist for social justice, gave a homily at a service in which , contrary to Catholic doctrine a woman was ordained as a priest. He was excommunicated four months later.

Father Steven Kiesle asked to leave the priesthood after his arrest for molesting children. His Bishop sent letters to the Vatican recommending approval. Four years later, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote back saying the issue needed careful consideration and more time. After six years, Kiesle was defrocked.

David A. Sylvester in a thoughtful post at Tikkun Daily writes about why he stays in the Church, this despite his full recognition of the horror of the comparison of the Church's treatment of the two priests and his understanding of the checkered history of the Church. His main lines of argument involve ways in which liberal Catholics distance themselves from the leadership of the Church. It is standard Catholic doctrine that Catholics must follow their well-formed conscience even if it conflicts with those of Church leaders. Moreover, he does not regard the Vatican as the Church; he argues that the People of God are the Church. He believes Church leaders should be confronted in a prophetic spirit of justice, not vengeance.    

On the latter point, it may be easier for many to do this outside the Church than inside. If one stays inside the Church one is more likely to be angry at Church leaders because one feels more attached. On the People of God point, ironically, Sylvester provides the resources to take much of the liberal comfort out of identifying with them rather than the Vatican. In developing an argument for humility and understanding the forces working on Church leaders, he observes that American Catholics are only 6% of the world's Catholics and, of course, a hefty percentage of American Catholics are not liberal. On the sexist issues associated with the women's ordination issue or the issues associated with sexual orientation, from the perspective of the liberal, the People of God are not much better than the Vatican. Indeed, the People of God might be less likely to speak out against the materialism, hedonism, and general limitations of capitalism. On the other hand, the People of God would be less likely to cover up sex abuse.

Sylvester also is moved by a more primitive argument. The conservatives would like me to go. I will not give them the satisfaction. No doubt many conservatives want the liberals to go; they would prefer a smaller more unified Church. There is a lot of "Go Back to Russia" sentiments among Catholic conservatives. But among others there is a desire for liberals to stay and for them to lead the best Catholic lives they can. I think this may animate the views of the Church leadership. On the other hand, there are material considerations as well. American Catholics provide needed material support for the mission of the Catholic Church. I do not think the Church leadership wants to lose that.

The Future of News and Reporting on Political Economy

The print news media is in serious trouble and it appears doomed. That media depends on advertising for economic survival. Indeed, as James Fallows writes in the June issue of the Atlantic Monthly, “The typical newspaper costs much more to print and deliver than a subscriber pays.” But the newspaper has become a much less important vehicle for advertising (think about Craig’s List, E-Bay, Zilla, and Travelocity), and circulation has declined for many reasons. One significant reason is the availability of news for free on the internet. It seems clear that with few exceptions (e.g., the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal), the future of the news is not in print, but on the internet read through kindle, an ipad, or some contraption we have yet to see.

Herbert Gans in the spring issue of Daedalus (pdf available here) finds one bright light amidst the gloom. He notes that the capitalist press has focused its watchdog function on the government and not on business (except when scandals too large to ignore appear). The business section helps investors, but it does not ordinarily keep track of the lobbying interaction between businesses and politicians. In the wake of the Court’s embrace of the view that artificial persons have the same rights as natural persons, in my view, the need for reporting on political economy is more important than ever. Gans thinks that the news will be supported less by advertisers and more by foundations. If so, he suggests that there will be more room for political economy reporting. We’ll see.   

God of Our Fathers, Gods for Ourselves: Fundamentalism and Postmodern Belief

That's the title of an interesting new article by Fred Gedicks.

The abstract:

Prepared for a symposium on “Families, Fundamentalism, and the First Amendment,” this essay uses the “death of God” as a frame for recent developments in law and religion in the United States. Western culture has been obsessed with the death of God at least since Nietzsche. During the 1900s, this obsession took the form of a prediction that modernization had so undercut belief that the latter would eventually disappear entirely. That prediction turned out to be spectacularly wrong in the United States; popular and academic literature is now filled with triumphant - and regretful - expositions of the contemporary vibrance and vitality of religion. God has cheated death (or, at least, Nietzsche).

Or has he? The God whose death was widely predicted and the God who today is alive and well are not the same God. The God who died is the God of Christendom, who bound together western society with a universal account of the world that did not survive the advent of postmodernism; this God, indeed, is dead. The vibrant God of today is the one adapted to postmodernism; the vitality of that God is on display in contemporary American religion, especially in the spirituality movement. The most pressing religious problem now confronting the world is posed by believers who refuse to recognize the demise of the first God and the rise of the second; these “fundamentalists” continue to press for government recognition and enforcement of absolute religious truths. All three of these phenomena - the death of God, his rebirth in postmodernity, and his remnants in fundamentalism - are manifest in recent Religion Clause decisions.

The SSRN link:http://ssrn.com/abstract=1625842

Federal Judge rejects DOMA's denial of federal recognition of same-sex marriages valid in the states

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Judge Joseph L. Tauro of the District Court of Massachusetts ruled that the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) violates the constitution by prohibiting the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages that are valid under state law. In one opinion, he ruled that the law violates the Tenth Amendment by intruding on areas reserved to the states, noting that family law (including the law of marriage) has traditionally been regulated by state law and not federal law. Commonwealth v. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 2010 WL 2695668 (D. Mass. 2010). In a separate opinion, he ruled that DOMA violates the equal protection clause because the government could not provide any rational basis for failing to recognize same-sex marriages. Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, 2010 WL 2695652 (D. Mass. 2010). 

Argentina and Iceland approve same-sex marriages.

On July 15, 2010, the Argentine Senate voted to approve same-sex marriages, adding its voice to a similar bill approved in May by the lower house. Because President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner supports the bill, it will become the law. The Parliament in Iceland unanimously approved a similar bill (by a vote of 49-0) on June 12. Argentina and Iceland join the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, and Portugal in providing full marriage rights for same sex-couples in addition to the states of Massachusetts, Iowa, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire and the District of Columbia, although these state-law based marriages are not recognized by the federal government in the United States because of federal Defense of Marriage Act.

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The Perseverance of Frank Pasquale & Other Stuff

While I hope to resume blogging soon, for now I invite our readers to take a look at a series of recent posts by Frank Pasquale at Concurring Opinions: on the inheritance tax, a Malthusian Social Darwinist business environment, and inequality and health care. 

See too Neil Buchanan’s post, “A Pundit’s Conundrum” at Dorf on Law.

Lastly, a (typical) tax proposal from the Right for lowering unemployment by my state’s GOP gubernatorial candidate is scrutinized here by Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times.

Addendum: In light of Dean Chemerinsky’s Op-Ed in today’s Times, I’ve added this post from PrawfsBlawg on Wikileaks’ publication of the Afghan war documents. 

 

The Sexual Exploitation of Children

Carla Seaquist has an excellent and very well written essay here showing why the response by the Vatican to the sex abuse crisis from the past to the present continues to be inadequate. But she also saves some fire for the secular world: "Some critics, the neo-atheists in particular, see a zero-sum game in play, claiming that the faltering of the Catholic Church proves the superiority of the secular world. But that's false either-or thinking. Both the Church and the secular world are in moral disarray. For while the secular world has produced many advances -- the emancipation of women being a big one, including, notably, the frocking of women in some Protestant denominations -- the secular world has also blurred the moral line in the culture, the line that gives meaning and value to life, and in so doing has produced... junkier results: the mainstreaming of pornography, for one example.

"And for another example, and of bearing here: the sexualization of childhood -- which, at base, is molestation of another kind.

"And compounding tragedy upon tragedy: To combat this sexualization of childhood by the secular world, the Catholic Church -- theoretically a powerful moral counterforce -- has, by its own sins, destroyed its own moral authority to do battle, silenced its own voice to speak out, rendered lame its own sword arm."

Good News: "With a laying on of hands, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on Sunday welcomed into its fold seven openly gay pastors who had until recently been barred from the church’s ministry."

The story is here.  "The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, known as the E.L.C.A., with 4.6 million members, is now the largest Protestant church in the United States to permit noncelibate gay ministers to serve in the ranks of its clergy — an issue that has caused wrenching divisions for it as well as for many other denominations."

The Future of the Catholic Church

Ted Jelen, one of the leading religion and politics scholars, has an interesting essay at patheos.com on the future of Catholicism. He expects a continuing decline in respect for the authority of the leaders of the Church. He observes that younger Catholics are even less likely than older Catholics to respect the authority of the clerics. He thinks this will be increased by the growing power of Church leaders in the Southern Hemisphere, a power that will reinforce the conservative theology that has contributed to the shrinking of the Church in Europe and the United States.

At the same time, he thinks that lack of respect for the hierarchy may play a useful role in the Church with respect to the sex scandal: "Ironically, the emphasis of Vatican II on the Church as the 'people of God,' as opposed to the hierarchy, may well mitigate the negative fallout of the sex abuse scandals. To the extent that lay Catholics regard the clergy and their superiors as functionaries, rather than as the embodiment of Christ's Kingdom on Earth, ordinary Catholics may consider the issue a problem to be resolved, rather than a blow to the Church's very identity."

He makes one other prediction that I have doubts about. He suggests that the growing character of Islam in Europe may help to revive the Catholic Church, citing religious competition as a spur to religious growth. I can see how concerns about and prejudice against Muslims in Europe could lead to a strengthening of the faith of many believing Catholics, but I think the stronger effect will be a European rise in religious hostility -- a hostility that will spill over to the Catholic Church as well.

Defense Spending and the Deficit

A bipartisan commission appointed by Barney Frank is recommending ways to cut the defense budget by a trillion dollars over the next decade. See here. According to Ronald Osborn in the July 16 Commonweal, the U.S. will spend nearly as much this year on its military as the rest of the world combined. And as Osborn points out, much of the spending for our recent wars has been financed with deficit financing from China and Japan. Under Bush alone, the deficit was $4 trillion higher when he left office.

If conservatives really cared about the deficit, the military budget would be an obvious place to look. It is difficult to credit any claim that our recent wars have made us safer. One of the political problems with cutting the military budget, however, is that it serves as a massive, but inefficient jobs program. For that purpose, we could find more efficient and useful ways to spend our money, ways that would make our economy more competitive and our country more humane.

Inequality and the Recession

A few days ago, I called attention to a book whose thesis is that at a particular level of wealth, the most important factor in a nation's well being is equality of income, see here. The lack of equality of income of in the United States is particularly problematic. Robert Reich argues in the July 19/26 double issue of The Nation argues that our income inequality caused the recession. He argues that when earnings accumulate at the top, wealth is invested where other big investors are likely to put their assets. This causes speculative bubbles. Meanwhile, when wealth is concentrated at the top, the rest do not have enough purchasing power to support the economy. This helped us get into the recession and makes it more difficult to get out.

Reich predicts that the pendulum will swing against the current inequality, but he is not sure whether it will swing "with reforms that widen the circle of prosperity or with demagoguery that turns America away from the rest of the world, shrinks the economy and sets American against one another."Reich outlines a series of progressive reforms. But those reforms would require the support of an enlightened business community to get through Congress.

Although Reich purports to believe that such enlightenment will show up at some point, it seems more likely that change will only come when things get ugly -- when an economic populism of "mad-as-hell" Americans turn against the establishment.  

Sex Abuse and Women Priests

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the Vatican was about to declare the ordination of women as priests to be a grave crime. In what Michele Dillon aptly describes as a “jarring juxtaposition,” the Vatican in the same message also declared pedophilia to be a grave crime. That the Vatican has a tin ear for public relations is not news. But it is not obvious as to what inner dialogue could lead the Church leaders to compromise a message about pedophilia with this reaffirmation of a doctrine as unjustified as it is insensitive.

Dillon does not defend this, but she has an explanation in the Washington Post: “The simultaneous categorization of sex abuse and attempted women's ordination as grave offenses, therefore, may not be so bizarre. It is the Vatican's assertion of authority against internal and, in particular, what it perceives as external threats. It is understandable that the church wants to uphold certain traditions and is concerned about the consequences of overturning what it considers core doctrine. But in doing so, the Vatican risks losing sight of the damage done to the victims of priest sexual abuse and the consequential further erosion of its pastoral and moral authority.”

The Scope of the Bishops' Teaching Authority

I noticed this article in NCR and had meant to post something on it.  I continue to think it odd that the Vatican would be upset that the sisters supported health care reform based on their own understanding of what the law would do vis-a-vis abortion rather than deferring to the USCCB's predictions about the likely impact of the legislation.  They did not, after all, question the Church's teaching on abortion.  They simply disagreed with the bishops over what this particular piece of legislation would mean.  And the competence required for interpreting a highly complex piece of legislation hardly seem to be the exclusive province of the bishops or their legal advisors.

Anyway, I wanted to post something about this, but never found the time.  Luckily, the editors at Commonweal beat me to the punch, writing a post that basically makes the same basic point I wanted to make, but more colorfully and in the context of their response to criticism by law prof Helen Alvare of an article in Commonweal by law prof Timothy Jost, the latter of which argued that the law would not provide federal funding of abortion. 

Alvaré thinks our disagreement with the bishops conference shows us to be ”both arrogant and naive,” but as Richard R. Gaillardetz has pointed out, neither the bishops nor their lay advisers have an exclusive claim to competence when it comes to the technical evaluation of public policy. Nor can the bishops conference, despite its consistent and often heroic efforts on behalf of the unborn, fairly claim ownership of prolife principles. Professor Jost does not have less credibility as a prolifer because he is not a Catholic, or because he sometimes disagrees with the bishops conference about other issues. It is unbecoming of Alvaré and the editors of Public Discourse, a nonsectarian outfit, to try to turn this dispute into an ecclesial turf war.  It is possible for Mennonites — or Mormons or Zoroastrians — to construe a piece of legislation correctly and for Catholic bishops to misconstrue it.

(Prof. Jost provides his own response to Alvare here.)  I would have thought this a relatively uncontroversial position among Catholic conservatives.  Indeed, it seems to me the same "prudential judgment" move that economically conservative Catholic commentators frequently make when explaining why they do not feel compelled to defer to the bishops' teachings on economic policy.  Here's Stephen Bainbridge, quoting Charles Rice, on why he was not obligated to support an increase in the minimum wage, even though the bishops supported it:

specific policy statements, such as those found in the Bishops' pastoral letter [Economic Justice for All], are properly viewed as prudential judgments about how Catholic social teaching applies to the question at hand. Faithful Catholics are free to question such judgments, because the "bishops, as bishops, have no greater insight into policy matters than anyone else."

Here's what the bishops say in Economic Justice for All:

As bishops, we do not claim to make these prudential judgments with the same kind of authority that marks our declarations of principle. But, we feel obliged to teach by example how Christians can undertake concrete analysis and make specific judgments on economic issues. The Church's teachings cannot be left at the level of appealing generalities.

My own thought is that the bishops are entitled to some deference on policy questions -- certainly not none, as Bainbridge (quoting Rice) suggested (wrongly in my view) in the context of economics, when he said that the bishops have no greater insight than anyone else on policy matters.  But I hardly think it is somehow inappropriate to carefully consider the alternative interpretations provided by legal experts like Jost and come to the conclusion that the bishops are ultimately mistaken.  Of course, there might be situations where the evidence is so clear that to take the contrary position is a sign of bad faith.  But that is hardly the case here.

Douthat's Tribalism

I don’t usually read Douthat’s column.  But today’s headline caught my eye.  I figured from the title that he was going to blame liberals for racial hostility on the Right.   That’s not quite what he did.  Nevertheless, I found his column to be perverse, but in a slightly different way than I had expected.  His discussion relies heavily on a study of admissions at elite colleges and universities, which found that poor whites are less likely to be admitted to these institutions than comparably qualified whites with higher incomes:

while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”

This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

Where to start.  First, let me say straight out that, as a resident of a rural area, I agree that there’s a real problem with how this country addresses (or, more accurately, neglects) problems of rural poverty.  And I agree that that neglect includes elite educational institutions, though I doubt my employer has that problem to the same degree as Douthat’s alma mater.  Of course, the problem goes well beyond college admissions.  But, like David Brooks, Douthat is expert at taking social science and twisting it to suit his preconceived partisan agenda.  So he chooses to focus on those godless liberals running America’s top universities.

We then arrive at his strange parenthetical about elite schools discriminating not only against the urban poor but against “white Christians in particular.”  What’s his evidence that white Christians are uniquely disfavored by elite colleges?  None that he points to in the piece, unless we are to take his claim about what the “alumni of highly selective universities already know” (i.e., Douthat himself) as an authoritative source.  Why does Douthat think that poor, rural white Christians are particularly disfavored, as opposed to rural, white working class people in general?  Which non-Christian white, rural working class people are being welcomed by admissions officers?  While most of the disfavored group (the white, rural poor) are in fact Christian, what’s the evidence that their religion is motivating their exclusion in any way?  Are wealthy Christians suffering the same fate?  It’s interesting that, of his examples of the activities colleges disfavor (4-H, FFA, and ROTC), none of them are, in fact, religious.

Douthat’s lack of evidence that the white Christian poor are uniquely disenfranchised raises the crucial question:  why stretch to Christianize this point?  Why not simply let the data speak for itself and talk about the struggles of the rural poor in America?  Because that would ruin Douthat’s partisan objectives.  If the struggles of the rural poor are a problem of poverty and the shortcomings of our meritocracy in dealing with issues of poverty, particular rural poverty, then the solution is plainly redistributive.  Or, put another way, if the problems of the rural poor are framed in economic terms, rather than religious/cultural ones, then Douthat’s column — and the data it highlights — would raise the question of what either party has been doing for the rural poor.   This would be a particularly interesting question to address in light of recent stories about rural counties tearing up paved roads because they can’t afford to maintain them at precisely the moment the Senate GOP is filibustering federal aid to state and local governments.

But that conversation would be far too messy for Douthat, so, despite the pesky lack of evidence, he has to turn the story from one of class bias into one of religious bias in order to fit it within the tidy red-state, blue-state framework.  Add the label “Christian” to the group being excluded, and, voila!  class struggle becomes culture war.  The enemy is not the elite, which resides in both parties (though we could have a nice discussion about which party’s policies better serve the rural poor).  The enemy is the liberal, urban, secular elite out to keep you from finding Jesus (as a Republican congressional candidate from Missouri put it the other day).  Pay no attention to the GOP agenda of tax cuts and deregulation, which will do nothing for the rural poor, white or black or brown.  This is just pure hackery.  I should have stuck to my normal policy of ignoring Douthat’s columns.

Human Well Being Between Societies

What is most correlated with human well being including the reduction of poor health (including obesity, hypertension, mental illness, and diabetes) and social disfunction (including violent crime, drug use, educational failure, teenage births and incarceration rates? It turns out that the answer among nations that have reached a certain level of wealth is that lower income inequality correlates with better outcomes. This holds among industrialized nations and among the fifty states. This holds not only for the poor, but surprisingly for the rich as well (perhaps because societies marked by inequality heighten stress).

These propositions are supported and developed in a new book called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. The book is reviewed by Daniel Finn in the current issue of Commonweal.

In Memoriam: Charles Benjamin Gittings, Jr.

“Charles Benjamin Gittings Jr., who for nearly nine years ran a website dedicated to stopping prisoner abuse in the war on terrorism, died Wednesday at his home in Fort Bragg, Calif., after a long battle with cancer. He would have been 58 next week.
  Though not a lawyer, Gittings had a life-long interest in military tactics and law that led him to become an invaluable resource to some of the nation's greatest experts in the field.
  His death prompted an outpouring of tributes from civil liberties attorneys across the nation who worked with him to try to close the prison at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” [….]

Full obituary notice here.

I knew Charles from his frequent comments at Opinio Juris. In one such comment thread from last year in which he was taken to task for lack of a formal legal background, I wrote in support as follows:

Charles,

How dare you have the chutzpah (or temerity, audacity…) to attempt to understand the law! Why you’re just a layperson, a non-lawyer no less, and you think you possess the ability “to parse through the complex international legal doctrines, deduce that those legal doctrines were violated by the Bush administration, then tackle the complex issue of the application of international law in the domestic sphere, and again deduce that those international legal norms create domestic legal obligations, and then, after all that, go though the legal minefield that is determining if said violations impart criminal liability through the chain of command all the way up to the upper echelons of the Bush administration”???!!!!

While I’ll admit to being sometimes put off by your rhetoric and tone, I still have much admiration for the tenacity of your dedicated and assiduous amateur pursuits in this area and I do think your head and heart are often in the right place, which is more than one might say for a few legal scholars or lawyers. Anyway, persevere. [….]

To which he replied:

“Well thanks for the props Patrick. The tone is just a symptom of my frustration. It’s been seven years now, and the facts simply could not be much more obvious than they are right now.

These people are murderous war criminals and demented neo-fascists who have literally spent eight years systematically subverting and corrupting the laws of the United States for criminal purposes. That isn’t rhetoric, it’s a fact.

I understood a long time ago is that the only way to solve a problem is to first understand it, I’ve got seven years of evidence that says my analysis has been right on the money from day one, and all of it was purely a matter of analyzing the facts.

What can I say?

I don’t have a lot of fancy academic credentials because school always slowed me down and I’m mostly self-educated, but I know what I’m doing and I know that I’m good at it because I’ve been at it for almost 50 years now.

The problem here is that so many folks get stuck in tape recorded conventional wisdom and institutional mindsets and don’t analyze the facts; and look where it’s gotten us — it’s enough to make me scream.”

Here’s the website Charles maintained: Project to Enforce the Geneva Conventions. 

Update: See too this post by Andy Worthington of the New Left Project.

The Legal Strategy of the Christian Legal Society

Mike Dorf has an interesting essay at Dorf on Law speculating on the legal strategy of the Christian Legal Society in its recent Supreme Court case. Why did the lawyers stipulate to the all-comers policy in the lower courts? Why did they run away from the stipulation in the Supreme Court? Why did they distinguish between status and beliefs instead of arguing for a more absolute form of freedom of association? On the latter Mike thinks that McConnell did not want to have the Court think the group was homophobic. I am sure he didn't, but I think the larger worry was that he wanted to avoid a principle that would give racially discriminatory groups unqualified rights to equal status with other groups. I do not know if this was a necessary strategy, but I do not think it hurt his client.

The Nazis and the Communists

In a recent fertile and provocative post on relativism, tolerance, and bigotry, Bob Hockett argues --- rightly I think --- that a commitment to tolerance does not logically require permitting the Nazis to march in Skokie. Most on the left were united on the view that the Communists should be permitted to speak, but divided on the question whether such permission should extend to the Nazis.

Is there a basis for distinction? In the case of the Nazis, one could argue that there is little marketplace value in their message. If their message were adopted, the government would be illegitimate --- applying rudimentary principles of equality. Less true of the Communists. Socialism is not illegitimate. On the other hand, repressing freedom of speech is illegitimate, and the Communists of the 1950’s were committed to such repression.

One basis for distinction is that the message of the Nazis, like that of the KKK, is immediately harmful to ethnic, religious, or racial minorities. The message of the Communists was not immediately harmful to any such group. If intentional infliction of emotional distress is a constitutional tort, it is easy to see how one might say that the Nazis marching in the home city of Jewish survivors inflicts similar harm.  

"Conference on exorcism will make your head spin"

Notre Dame theologian Richard McBrien writes:  "The priest who sent me a copy of this letter wrote across the top, in capital letters, 'CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS? IN 2010?'"  Read Fr. McBrien's NCR column, here.

Women Bishops

The Church of England is about to consider the issue of women Bishops with the apparent support of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the encouragement of one of England's leading women rabbis. See here.  Meanwhile in the U.S., of course, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church is a woman. I am guessing the Synod would not be considering this issue if the Archbishops of York and Canterbury did not think it would be successful.

Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church is poised to declare the attempted ordination of women as priests to be a serious crime. See here.

More on then-Cardinal Ratzinger's "dictatorship of relativism"

A reader of MOJ has kindly called this to our attention:

A “DICTATORSHIP OF RELATIVISM”?

Symposium in Response to Cardinal Ratzinger’s Last Homily

In memory of Clifford Geertz

Contributors:  Gianni Vattimo, Julia Kristeva, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, David Bloor, Christopher Norris, Daniel Boyarin, Jeffrey M. Perl, Kenneth J. Gergen, Richard Shusterman, Jeffrey Stout, Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Mary Baine Campbell, Lorraine Daston, Arnold I. Davidson, John Forrester, Simon Goldhill

Common Knowledge 13:2-3 (2007)

The introduction to the symposium is here.

On Bigotry, Relativism, and Tolerance

Our Michael has initiated an interesting discussion over at Mirror of Justice, by posting there a recent BBC interview with Les Green, Simon Blackburn, Archbishop Rowan Williams, and others about Pope Benedict's expressions of concern about a 'dictatorship of relativism' (HT Brian Leiter's weblog).  The discussion has loosened a memory in my poor head, some reflections on which might be of interest to the RLL community.  

When I was young, innocent, and hopeful, a conversation broke out among several friends and myself about the old 'Nazis marching in Skokie' case, which I had read about in connection with a history of the ACLU.  (The case was said to have deeply divided that organization.)  Some of my friends, with whom I was inclined to agree, thought if fitting for the city to prohibit the march.  Other friends, with whom I was inclined to disagree, argued that the prohibition was a violation of the Nazis' First Amendment rights.  (Isn't that rich?  No 'clean hands doctrine' here it would seem!)  This faction further argued, in effect, that it was incoherent for those of us who thought the ban warranted to favor it in the name of tolerance, since in so doing we were ourselves being, they asserted, intolerant. 

I recall feeling great irritation with this latter observation, and I said as much.  It just couldn't be licit, I thought.  For it seemed to me that, as an argument, it must surely have 'proved too much.'  After all, if one could not, on pain of self-contradiction, refuse to tolerate any instance of intolerance itself, then presumably one would have to tolerate everything.  And then that would open one to self-contradiction.  For in 'tolerating everything' one would be tolerating, among other things, intolerance -- toleration's contrary.   

So were both sides of our juvenile argument committing themselves to incoherence, I wondered, the anti-marchers by being intolerant of intolerance, hence acting contrary to their own professed anti-intolerance, and the pro-marchers by tolerating intolerance, hence affirming their own contrary?  Could one simply not speak coherently of tolerance at all in ethically oriented conversation?

As I cast about for means of dissolving this conundrum in the course of our lengthy discussion, I hit upon a tentative solution that I later recognized to have been a primitive grope in the direction of Kripke's response to the  Epimenides (the 'paradox of the liar'). The Epimenides, as many here will recall, is the paradox occasioned by a statement's apparent self-denial -- a statement of the form 'this statement is false.'  The putative paradox stems from the statement's being false if it is true, and true if it is false -- assuming, of course, that it must be one or the other and not both.  (That assumption turns out to be false.)  

Now intuitively, Kripke's response to paradoxes of this form, if I'm remembering it rightly, involves distinguishing between what he calls 'grounded' and 'ungrounded' statements.  A grounded statement, again if I recall this correctly, is about something other than a statement.  It's about dogs, or cats, or what ever, anything other than statements.  So long as you have one of those, then any statement about that statement, or about a statement about the statement about the (grounded) statement, or ... , will itself be grounded as well.  Otherwise, not.  If one then stipulates that only a grounded statement is possessed of a truth value, one defuses the Epimenides by observing that the self-denying proposition in question is ungrounded, hence possessed of no truth value at all, true or false, hence not paradoxical in the 'both true and false' sense.

(Kripke's 'ground' serves, in the language of topology, as a 'fixed point' for any hierarchy of statements about statements about statements about ...  And Kripke makes use of that fact in a clever deployment of Brouwer's fixed point theorem to derive interesting semantic conclusions about grounded and ungrounded hierarchies of statements -- again, assuming I recall this correctly.  But my own purpose is much simpler, so enough about that.) 

Now my own youthful proto-Kripkean response to the 'tolerance' conundrum worked in much the same way as Kripke's response to the Epimenides: 'Tolerance,' I speculated, always carried what I then called a sort of 'argument place' with it.  It always implicates what the grammarians call a 'direct object.'  One does not simply 'tolerate.'  One 'tolerates x,' or 'tolerates y,' etc.  And there surely are things -- x's -- that it is right to tolerate, things that it is wrong not to tolerate, things that it is not right to tolerate hence wrong to tolerate, and so on.  Further, assuming some x that it is right to tolerate and wrong not to tolerate, it surely will often be right not to tolerate intolerance of that x.  At any rate it will need not be incoherent to deny toleration to such instances of intolerance. 

Well, you see where this is going, I trust.  The first moves in my arguments with my pals over the Skokie case, I decided, were 'ungrounded,' in the sort of pseudo-Kripkean sense I'm appealing to here.  My pals and I were speaking of 'tolerance' in abstracto, without attending to the argument place -- the x, y, or what ever -- that the word 'tolerance' always opens.  Hence we experienced a strange sort of vertigo in the early stages of our back-and-forth.  The conversation was unteathered, unanchored, unmoored.  Once you attend to the argument place, by contrast, things grow quickly more tractable.  For you recognize that you must 'ground' the discussion before it will take you anywhere.  And once you have done that, you might actually make headway.  At the very least, you might figure out what you actually disagree about. 

Triumphantly bringing my tentative solution to bear on the Skokie case, I decided that what we were actually disagreeing about was a doctrinal or prudential question rather than a logical or even ethical question.  I reasoned as follows:  If it is wrong for the Nazis not to tolerate people of a certain ethnicity, then surely it can be perfectly in order as a logical and ethical matter not to tolerate this Nazi intolerance.  At any rate it will involve no incoherence, and any argument on behalf of the Nazis' right to march will accordingly have to proceed from something better than the accusation of incoherence.  For it was not 'tolerance itself' -- what ever that might mean -- that was rightful or wrongful on the part of the Nazis or their antagonists.  It was 'tolerance of [this ethnic group],' 'tolerance of [this attitude],' 'tolerance of [this behavior]' that is rightful or wrongful.  And what the Nazis refuse to tolerate it is wrongful not to tolerate, such that the refusal to tolerate the intolerance in question can be altogether rightful.  It might still be constitutionally problematic -- though I did not and do not think so -- but if so this would be a matter of the legal doctrine not logic.

Now, how does this bear on the conversation here?  I think in this way: Much of the professedly moral opining that many in Pope Benedict's Europe deplore, I suspect, expresses intolerance of things about which most of us would agree it is wrongful to be intolerant.  There seems to be much intolerance afoot in some quarters, for example, of girls and women who wish to participate on equal terms with boys and men in educational and vocational settings.  My guess is that most of us in 'the West,' be we generally 'leftward'- or 'rightward'-leaning where political questions are concerned, agree that instances of this form of intolerance are not to be tolerated, either as an ethical or as a legal matter.  And there is no incoherence, nor need there be any bigotry or relativism, in any such judgment. 

All of us, 'left' or 'right' or 'in between,' who find sexism of the specified type intolerable are simply taking a universally applicable human right seriously -- 'absolutely' seriously.  We are not thinking as 'bigots' or 'relativists.'  And we might even be right, moreover, in some cases, to describe certain instances of the particular form of intolerance itself as bigoted or relativist -- if prompted or defended, say, by reference to a putatively relevant 'fundamental difference' between women and men, or to a putative 'religious' or 'cultural' right to subordinate women.  

Other instances of the moral opining to which I refer, by contrast, express intolerance of things about the morality of which reasonable people still disagree -- be they in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, or anyplace else.  There are some, for example, who appear to take sexual orientation to be more a matter of behavior or 'lifestyle choice' than of genetically determined or deeply-psychologically-rooted identity.  There are others who appear to see things the other way round. 

To those who see things the other way round, it will of course sometimes be tempting, in careless moments, to view proponents of the contrary position as 'bigots.'  For it will seem to them, prior to reflection, that what they take for granted as an ineluctable characteristic on all fours with ethnicity is not being tolerated.  To those who see sexual orientation as merely a 'lifestyle choice,' by contrast, it will sometimes be tempting, again in careless moments, to view defenders of 'gay rights' or 'gay marriage' as 'relativists.'  For it will sometimes seem to them, again prior to reflection, that their opponents think 'anything goes' where behavior and 'lifestyle choice' are concerned.  But in fact bigotry and relativism are apt to be neither here nor there in these cases.  For in fact most on both sides will be absolutists about moral and ethical matters, and in agreement that it is ethically wrongful to view persons as subordinate on the basis of ineluctable attributes.

In cases of this latter sort, then -- cases in which reasonable people continue to disagree about moral (and perhaps related metaphysical) questions, rather than cases in which reasonable people are disagreeing with unreasonable people -- I think we are probably well advised to take special care not to think of tolerance in abstracto, and hence not to play fast and loose with charges of 'bigotry' or 'relativism.'  For what these cases are ultimately about is whether some specific act or attribute is tolerable or intolerable.  And it is only by keeping one's eye on the real ball -- that is, by fixing attention on the act or attribute in question -- that we keep the door open to real progress.  I fear that labeling, as 'bigots' or 'relativists,' those who view the ball differently than we do is, all too often, an indicator that our eyes have strayed from the ball, and that the discussion has accordingly become ungrounded. 

I hasten to add that I do not in saying these things mean to imply that I think Pope Benedict's expression of concern about a 'dictatorship of relativism' to be ungrounded in this sense.  For, truly, I do not know what he had in mind.  Nor do I mean to imply that I think any particular charge of 'bigotry' now before my memory to be ungrounded.  I've little doubt that it's perfectly correct to say of many unreasonable people that they hold bigoted views, and of many unreasonable people that they hold 'relativistic' and hence ultimately incoherent views.  But I do think by far the greater part of humanity is reasonable, and that none of these reasonable people are bigoted or relativist.  They simply continue to disagree, pending further argument on the actual merits, on a number of very specific moral and ethical questions.  And I can't help but hope -- yep, I'm still hopeful! -- that in keeping our eyes on those 'balls' we might still move them forward.

Fox/Beck/Limbaugh and Black Panther Voter Intimidation Case

In an episode that raises interesting questions both about voting laws and the polarization of todays media,right wing commentators are up in arms about a presumed voter intimidation case from 2008 in which "armed Black Panthers" (BPs) with racist violence goals brandished "weapons" at a Philadelphia polling place; the Obama Department of Justice dropped charges against them in-- as the commentators see it--just another example of the "white-hating" radicalism of the Obama administration. That suspicion is supported by the resignation in protest from the Justice Department of a South Carolina Republican appointed by President Bush in 2005. 

The real story, of course, is much more complicated. The two BPs were not "armed" in the implied sense (one had a billy club), apparently did not directly threaten voters, were reported to police and charged by Justice Department officials, and one remains under court order. The reason more serious charges were dropped by the Justice Department apparently apparently has to do with the high thresholds of evidence in the law. 

A New York Times story on the incident and conservative reaction to it appeared on July 6. The author, Charlie Savage, writes that

"... the civil rights division [had] invoked a rarely used section of the Voting Rights Act to file a civil lawsuit alleging voter intimidation by both men, the [BP] party chairman and the party.
In April 2009, the division seemed to win the case by default because the New Black Panthers failed to show up in court. But the following month, a longtime Justice official, Loretta King — who was then the acting head of the division — decided to reduce the scope of the case.
The department dropped the charges against the party, its chairman and the man who was not carrying a club. It pressed forward with the lawsuit against the man with the club, obtaining an injunction that forbids him from carrying a weapon near an open polling place in Philadelphia through 2012.  

"The case became a cause célèbre in the conservative media world, and the Civil Rights Commission opened an investigation. The eight-member panel, which has the power to issue subpoenas and issue reports, is controlled by a six-member conservative bloc  appointed during the Bush administration.
In testimony before the panel in May, Tom Perez, who became the assistant attorney general for the civil rights division in October 2009, said that “reasonable minds can differ” about the case, but that the acting supervisors had concluded that the case had been over-charged.
Mr. Perez said there was insufficient evidence that the [BP party itself] was responsible for the incident. He also noted that the voter intimidation provision is rarely used, and pointed to similar incidents during the Bush years in which minorities were the alleged victims but the division did not file such a lawsuit."

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/charlie_savage/index.html?inline=nyt-per). 

Abigail Thernstrom, conservative scholar and vice-chair of the Civil Rights Commission also responded to the media outcry, with an article in the National Review on July 6. She argued that the reaction was overblown and undermined conservative credibility. Thernstrom writes,

"Forget about the New Black Panther Party case; it is very small potatoes. Perhaps the Panthers should have been prosecuted under section 11 (b) of the Voting Rights Act for their actions of November 2008, but the legal standards that must be met to prove voter intimidation — the charge — are very high. 

In the 45 years since the act was passed, there have been a total of three successful prosecutions. The incident involved only two Panthers at a single majority-black precinct in Philadelphia. So far — after months of hearings, testimony and investigation — no one has produced actual evidence that any voters were too scared to cast their ballots. Too much overheated rhetoric filled with insinuations and unsubstantiated charges has been devoted to this case.

A number of conservatives have charged that the Philadelphia Black Panther decision demonstrates that attorneys in the Civil Rights Division have racial double standards. How many attorneys in what positions? A pervasive culture that affected the handling of this case? No direct quotations or other evidence substantiate the charge.

Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, makes a perfectly plausible argument: Different lawyers read this barely litigated statutory provision differently. It happens all the time, especially when administrations change in the middle of litigation. Democrats and Republicans seldom agree on how best to enforce civil-rights statutes; this is not the first instance of a war between Left and Right within the Civil Rights Division.

The two Panthers have been described as “armed” — which suggests guns. One of them was carrying a billy club, and it is alleged that his repeated slapping of the club against his palm constituted brandishing it in a menacing way. They have also been described as wearing “jackboots,” but the boots were no different from a pair my husband owns. 

A disaffected former Justice Department attorney has written: “We had indications that polling-place thugs were deployed elsewhere.” “Indications”? Again, evidence has yet to be offered. 

Get a grip, folks. The New Black Panther Party is a lunatic fringe group that is clearly into racial theater of minor importance. It may dream of a large-scale effort to suppress voting — like the Socialist Workers Party dreams of a national campaign to demonstrate its position as the vanguard of the proletariat. But the Panthers have not realized their dream even on a small scale. This case is a one-off."

http://article.nationalreview.com/437619/the-new-black-panther-casebr-a-conservative-dissent/abigail-thernstrom

Christianity Going South

Sightings

Christianity Going South

-- Martin E. Marty

Sightings authors often comment on religion in the United States rather than "the rest of the world," but through the years have shown regularly how artificial or at least permeable such geographical distinctions are when it comes to religion.  Philip Jenkins, Mark Noll, Lamin Sanneh, and others reveal the same, with important books on what Jenkins calls “The Next Christendom” and Noll describes as “The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith.”  They see the Christian population “going South.”  In American slang, “going south” means going down to an inferior position.  But in demographic terms, the capital “S” signals going up, as the masses of Christians are doing, while Christian power slides from Europe and North America to Africa, Latin America, and other points South.

It is impossible to quarantine the diseases of the old North’s Christendom so that they do not also spread South.  So the worst of the “prosperity Gospel,” with its guarantees of material prosperity to converts, has taken over and predominates in many movements, such as in Kenya.  The homophobia that leads nations like Uganda and Kenya to debate whether to condemn homosexuals to death is richly related not only to old tribal taboos, but to new-style Pentecostal churches there.  And the conflicts over gay issues in the American Episcopal church are heated up by interventions on the part of Ugandan and Kenyan Anglicans.  The Lutheran World Federation, meeting this month, deals with Tanzanian Lutherans (who number one-third as many Lutherans after a few decades as there are Lutherans in the United States after three centuries of presence), as they say they will not accept funds or help (or prayers?) from Lutheran bodies that have different views of homosexuality than they do.

Exuberant therefore as many northern world historians may be over aspects of Christian growth in Africa – and I’ve also paid attention to these in my 2007 The Christian World – they and their compatriots often gasp when close-ups of practices in Africa get global publicity.  This week the notices come from Nairobi, in balanced reporting by writers in The Economist who, quite naturally, notice the economic side of Pentecostal growth there.  Borrowing “Prosperity Gospel” techniques from American evangelists and then re-exporting them in exaggerated form, African movements manifest bull market versions of competitive “market religion.”  These have to be upbeat and aspirational.  They help in some reform of business practices there, but “there is also plenty of hucksterism.”

The Economist tells of Bishop Margaret Wanjiru’s “Jesus is Alive Ministries,” where Ms. Wanjiru, a governmental official, draws 100,000 worshippers to meetings, but can see that number rise to 500,000 when a visiting evangelist also comes along.  The editors comment that judgment from European and American critics often overlooks the fact that gross versions of “the Protestant Ethic” were imported from the northern churches.  They also assess that these Pentecostalisms do better at inspiring personal wealth-seeking than at becoming clear political movements.  We’ll wait and see.

Oh, and did we mention that The Economist reminds readers that many of these Pentecostal leaders promote “clear anti-Muslim sentiment” which “scares politicians who want to win the sizable Muslim vote.”  Romanticizing New Christendom movements can be as dangerous as is the sneering done by those who look on and do not discern the good effects of much of these churchly endeavors in the lives of ordinary members.

References:

Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford, 1999).

Jenkins also treats the subject in “The Next Christianity,” in The Atlantic Monthly, October 2002: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2002/10/jenkins.htm.

Martin E. Marty, The Christian World: A Global History (Modern Library, 2007).

Mark Noll, The New Shape of World Christianity (IVP Academic, 2010).

Lamin Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (Oxford, 2008).

“Slain by the Spirit: The rise of Christian fundamentalism in the Horn of Africa,” in The Economist, July 2010: http://www.economist.com/node/16488830?story_id=16488830.

For an earlier treatment of the prosperity gospel in Africa, see Isaac Phiri and Joe Maxwell, “Gospel Riches,” in The Christian Century online, July 2007: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/july/12.22.html.

[Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.]

Rise of the Religious Left

By Charles M. Blow

Op-Ed, NYT, July 2, 2010

Which political party’s members are most likely to believe that Jesus will definitely return to earth before midcentury? The Republicans, right? Wrong. The Democrats.

This was revealed by a report issued last week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

On the surface it may seem surprising, but, in fact, it’s quite logical. Blacks and Hispanics, two highly religious groups, are a growing part of the Democratic Party. A June 2009 Gallup report found that blacks and Hispanics constituted 30 percent of the party. Recent polling by Pew puts the number at 37 percent.

According to a Gallup report issued last Friday, church attendance among blacks is exactly the same as among conservatives and among Republicans. Hispanics closely follow. Furthermore, a February Gallup report found that blacks and Hispanics, respectively, were the most likely to say that religion was an important part of their daily lives. In fact, on the Jesus question, nonwhite Democrats were roughly twice as likely as white Democrats to believe that He would return to earth by 2050.

Add to this the fact that, according to the 2009 Gallup report, 20 percent of the Democratic Party is composed of highly religious whites who attend church once a week or more, and you quickly stop second-guessing the Second Coming numbers.

Welcome to the Religious Left, which will continue to grow as the percentage of minorities in the country and in the party grows.

People often ask whether the Republican Party will have to move to the left to remain viable. However, the question rarely asked is whether the growing religiosity on the left will push the Democrats toward the right.

At the moment, that answer is both yes and no. On the one hand, unlike John Kerry before him, Barack Obama made a strong play for the religious vote on his march to the White House. It worked so well that it’s likely to continue, if not intensify, among Democratic candidates. On the other hand, the religious left is not the religious right. The left isn’t as organized or assertive. For the most part, it seems to have made its peace with the mishmash of morality under the Democratic umbrella, rallying instead around some core Democratic tenets: protection of, and equality for, the disenfranchised and providing greater opportunity and assistance for the poor.

The unanswerable questions are whether these highly religious, socially conservative Democrats will remain loyal to a liberal agenda as they become the majority of the party and their financial and social standing improves. Or whether Republicans will finally make headway in recruiting them. The future only knows.

Then again, the world as we know it may not have much of a future if, as these Democrats believe, a deity will soon descend from the sky.

Liberal Jurisprudence

Noah Feldman argues in last week’s New York Times Magazine that liberal jurisprudence has reached a crisis point and that its distinctive mission should be to promote an apparently limited form of economic justice by opposing strong property rights claims and by reigning in corporate power. Both worthy goals, but I think Feldman is generally quite wrong in claiming that progressive constitutional thought is reaching a crisis point. He supports this claim by pointing to the thought of the current progressive-leaning justices and ignoring the writings of progressive academics. But the revealed scope of the vision of the moderate to liberal justices is necessarily limited by the cases the Court takes to hear, and the liberals naturally try to keep cases from the Court that would enable conservatives to entrench bad law. What Feldman does not focus upon is that the docket would look entirely different if the liberals commanded a majority of the Court. Liberals would open the docket to cases in which government has discriminated on the basis of mental health, age, and wealth among others. It not only would invalidate the distribution of educational funds according to the wealth of the student’s neighbors, but would open up an examination of unequal distribution of funds for police and fire protection, health care, and other social services. A liberal court would offer a fair hearing to those accused of crimes and those in prisons who are maltreated. A liberal court would reexamine a long line of cases in which state collaboration or delegation to the private sphere has escaped constitutional examination. And, of course, a liberal court would not narrowly construe congressional power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment’s commitment to constitutional liberty and equality.

To argue that the liberal project should be confined to economic justice is almost bizarre. Feldman seems to argue elsewhere that it is permissible for state and localities to make theological judgments in allowing religious displays on government property so long as they spend no money in doing so. As to economic justice, of course, progressives should be so committed. Progressives should support business regulation, but there is little evidence that the current Court will do much on constitutional grounds to resist business regulation. Yes, the Tea Party will make challenges, but they need five votes, and I do not think they are there – not even on this Court.

Progressives should oppose corporate free speech rights (including advertising rights) for the reasons he gives (though note that ACLU progressives (I fear Kagan is in this camp), unlike Public Citizen progressives disagree about this). Feldman is right to worry that corporations play a dominant role in democratic politics. It is regrettable that efforts to rein in corporations are now constitutionally cabined, but there are limits in any event to what a legislature will do to make it easy to challenge incumbents. A liberal court could go a long way to rehabilitate our democracy by assuring free access to the airwaves for political candidates. But, so doing would require a theory of the broadcast media and a theory of democracy that is beyond the will of the political branches and well outside the radar of our conservative court. If we ever achieve a liberal majority on the Court, in my view, constitutional principle demands that the finding of ways to rehabilitate our democracy should be at the forefront of the Court’s agenda.

The Many Meanings of the Cross

Over at the Immanent Frame, Winnifred Sullivan has a nice essay discussing the many meanings of the cross in memorial settings. Deconstruction has its uses, but looking at the cross through the eyes of a reasonable non-Christian – which should be the test – a cross, at best, uses religious means to communicate a message that honors the war dead. This does not mean that the remedy should have been to take down that cross in the California desert – that was the issue in the Salazar case. It does mean that it is idle to suppose that the cross is free of religious meaning. As counsel for the plaintiff famously said at oral argument, crosses do not appear in Jewish cemetaries. 

"A Dictatorship of Relativism"?

Leslie Green, Professor of Philosophy of Law, Balliol College, Oxford University, takes on Benedict XVI, here.

[HT:  Leiter Reports:  A Philosophy Blog.]

The Limits of Episcopal Authority

COMMONWEAL

June 30, 2010

Web Exclusive

The Limits of Authority

When bishops speak about health-care policy, Catholics should listen, but don't have to agree

Richard R. Gaillardetz

The aftershocks of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ opposition to certain elements of recent health-care legislation are still being felt in the church months later. Religious communities that supported the legislation are being subjected to harsh and unwarranted punitive measures and the Catholic Health Association, whose support of the legislation was crucial to its passage, is being maligned by right-wing groups like the Catholic News Agency.

Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, current president of the USCCB, contends that the dispute is fundamentally a matter of ecclesiological principle. In a recent interview with John Allen, the cardinal said that the disagreement with the Catholic Health Association over health-care legislation was “about the nature of the church itself” and was therefore a disagreement “that has to concern the bishops.” This was a disagreement about the nature, limits, and proper exercise of episcopal authority. But there is a second, closely related matter at stake—namely, the character of Christian participation in public life. It may be helpful to begin there.

[Read the rest, here.]