Wednesday, November 18, 2009

My Response to Scalia: Consciousness, A Distinct Level of Intelligibility from Concept

Copyright (c) 1996 The University of Notre Dame
The American Journal of Jurisprudence

ARTICLE: JUSTICE SCALIA AND YOGI BERRA: A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION

1996

41 Am. J. Juris. 165

Author

Robert A. Connor

Excerpt

By a straightforward presentation of his Constitutional philosophy devoid of legalese and teased with wit and metaphor before a philosophically and theologically sophisticated audience, 1 Justice Scalia has made the working of adjudication at its highest levels available to scrutiny and critique. We thank him for this. My remarks here are offered with the greatest respect for his thought and with the hope of engaging it in dialogue concerning the epistemology grounding representative government and adjudication within it.

When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was entreated by Judge Learned Hand: "Do justice, sir, do justice," he responded: "That is not my job. It is my job to apply the law."
2 Holmes was also known to comment: "I always say . . . that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job." 3 The recent remarks of Justice Antonin Scalia seem to fall under the same rubric: not do justice but apply the law, and if that law is abortion, "the state should permit abortion, in a democracy." 4 The picture that emerged from Scalia's speech and even more clearly and radically from the question and answer period at the end was that adjudication was less a process of administering justice than a technical and rigid application of a law which is the product of majority vote. In the case of abortion, however, Scalia, as in his reference to the Nuremberg laws, "would have resigned." 5

The different facets of the picture were ...

* * * *

JUSTICE SCALIA AND YOGI BERRA:

A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION


Robert A. Connor


September 17, 1996


By a straightforward presentation of his Constitutional philosophy devoid of legalese and teased with wit and metaphor before a philosophically and theologically sophisticated audience,1 Justice Scalia has made the workings of adjudication at its highest levels available to scrutiny and critique. We thank him for this. My remarks here are offered with the greatest respect for his thought and with the hope of engaging it in dialogue concerning the epistemology grounding representative government and adjudication within it.

When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was entreated by Judge Learned Hand: "Do justice, sir, do justice," he responded: "That is not my job. It is my job to apply the law."2 Holmes was also known to comment: "I always say... that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job"3 The recent remarks of Justice Antonin Scalia seem to fall under the same rubric: not justice but apply the law, and if that law is abortion, "the state should permit abortion, in a democracy."4 The picture that emerged from Scalia's speech and even more clearly and radically from the question and answer period at the end was that adjudication was less a process of administering justice than a technical and rigid application of a law which is the product of majority vote. In the case of abortion, however, Scalia, as in his reference to the Nuremberg laws, "would have resigned."5

The different facets of the picture were the following:

a) Limitations for a Justice of the Court: It is a mistake to try to "persuade" a Justice of the Court on any point of law since he does not make law. His power is limited to the application of the will of the people brokered by the technical, literal reading of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Scalia: "It is the Constitution that governs my action... But do it by not persuading me. I'm a worldly judge. I just do what the Constitution tells me to do."6 Therefore, do not talk to him of the philosophy of Constitution, truths grounding the Constitution, etc. Invasion into arenas transcending the Constitution would be flagrant judicial activism and unwarranted

migration of power into forbidden territory and therefore, tyranny by what has become a judiciary elite.

b) Extrinsicism of Religion and Morality: Government is as religiously and morally neutral as a "tooth paste"7 or a "crowbar." It may act out "what is ultimately a motivation of morality, but it is a motivation of morality at the level of the individual citizen which then expresses itself in the majority vote that controls what the government does. But the government... in and of itself is totally neutral on those points. It is the people who must bring out the morality dimension that is reflected through the government. And I think that it is inconsistent with democratic theory that the government has an obligation to do that in and of itself."8

This extrinsicism of morality to government "in and of itself" is repeated again: "But that process (Christian inspiration of law) is achieved not within the context of government but outside the context of government, with free men and women persuading one another and then adopting a governmental system that embodies those Christian precepts."9

c) Majority Rule: Part and parcel of this neutrality is the quantitative rule of the majority. The will of the majority is the source of authority, not any presumed truths concerning the person, rights, morality and even less, faith. The government is blind to faith, morality and inherent rights of the person. The person has no intrinsic rights that are presumed. The same were surrendered on entry into the social civil contract. Such presumed rights would contravene the authority and rule of the majority. Whatever they be, they are given by the majority, e.g., the Bill of Rights. Scalia: "The whole theory of democracy, my dear fellow, is that the majority rules, that is the whole theory of it. You protect minorities only because the majority determines that there are certain minorities or certain minority positions that deserve protection. Thus in the United States Constitution we have removed from the majoritarian system of democracy the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, and a few other freedoms that are named in the Bill of Rights. The whole purpose of that is that the people themselves, that is to say the majority, agree to the rights of the minority on those subjects -- but not on other subjects. If you want minority rights on other subjects, you must persuade the majority that you desire those minority rights. Or else you take up arms and conquer the majority. I mean you may always do that, of course."10

Scalia concludes his answer with this telling remark: "The minority loses, except to the extent that the majority, in its document of government, has agreed to accord the minority rights. Otherwise you do not want a democracy, you want a king to decide what is right."11

d) Democracy as Dogma: Democracy, then, is a political and legal structure incarnating the will of the majority to which one makes an act of self commitment akin to religious faith. Scalia: "Once you adopt democratic theory, it seems to me you accept that proposition. If the people, for example, want abortion, the state should permit abortion, in a democracy.12 If the people do not want it, the state should be able to prohibit it as well. It seems to me the crux of the matter for the Christian in a democracy is to use private institutions and his own voice to convert the democratic society, which will then have its effect upon the government. But I do not know how you can argue on the basis of democratic theory that the government has a moral obligation to do something that is opposed by the people. That works fine in a monarchy, I suppose, but I do not know how you can reconcile it with democratic theory."13

Background: "You Can't Beat Somebody With Nobody"

In a 1989 article "Originalism, the Lesser Evil,"14 Scalia ranges over the topic of constitutional adjudication in search of criterion, be it "originalism" which means attending to the original meaning of the constitutional text (not without serious problems), or be it "non-originalism" which means consulting a conceptual agreement or consensus15 in the light of which the Constitution may be interpreted. Confronting the latter, he pins on it an aphorism of Yogi Berra (or perhaps a Mayor Daly): "You can't beat somebody with nobody,"16 since he finds no consensus on the meaning of the human person or on moral principle with which to interpret the Constitution now. Scalia remarks: "The central practical defect of non originalism is fundamental and irreparable: the impossibility of achieving any consensus on what, precisely, is to replace original meaning, once that is abandoned."17 The result is that Scalia, finding "nobody" as authoritative on the level of self evidence18 and therefore truth to direct and order freedom, takes the "somebody" of the constitutional text (and therefore the will of the people as ultimate authority). Anything not in the text does not exist. Religious freedom, freedom of speech, etc. become "invisible" until they reappear in the Bill of Rights as a concession of majority will to the minority. "The minority loses, except to the extent that the majority, in its document of government, has agreed to accord the minority rights."19

All this comes down to say that the constitutional structure is not built on truth. Although Scalia can lyricize philosophically "I love natural law"20 or the governmental system "embodies those Christian precepts," in the real world of adjudication he speaks as judge: "But once the Constitution was put in place, it is the Constitution that governs my actions." And this is correct for him to say as judge since his mandate extends to applying the law. But it is not the whole story.

Scalia remarks that he "loves natural law," and he sees the Constitution as "embodying moral values that were central to Christianity." However, he reserves moral values to the sphere of private conscience. There can be no access to those values except by way of private persuasion ("We are fools for Christ's sake"21). In his explicit presentation, the public system of government is a "neutral" mechanical construct. He chides those who contradict this view when he responds: "To say, `Ah, but it is contrary to the natural law' is simply to say that you set yourself above the democratic state and presume to decide what is good and bad in place of the majority of the people. I do not accept that as a proper function." It is not proper function because Scalia presumes by stealth the philosophy of Hobbes and Locke concerning the "state of nature" as the source of rights. Rights are so anemic and so little attached to the person as person that they are "detachable" on entrance into the society and then returned, "secured," by the benevolence of the state. Like them, Scalia presumes that there is no self evident truth because there is no de facto consensus concerning the human person and his rights. The person has no rights in democratic society. "(T)hat's why we have a Bill of Rights. We set them forth in the Bill of Rights. But that is the limit of them, and I do not make up other ones"22 (emphasis mine). The society is not built on natural law or self evidence but on the will of the people as emerging from the state of nature into a social contract.

In "Originalism...," Scalia warns that "the main danger in judicial interpretation of the Constitution ... is that the judges will mistake their own predilections for the law. Avoiding this error is the hardest part of being a conscientious judge...Nonoriginalism which under one or another formulation invokes `fundamental values' as the touchstone of constitutionality, plays precisely to this weakness."23

I would like to address this difference. Scalia sets up the difference with the metaphor of choosing between two librarians to hire. One speaks too loudly, the other too softly. He chooses originalism - the written law of Constitution24 ("values... fundamental to our society") as the librarian who speaks too softly in preference to going beyond the text of the Constitution by imposing one's personally preferred values, i.e., the librarian who speaks too loudly. I will argue that Scalia's choice of originalism (legal text) over nonoriginalism (the search for self evidence) begs the question as to the ultimate grounding of authority. From his standpoint as judge, it is proximately the will of the people. But, the will of the people cannot be the grounding absolute of authority since freedom always raises the question of truth, and the human will is not its own truth since the indeterminacy of human freedom gives witness to the "unfinished"25 state of man. To abandon the search for truth as the authority for freedom's use is to abandon the human person ultimately to being used by forces more powerful than himself. It would mean to abandon him to the tyranny of totalitarianism which in this case would have a democratic stripe. It would appear to be a "rule of law" but in reality it would be a dictatorship of the arbitrary will of individuals. The Pope remarks:

"(T)otalitarianism arises out of a denial of truth in the objective sense. If there is no transcendent truth, in obedience to which a person achieves his full identity, then there is no sure principle for guaranteeing just relations between people... Thus, the root of modern totalitarianism is to be found in the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person who, as the visible image of the invisible God, is therefore by his very nature the subject of rights which no one may violate... Not even the majority of a social body may violate these rights, by going against the minority, by isolating, oppressing, or exploiting it, or by attempting to annihilate it."26

Therefore, we are confronted with Scalia's assertion that "(t)he central practical defect of non originalism is fundamental and irreparable: the impossibility of achieving any consensus on what, precisely, is to replace original meaning, once that is abandoned," and the Pope's counter assertion that "(i)f there is no transcendent truth, in obedience to which a person achieves his full identity, then there is no sure principle for guaranteeing just relations between people." John Paul II concludes that

"if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism."27


Truth: The Absolute As Key to Freedom


To deepen the perspective, Walter Berns testifies that, at the founding of the country, the freedom of self determination vis a vis religion, speech, etc. rests, indeed, on truth as having an absolute dimension.28 He remarks: "These principles (of free government) require the establishment of religious freedom, the right of men to hold whatever opinions they choose respecting God or gods. That men must have this choice is not itself a matter of choice or indifference"29 (underline mine). He continues: "Freedom of religious opinion is absolute... the United States is founded on a `political creed,' the self-evident truths acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence. The truths that `we hold' to be `self-evident' constitute a creed on which the country was founded."30 Later, Berns insists that "they (the Founders) were fully convinced that the Constitution of the United States derived from a `self-evident' truth respecting man's nature and the government appropriate to it. In fact, toleration of different religious opinions rests, and can only rest, on this political truth. Men are endowed with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,.... If this were merely an opinion, it would be necessary to hold as legitimate the claim of a Charles I to suppress religious freedom and replace it with an established church. Or... if this `truth were but an opinion, it could not protect free inquiry into other opinions"31 (bold mine).

It is clear from words such as "self-evident," "palpable," "scientific," not "opinion," "discovered by the new political science" that the truth which grounds freedom of religion is an absolute, even if that absolute has been conceptualized as the "philosophoumenon" of Hobbes's state of nature. A transition took place in Berns from his 1985 "The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy," to his 1987 "Taking the Constitution Seriously," where he repudiates the absurdity of the "right to be let alone"32 which characterizes the "state of nature." He ends by "taking the Constitution seriously," which means the literal text in the positivistic sense of Scalia's "somebody" (the librarian who speaks too softly). To overcome the porosity of the liberal minded judges for whom there is no truth and therefore no end to the invention of absurd "rights," he opts, like Scalia, for the text of the Constitution which "derives its binding authority... only from the fact that it is an act of the people in their constituting capacity."33 But again, this leaves us in the throes of the conundrum in which we ask: what is the truth - the self evidence - which can guide the will of the people to goodness?


The Search For A "Deeper" Meaning of "Truth"


Original Self Evidence: Historically, at the founding of the country, there was a consensus in truth so strong that it was perceived as self evidence in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...." Berns remarks: "There was no dispute with respect to the principles on which the Constitution was built."34 "The agreement among them was massive. There was no dispute about freedom of conscience or the free exercise of religion; the adoption of the clause protecting free exercise was an altogether perfunctory matter, giving rise to no difference whatsoever. There was no dispute with respect to the principles on which the Constitution was built; stated in its most radical form, they all agreed that our institutions do not presuppose a providential Supreme Being."35 Again: "the United States is founded on a `political creed,' the self-evident truths acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence. The truths that `we hold' to be `self evident' constitute a creed on which the country was founded... This may explain why Jefferson could say that difference of opinion is advantageous in religion and harmless in physics and geometry, and not say it regarding the fundamental principles of government"36 (bold mine). And again: "They (the Founders) were fully convinced that the Constitution of the United States derived from a `self-evident' truth respecting man's nature and the government appropriate to it. In fact, toleration of different religious opinions rests, and can only rest, on this political truth... If this were merely an opinion... `it could not protect free inquiry into other opinions.'"37

What is of interest here is the identity between absolute and self-evident truth.38 The need for the absolute is clear enough in Berns that he concludes that if you treat religious and political concepts as equally relative, and there is no absolute, then "the Constitution rests on nothing at all - or rather, on no principle immune from the whims of transient majorities"39. The shame is that Berns, having correctly identified the need of truth in its absoluteness as the grounding of the Republic, fell in with the Enlightenment rubric that all knowledge must be conceptual, and then assigned as content to that absolute concept the philosophoumenon of Hobbes's state of nature.40 Then finally disabused of that fallacy and not realizing that the truth of the person and rights are to be found on a second tier of experience (as we shall see), he collapses into Scalia's textual originalism where he hopes the secretary who speaks too softly can ward off the subjectivism dug up from the liberal penumbra. He concludes that "The only appropriate agenda for conservatives41 is to defend the liberal Constitution - if necessary, to defend it from the liberals - because by that Constitution rights are secured. This knowledge - that as far as the national government is concerned, security for rights is found in the structure elaborated in that text - could be one of the happy lessons learned in this bicentennial season"42 (underline mine).

Universal Christian Faith: This absoluteness, appearing as consensus and self evidence, coincided historically with an almost total presence of Christian faith as praxis in the colonies. Benjamin Hart asserts that "America at the end of the 18th century was overwhelmingly Protestant, and of the dissident variety. Though precise figures on church membership are not available, we do have numbers on church bodies. In 1775 there were 668 Congregational churches; 588 Presbyterian; 494 Baptist; 310 Quaker; 159 German Reformed; 150 Lutheran; 65 Methodist; 31 Moravian; 27 Congregational- Separatist; 24 Dunker; and 16 Mennonite churches. The Anglican Church had 495 congregations, making it a decided minority in America at the time of the revolution. About 75 percent of all Americans belonged to churches of Puritan extraction. When dissenting Protestants and Anglicans are combined, we find a religious composition in America that was 98.4 percent Protestant, 1.4 percent Roman Catholic, and three-twentieths of one percent Jewish."43 Besides the numerical presence of believing Christians,44 Berns reports that "(t)o one degree or another, and in one or another of its christian varieties, over half the states had an established religion..."45. Concerning the impact of this on the societal ethos, Washington remarked in his farewell address: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports... And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion... (R)eason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."46 Jefferson himself (enemy of "monkish ignorance and superstition"47) questioned whether "the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?"48 Tocqueville, in summing up his observations on the country, remarked: "I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion - for who can search the human heart? - but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society."49

Christianity Reveals Person and Rights: The task now is to take the self evidence (absoluteness) of the founding principles and the universally held christian faith and to see if they can answer Scalia's conundrum as how "to discern a difference between those political values that (the justice) personally thinks most important and those political values that are `fundamental to our society.'"50 The question really comes down to what "those political values... fundamental to our society" are.

The Declaration of Independence declares that the human person and his right and dignity to self determine are the fundamental political value. Three fourths of that document consists in taking umbrage at the violation of these self evident rights and therefore, "(t)hat these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States..." This was declared to be self evident and of such a forceful and non debatable character that there was no reasoning beyond that bold assertion. It must be concluded that the self evidence was pre-conceptual.51

Now, if the principles on which the Republic is built are pre- conceptual and therefore absolute and self evident as to obviate any ideological debate,52 and Scalia finds that now there are no absolutes commanding universal consensus in whose light he can confidently adjudicate,53 would it not seem reasonable to investigate whether there may be a kind of truth that is pre-conceptual, i.e., experiential and of another order? Perhaps, what has traditionally been referred to as "natural law" may be a second tier of experience massively lived out at the moment of the American founding and which coincided with, or was caused by, the almost universal presence of christian faith. And that being so, in order to beat "somebody with somebody," we would have to have recourse to that experience and that faith again.

My proposal then is to explore what kind of truth is that self evidence and how could christian faith have played into its formation. That is, does the exercise of christian faith yield the consciousness of an absolute - a self consciousness distinct from conceptual truth - which is self evident?


Truth On A Second Tier of Experience


The Phenomenological "Pause:" The first order of business is to determine whether there is another level of experience and knowledge which is legitimate, i.e., objective and realist but not the object of the exterior senses. Wojtyla offers that besides the direct experience of external things, there is also the direct experience of one's own acting: "it seems most improbable that man with his conscious acting or action is not given as the object of experience."54 Suffice it to say that since Descartes, reality has been epistemologically restricted and reduced to exterior sensation.55 What is externally sensed is measured, abstracted and forms a propositional kind of knowing which could be called "cosmological" because it reduces or objectifies reality to the state of cosmos or "thing." Truth on this level consists in a conformity of propositions of logical subjects and predicates to sensed reality. However, the interior, non sensible yet universal experience and consciousness of the "I" has been eliminated as empirically real by being absorbed into the cartesian self as "consciousness" (res cogitans), - the unreal "I" of idealistic subjectivism - not to re-emerge as real until our own day in Karol Wojtyla who retrieves it ( the "I") as "agent of the moral act."56

Wojtyla's philosophic contribution consists in "pausing" at the irreducible experience of the subject freely determining not only the kind of action to be performed but the very self as cause of the action. The pause must take place because the experience of self determination is empirical as real and therefore demands the attention of cognition on this new second tier of experience.57 He remarks: "Lived experience essentially defies reduction."58 Having lost the real "I" in the reductive rationalism of the Enlightenment, until now we have not known how to pause at this irreducible reality.

Hence, Enlightenment man has been left with the welter of conflicting conceptual (reductive) ideologies as the only valid truth with no deeply experienced north that could give them meaning. Besides, these concepotualizations discredit each other by their partial and mutual contradiction,59 thus leaving the mind in a state of skepticism.60 Hence, Scalia's Yogi Berra: "You can't beat somebody with nobody" and Bork's perpetual motion machine testify to the inconclusiveness of working with only this kind of cognition. It is an epistemological dead-end which leaves the positivism of the Constitutional text as the only escape. But it escapes into totalitarianism, as we saw on page 11.61


The Recovery of the "I" and Christian Faith


The proposal here is to suggest that the self evidence of the "I" at the core of the first of our legal documents, the Declaration of Independence, can only be fully retrieved on this second epistemological level of experience where Christian faith is found as moral act - not abstract essence62 - producing both the anthropological experience of self gift and the consciousness of the "I" sufficient to generate a democracy. And the reason is that only Christian faith demands the response of the whole person, and therefore, the "I,"63 to the revealing Person of Christ.64 It initiates an epistemology of self experience rather than an epistemology of sensation and abstraction.

Christian faith offers the existential encounter of the revealing Person to the believing person in the prototypical exchange between Christ and Simon son of John. The "non-I" of Simon is transformed into the christian "I" of Peter. He goes through a name change because he went through an anthropological transformation by entering into the prayer of Christ which was equivalent to "becoming Christ."65 Ratzinger describes the nature of Christ as Person to be pure Trinitarian Relation to the Father - Truth in Person - Who, when incarnate as the man Jesus, translates as prayer. Therefore, "we see who Jesus is if we see him at prayer"66 (underline mine). Simon is called into this prayer (as a lived experience of his "I"), and by so doing becomes like Jesus' "I."

Since fundamental epistemology teaches that like is known by like, Simon's interior transformation of prayer gives him a likeness to Christ such that he experiences in himself what it is to be like Christ in Himself, and therefore, to have a direct, moral experience of being the "Cornerstone"67 who is Christ.68 This validates the name change from Simon to "Petros." Stone mimics stone, and hence, only stone "knows" stone. As the experience of being Simon is transformed into the experience of being Christ, the pre-conceptual consciousness of the "I" of Simon becomes the pre-conceptual consciousness of being Christ. The metaphysical "advance" boosting Simon into the self gift of prayer, produces the epistemological "advance" from Simon to Peter. There is now a full self-evident realization of the dignity of the person and rights which can become, within the proper historical conditions, the grounding truth of American democracy.

The men who had not entered into the prayer of Jesus (with the gift of their "I") and who were working within an epistemology beginning with sight, sound and abstraction, did not recognize him.69 On the other hand, for those who had entered and lived the moral act of faith which is prayer, that pre-conceptual experience turns conceptual upon reflection and Simon-now-Peter is able to formulate as words, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."70 Whereupon Christ changes his name to conform to this new metaphysical anthropology: You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church..."71 Stone is named from stone.

This unique form of consciousness of the self as total gift could only take place in the act of Christian faith because Christian faith is uniquely an encounter between persons and not primarily ideology. Christ is the only God that has become man. Christian faith alone is gift of self. Hence, the resonance of persons produces the unique anthropological experience of likeness between two "I's" and therefore confers unparalleled dignity while creating a universal consciousness of equality in all partakers. No matter how varied we all are in talents received, we can be equal in giving it all back. Only christian faith - as life, not concept - would give this sense of radical equality which finds its secular counterpart in representative government and the vote. Thus, I propose that the "I" who is discovered in this act of faith is the "I" of dignity and rights who is the grounding principle of the American founding. The self determination that brought about the gift of self to the revealing Christ, is the same kind of self determination that founded the secular structure of representative government in 1776 and 1789. That is to say that America was a christian people before it was a representative government authorized by vote.72


Phenomenology Interprets Self- Evidence


Wojtyla has given us a phenomenological tool making it possible to "pause" at this experience of the "I" in the moral act (in our case, the act of faith), and by so doing has made it possible to pause at the act of faith as the anthropological experience of person and rights. Hitherto, we have had neither the tool, the pause, nor the recovery of the "I." Hence, he makes it possible to distinguish between subjective "interests" which are subjectivist wishful thinking and "those political values that are `fundamental to our society'"73 which are the subject as truth.

The proposal, then, is to see Christian faith rather than the ideological philosophoumenon of the "state of nature" as the true historical source of the consciousness, the self- evidence, of the dignity of the human person and his rights. Instead of the "right to be let alone" which is really a residue of sin which leaves the person in darkness as to the truth of imaging God,74 Christian faith is the unique anthropological act which restores to self evidence the dignity of the human person. As such, christian faith as a relational act is fundamental for a secular democracy which pretends to build itself on that dignity. In short, there is no grounding self evidence for the state when there is no public provision and space for christian faith. That is to say, "reason shut in on itself does not remain reasonable or rational... Reason needs revelation in order to be able to be effective as reason. The connection between the state and its Christian foundations is imperative precisely if it is to remain the state and be pluralist."75 The state needs the act of living faith, i.e., the experience of truth as an absolute, for its own rationality and freedom. But it needs it as pre-conceptual self evidence, not as abstraction for in that case the Church would become theocracy (the incarnation of religious ideology) and pluralism would cease.


Rights: The Truth Content of "I"


Dignity and rights, understood as dimensions of the person ("I"), are not a subjectivist grab bag from which any self interest can be extracted, much less the rationalist lucubration of selfish isolation in the "state of nature." Scalia offered that it was "very difficult for a person to discern a difference between those political values that he personally thinks most important and those political values that are `fundamental to our society'." His supreme pique seems to be occasioned on the one hand by the "transformation of charity into legal entitlement" or human handicap system of affirmative action which "has produced both donors without love and recipients without gratitude"76 while on the other by the noxious notion of entitlement to abortion, pornography, homosexual marriage, etc. To stop this destructive avalanche, finding "nobody" as truth, he recurs

to constitutional text, positivistic argumentation and wilting sarcasm. But the problem continues to be truth, and its non- perception continues to be caused by its non conceptual character77 while being misrepresented by the bogus mis- conceptualization of the "state of nature." To be the man of the hour, Scalia would have to acknowledge the reality of self evident truth originating from christian faith, in spite of there being no consensus. To do so would be enormously pedagogical78 whether in the majority or in dissent. He would not be teaching religion ideologically, or certainly less, imposing religion institutionally, but acknowledging the religious-truth- now-secular-principle of the person as gift. This "giftedness" whereby one becomes another Christ79 is the truth of the person which grounds what we understand to be "rights." These are certain ways that the "I," discovered in the act of faith, gives itself to God and to the others in the family and civil context. That is, once the person is disclosed by the experience of being gift - both as solidarity (responsible for the others) and subsidiarity (responsible for oneself)80 -, then the "rights" are known as experienced and self evident.81 They are not simply "interests" that can be whimsically snatched from the subjectivities and whims of populace or Court Justices as from a "tinkerer's toolbox."82 They are "objective" dimensions of the person ("subject") who has the unique dignity of determining himself to be gift in the act of imaging the divine Persons who are pure Gift. They are inalienable and inseparable from the person as ways in which he/she lives that one absolute, yet singular, truth.83 They are not gifts "conceded" to the person by the largesse of the majority since, being inalienable from the the being of the person, they cannot be removed in any way, less by "entrance" into society.84 Rather, they are the conditions whereby the person becomes gift and needs service. Their limit is the objective truth of the person, and although that truth does not change, our awareness of it does, provoking us to be open to further developments. How else to explain the qualitative and quantitatively development in Magisterial teaching on rights as seen in Gaudium et Spes #27 (see footnote #79)!

The bulk of Scalia's talk at the Gregorian centered correctly on the confusion of rights with "interests" and the serious damage that is done to persons, government and christianity itself by the "transformation of charity into legal entitlement."85 Since person and truth have no public validity for him, the giftedness of the person to others has no public validity. Hence, Scalia, not perceiving the person and less his constitutive social dimension as the prius of criterion, presumes that Catholic social teaching "must incline us toward that system ("welfare socialism") whereby we would be obliged to put a `chicken-in-every-pot.'" He retorts, "the answer, I think, is no." Sensing correctly the materialism of welfare socialism, he rejects it, but he does so under the Enlightenment aegis of there being no personal rights at all save those conceded by the state. The intrinsically relational person becomes progressively individualized and hence materialized to his own detriment and the detriment of democratic society.


Conclusion


The present discussion concerning the judicial usurpation of politics by the activist side of the Court and the conservative rejoinder from the side of juridical positivism seems to exhaust the noetic options and leave us at an impasse: either go under as a democracy because there is no truth to order freedom, or start a fight to establish new structures. But this exhaustion and impasse take place only on that level of experience which gives rise to abstract thought where freedom and truth are inversely proportional. The more truth, the less freedom; the more freedom, the less truth.

The burden of this paper has been to suggest that there is second level of experience which is also empirical and therefore real where one experiences the "I" as act. Here, freedom and truth are directly proportional not as objectivized "this" and "that," but as dimensions of the same personal subject. The paradigm act of the "I" is christian faith - a moral act - where the "I" enters as gift of self into a relationship with the revealing Christ, producing an experience and consciousness of self as freedom and self as truth. That is, freedom is experienced as dignity of self and right to self-determination precisely when the "I" is given as gift, which is its truth. The historical conditions of the country's founding suggest that the consciousness of this christian experience was surely the dynamic establishing the American people as people and thus the core political principle from which the originating law of the Declaration of Independence and the definitive Constitution emanated. I am proposing that christian faith is the moral, anthropological - let us say secular - act which has becomes the political principle of the American political foundation.

Corresponding to the two levels of experience, the objectivizing sensation/abstraction, and the subjective gift of the "I," the noun "people" has two epistemological meanings which we could materialize as "thick" and "thin." Thin as the quantitative category of the majority which corresponds to the objectivizing sensation/abstraction; thick as rights of the subject on the level of self experience as gift. With this double epistemological experience, we can propose a resolution to the double meaning of "people" in constitutional interpretation as suggested by Arthur Allen Leff: "people rightly see themselves simultaneously as part of `the people' and as autonomous persons."86 As a result, the Constitution "commands that both of these conceptions of the final lodging place of evaluative power be simultaneously reflected in the operations of the American polity."87 Together with the abstractive reasoning which yields the notion of "the people" for majoritarian head counting on a quantitative level and political hegemony over the minority, christian faith produces the consciousness of the intrinsic worth of the individual person whose value as person transcends the quantitative totality of the entire body politic. Hence, constitutional interpretation demands the deployment of both epistemological levels of experience.

Judicial review, then, in order to interpret the Constitution in a truly objective way, needs to pay attention to objective head counting but also to the value of the subject which validates majoritarianism in the first place while grounding the inviolable character of the human person as possessor of human rights. Constitutional interpretation will have to breathe the epistemological atmosphere with the lungs of both first and second tiers of experience. The law must be applied as it reads, but that reading must be interpreted within the christian anthropology that inspired it. To do otherwise is to interpret it in only one dimension and to fail a people in desperate need to understand themselves precisely as people forming a communio personarum, a United States. They continue to need the foundation of the gift of self which is christian faith as anthropology. And it must be kept clear that christianity does not enter the public square as christian theocracy nor church establishment nor creed. It enters precisely as gift of self in secular work and service.

Hence, Scalia cannot say (as he does) that "if the people... want abortion, the state should permit abortion, in a democracy." Maybe in a democracy, but not in this democracy! To affirm that the Court has nothing to say about abortion, or assisted suicide, or homosexual marriage, etc. because the Constitution has not written a word about it, is not to say enough about the United States nor the Constitution.

Since Scalia is a practical man ("I'm a worldly judge"), when the stakes are high, the most practical thing to do is to be right. A man, committed to truth, in a strategic position and with the political prudence to fight only necessary battles, could galvanize an entire people who await leadership. In opting for truth without abandoning the mandate to apply the law (which is not legal positivism), Scalia may be surprised by the "signs of the times" and the transformations being wrought here in abscondito not dissimilar to 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe. His destiny, which I have been privileged to see emerge over four decades, may include his being the key protagonist in the understanding and praxis of the United States as the universal paradigm of state in a world fast becoming one world in the next millennium.

On June 6, 1952 in Xavier High School after a final exam in Greek, Justice Scalia witnessed Morton Hill, S.J. write the words "diokete ten agapen" (pursue Love) on the blackboard as final, personal testament to his home room Greek and Latin class. Since Christ's Love and His Truth are identical with His Person, perhaps the writing of those words has now found the person and the historical context for its implementation: "diokete ten aletheian:" pursue Truth.

_______________________________

Notes

1 At the Pontifical University Gregoriana in Rome on May 2, 1996.

2 Robert H. Bork, The Tempting of America, The Free Press, 1990, p. 6.

3 Holmes to Laski, March 4, 1920, Holmes-Laski Letters, vol. 1, p. 249.

4 Catholic News Service, June 14, 1996, p. 13.

5 CNS, op. cit., p. 16.

6 CNS, op. cit., p. 16.

7 CNS, ibid., p. 9.

8 CNS, ibid., p. 14.

9 CNS, ibid., p. 16.

10 CNS, ibid., p. 14.

11 CNS, ibid., p. 14.

12 Scalia has officially gone on record in Casey, 112 S/ Ct. 2791, 2873, saying that "The States may, if they wish, permit abortion-on-demand."

13 CNS, ibid., p. 13.

14 University of Cincinnati Law Review, 1989, Vol. 57, No. 3.

15 Scalia remarks: "(I)t is not very helpful to tell a judge to be a `nonoriginalist.' If the laws is to make any attempt at consistency and predictability, surely there must be a general agreement not only that judges reject one exegetical approach (originalism), but that they adopt another. And it is hard to discern any emerging consensus among the nonoriginalists as to what this might be. Are the `fundamental values' that replace original meaning to be derived from the philosophy of Plato, or of Locke, or of Mills, or Rawls, or perhaps from the latest Gallup poll?" ibid., p. 855.

16 ibid., p. 855.

17 ibid., p. 862.

18 Robert Bork affirmed the same skepticism as to finding any conceptual consensus as to the meaning of man and "what man should become." He likened the prospect to the perennial and frustrating attempt to develop a perpetual motion machine. In line with Scalia's "You can't beat somebody with nobody," Bork urges that "the difficulty with the idea of perpetual motion... is not the accumulation of disappointments in all those garages but there is never going to be such a machine... (T)he problem with overarching systems of morality is not simply that the law professors are not bright... The problem is that this enterprise is doomed to failure." The Tempting of America, The Free Press, 1990, p. 256.

19 CNS, op. cit., p. 14.

20 CNS, op. cit., p. 16.

21 Jeffrey Sheler, "In Search of Jesus," U.S. News and World Report, April 8, 1996, p. 46.

22 CNS, op. cit., p. 15.

23 op. cit., p. 6, footnote 14.

24 Scalia describes the Constitution as "in its nature the sort of `law' that is the business of the courts - an enactment that has a fixed meaning ascertainable through the usual devices familiar to those learned in the law;" in "Originalism: The Lesser Evil," op. cit., p. 855.

25 "(m)an is an unfinished being, as indicated precisely by this `fissure' in him open to the infinite. According to this view, other natures in the world of nature are in their own way `finished beings,' while man, open to the absolute, awaits his completion;" John Paul II and Andre Frossard, Be Not Afraid, St. Martin's Press, 1984, p. 95.

26 John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, #44.

27 ibid.

28 "They (the founding Fathers) were fully convinced that the Constitution of the United States derived from a `self- evident' truth respecting man's nature and the government appropriate to it. In fact, toleration of different religious opinions rests, and can only rest, on this political truth; The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy, Gateway Editions 1985,ibid., p. 146; "The change (permitting Communists to teach in the Universities) has been dramatic, but it is not a change that reflects a change in Communism.... It is a change that reflects, instead, the fact that the Constitution is now held to stand for the equality of all ideas;" ibid., p. 184, et seq.

29 The First Amendment..., ibid., p. 18; (emphasis mine)

30 ibid., p. 83

31 ibid., p. 146.

32 "There is, and can be, no general constitutional right to be let alone. Let alone to do what? To worship? Absolutely. To read? Yes. To waste time? Even that. But to rob a bank? To counterfeit money? To `utter' checks? To make noise? To refuse to be vaccinated? To shoot heroin? To manufacture it? To make child pornography film? In countless ways the law invades privacy, even...the privacy of the home. So it is not enough to speak abstractly of a right to be let alone..." He concludes that if rights are reducible to "interests," then we would revert to the "state of nature" where life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." However, Berns here has lost his taste for "truth" since his repudiation of granting "interests" the status of "rights" is its impossibility, "and it is impossible because not all interests can be satisfied." See Taking the Constitution Seriously, Madison Books, 1987, p. 226-228.

33 Taking the Constitution Seriously, op cit. pp. 236-237.

34 The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy, op. cit., p. 10.

35 W. Berns, The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy, op. cit., p. 10. Note that the point is not whether "our institutions do not presuppose a providential Supreme Being" but that they are in massive agreement on self-evident first principles. My purpose is to show that the universal act of christian faith yields a non-conceptual knowledge of self and rights by the experience of the self as gift. Conceptually, it presupposes a "providential Supreme Being" while experientially it gives a consciousness of "I" and rights. It is on this Christian exercise that the principles of democratic government rest.

36 ibid., p. 83.

37 ibid., p. 146.

38 That Berns think that the absolute be a political concept like the right to be left alone deriving from the state of nature is irrelevant to my thesis. What is most significant is that he saw that historically there was a consciousness of absolute truth such that it was considered self evident. That the content of that concept be "that our institutions do not presuppose a providential Supreme Being" is irrelevant because the character of the truth that I am proposing is not primarily conceptual with but experiential on a second tier of experience as explained below. However, the absoluteness of it as self evident to all is vital to be recognized as truth. To not establish this is already to fall into the trap of positivism as it seems Scalia has.

39 ibid. p. 146.

40 "(S)o far as the Constitution of the United States is concerned, in the beginning was not the word (`and the word was with God, and the word was God'); in the beginning was the state of nature, and the word was with the philosophers of natural rights. It was from them that the Founders learned the new `science of politics.' and with it the principles of free government;" ibid., p. 19.

41 By "conservatives," I take him to mean those seeking truth.

42 Taking the Constitution Seriously, op. cit., p. 241.

43 Benjamin Hart, Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots of American Liberty, Here's Life Publishers, 1988, p. 337.

44 Concerning the Christianity of this religious phenomenon, Patrick Henry remarked at the Constitutional Convention that "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by religionists but by Christians, not on religion but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ."

45 "Taking the Constitution Seriously," op. cit., p. 111. See also: "The proscription of religious tests in Article VI (of the Constitution) (at that time) only to national office or national trust, and any attempt to broaden its coverage to forbid state religious tests would almost surely have failed.;" ibid., p. 167.

46 ibid., p. 13.

47 Letter of Thomas Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826: in "Taking the Constitution Seriously," op. cit. p. 244.

48 W. Berns, "The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy," op. cit., pp. 13-14.

49 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 1, p. 316.

50 op. cit., p. 863.

51 "What is noteworthy in the debates leading to the adoption of the First Amendment is the absence of that kind of religious problem. It is not the differences among the participants in that debate but rather the extent of their agreement that is remarkable. What divided them were differences on what can only, in the light of that history, be called secondary issues... Compared to these differences, the agreement among them was massive. There was no dispute about freedom of conscience or the free exercise of religion; the adoption of the clause protecting free exercise was an altogether perfunctory matter, giving rise to no difference whatsoever. There was no dispute with respect to the principles on which the constitution was built..." (bold mine); Berns, The First Amendment... op. cit. p. 10.

52 Scalia asserted at the Gregorian that "the Supreme Court of the United States, no federal court to my knowledge, in 220 years has ever decided a case on the basis of the Declaration of Independence. It is not part of our law. It expresses the underlying sentiment which gave rise to the creation of this Constitution. But it is the Constitution that is the document that governs us" CNS, p. 16. The reply of Walter Berns is the following: "In the various official compilations of American laws -The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America (1854), Revised Statutes of the United States (1878), The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the United States (1877), and even the United States Code - the Declaration of Independence enjoys what might be seen as pride of place, ahead of Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Ordinance, and the Constitution and its amendments. What is noteworthy here, however, is not the Declaration's place in that list - after all, the Declaration is the earliest of the documents listed chronologically - but, rather, its presence in that list, a list of legal documents" (underline mine); Taking the Constitution Seriously, op. cit., p. 23.

53 Let us remind ourselves of the spur under Scalia's saddle: "I also think that the central practical defect of nonoriginalism is fundamental and irreparable: the impossibility of achieving any consensus on what, precisely, is to replace original meaning, once that is abandoned;" "Originalism: The Lesser Evil," op. cit., p. 862.

54 The Acting Person, D. Reidel Publ. Co., 1979, p. 9.

55 "To reduce the range of experience to the functions and the content of sense alone would lead to deep contradictions and serious misunderstandings... what then is given directly in experience? Is it only some `surface' aspect of the being called `man,' an aspect detectable by sense, or is it man himself?... It does not seem reasonable to believe that we are given only some more or less undefined set of qualities in, or rather of, man, but not man himself. Moreover, it seems most improbable that man with his conscious acting or action is not given as the object of experience" ibid., p. 8-9.

56 Since the moral act is ascertainably real, and doing follows on being, the being of the doing must be real. And since my "I" self determines itself when it causes the act, and there is an inner experience of that self determination a (a passage from real potency to real act), there is a direct experience of the "I" as reality, distinct from the subjective penumbra of consciousness which has dominated the Enlightenment since Descartes'res cogitans. Phenomenology is the method that gives us respect for this experience and legitimates the "pause." This is the heart of Wojtyla's philosophy. See Wojtyla's Participation or Alienation,? in Person and Community, Lang, 1993, p. 199.

57 "This `pausing' should be understood in relation to the irreducible. The traditions of philosophical anthropology would have us believe that we can, so to speak, pass right over this dimension, that we can cognitively omit it by means of an abstraction that provides us with a species definition of the human being as a being, or, in other words, with a cosmological type of reduction (homo = animal rationale). One might ask, however, whether in so defining the essence of the human being we do not in a sense leave out what is most human, since the humanum expresses and realizes itself as the personale." He continues: "Lived experience essentially defies reduction. This does not mean, however, that it eludes our knowledge; it only means that we must arrive at the knowledge of it differently, namely, by a method or means of analysis that merely reveals and discloses it essence. The method of phenomenological analysis allows us to pause at lived experience as the irreducible... Such a disclosure - the deepest possible disclosure - would seem to be an indispensable means for coming to know the human being as a personal subject...." Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being, in Person and Community, op. cit., pp. 215-216.

58 ibid.

59 Enlightenment rationalism construes freedom as relativizing reality and thought. Wherever there is the absolute, there is no freedom. Hence, truth (which is an absolute in some way) is separated from freedom and the two become inversely proportional. The more truth, the less freedom; the less truth, the more freedom. It will only be on a deeper level of experience and consciousness that Christ's "the truth will make you free" (Jn. 8, 32) can be understood. It will be important to revalidate this interior level of moral experience available to phenomenology (and not to positivism) where truth is experienced as an act of free self gift, and in the very experiencing of this truth of the "I," one becomes conscious of the complementary pluralism of these free absolutes.

60 "The problem (with overarching systems of morality) is that their enterprise is doomed to failure, no matter how intellectually adroit they are. Their quest is doomed for reasons given by MacIntyre:

The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character... (T)hey apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture; (A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 51 (2nd. Edition 1984 at 6).

This is true, he says, because there is no longer a consensus about what man should become. Only a shared teleological view of the good for man can lead to common ground about which premises of morality are sound.... (O)ur public moral debates over such matters as abortion and capital punishment have been interminable and inconclusive because we start from different premises and have no way of convincing each other as to which are the proper premises... If we have no way of judging rival premises, we have no way of arguing to moral conclusions that should be accepted by all." R. Bork, The Tempting of America, The Free Press, 1990, p. 256.

61 It may be useful to consider John T. Noonan, Jr.'s thesis that law tended to be made in a state of abstraction and that (n)eglect of persons... had led to the worst sins for which American lawyers were accountable." His thesis calls for an historical epistemology that will retrieve the "I" (the person) from behind the "masks" of abstract categories where it is hidden and imprisoned. He concludes: "The central problem, I think, of the legal enterprise is the relation of love to power. We can often apply force to those we do not see, but we cannot, I think, love them. Only in the response of person to person can Augustine's sublime fusion be achieved, in which justice is defined as `love serving only the one loved;'" Noonan most tellingly quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. re the nature of persons in the law: (P)ersonality is an illusion only to be accepted on weekdays for working purposes. We are cosmic ganglia; so I believe as much as I believe anything. And personality is merely the gaslight at the crossroads with an accidentally larger or smaller radius of illumination." Persons and Masks of the Law, The Noonday Press, 1976, p. xii and p. 106. An account of the epistemology of non-ganglionic persons is the aim of this paper.

62 "The most fundamental of the first type of error occurs when the faith is considered as a sort of abstract essence. The legitimate distinction between faith and its expression can lead those concerned with inculturating the faith to search for or create an unincarnated `Christianity'... This temptation to preach an abstract Christianity can be offset by a steady concern for Christological anthropology, that is, by an appreciation and understanding of the human based on revelation in Jesus;" Francis E. George, OMI, Inculturation and Ecclesial Communion, Urbaniana University Press, 1990, p. 221. Christological anthropology is the shift from object to subject where faith is the reciprocal moral act of response, the gift of self, to the gift of the revealing Self of Christ.

63 "Recollectedness, therefore, is the condition which enables man to say, `God is here, the Living, the Holy of whom Revelation speaks, and here also am I.' But not the vague I of everyday life, that confused something which sits down at table, walks through the streets of the town, works at the office, but the real I - the self. This is the I which makes me responsible for my existence, that I - humble and poor though he may be - which is unique and irreplaceable and which God had in mind when He created me and to which the words `God and my soul and nothing else in the world' apply. That I awakens only before God" (underline mine). R. Guardini, The Art of Praying, Sophia, 1985, p.18.

64 "(A) person's true identity is only fully revealed to him through faith, and it is precisely from faith that the Church's social teaching begins;" Centesimus Annus, #54. It must always be recalled that "Christian faith... is not simply a set of propositions to be accepted with intellectual assent. Rather, faith is a lived knowledge of Christ, a living remembrance of his commandments, and a truth to be lived out;" Veritatis Splendor, #88, 5.

65 From a technical point of view, the anthropological change is metaphysical, i.e., from potency to act, while epistemologically, it is from object to subject. That is to say, it is one thing is to speak about the subject, another is to experience (erlebnis) and be conscious of being the subject. For example, even when Thomas Aquinas speaks of the person and subject, he speaks within the epistemology of objectification, i.e., "about." Wojtyla remarks: "We can see here how very objectivistic St. Thomas' view of the person is. It almost seems as though there is no place in it for an analysis of consciousness and self-consciousness as totally unique manifestations of the person as a subject.... (T)here seems to be no place for it in St. Thomas' objectivistic view of reality. In any case, that in which the persons's subjectivity is most apparent is presented by St. Thomas in an exclusively - or almost exclusively - objective way.... (I)t would be difficult to speak in his view of the lived experiences of the person (underline mine);" Thomistic Personalism, in Person and Community, op. cit., pp. 170-171.

66 J. Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One, Ignatius, 1986, p. 19.

67 Acts 4, 11: "This is `The stone that was rejected by you, the builders which has become the corner stone'"; Eph., 2, 20: "you are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the chief corner stone...."

68 The mechanism of this transference is the following: "Self- consciousness, like self-possession, as the name itself suggests, is not transferable beyond the individual concrete I, or self, that experiences itself and consequently understands itself in this manner. Although I cannot experientially transfer what constitutes my own I beyond myself, this does not mean that I cannot understand that the other is constituted in a similar fashion - that the other is also an I. For the other to be so constituted, self-possession conditioned by the other's own self- determination will be essential. An understanding of this truth defines to some extent the relation of my own concrete I to all other human beings. They are not just others in relation to my I; each of them is also another I. The other is always one of those I's, another individual I, related experientially in some way to my own I.... Thus the reality of the other does not result principally from categorical knowledge, from humanity as the conceptualized essence `human being,' but from an even richer lived experience, one in which I as though transfer what is given to me as my own I beyond myself to one of the others, who, as a result, appears primarily as a different I, another I, my neighbor. Another person is a neighbor to me not just because we share a like humanity, but chiefly because the other is another I," (underline mine); K. Wojtyla, Participation or Alienation? in Person and Community, op. cit., pp. 199-201.

69 "Now Jesus, having come into the district of Caesarea Philippi, began to ask his disciples, saying, `Who do men say the Son of Man is?' But they said, `Some say, John the Baptist; and others, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.' He said to them `But who do you say that I am?'" Jn. 16, 13-16.

70 Matt., 16, 15.

71 Matt. 16, 18.

72 This is the overall thrust of the first two chapters of Walter Berns's Taking the Constitution Seriously. First, there is Chapter 1: "Constituting the People of the United States;" only after constituting a people can there be Chapter 2: "Constituting the Government: the Convention." (underline mine)

73 Scalia Originalism: The Lesser Evil, op. cit., p. 863.

74 Catholic theology sees sin as the isolation of man in loneliness or the equivalent of Hobbes's "state of nature." Made in the image of likeness of a Trinity of Persons who are intrinsically relations, the temptation "You will be like God," (Gen. 3, 5), was an ontological impossibility for man as creature. Therefore, what Hobbes is describing is precisely the christian understanding of Hell and its isolation. "The human being is relational, and he possesses his life - himself - only by way of relationship. I alone am not myself, but only in and with you am I myself. To be truly a human being means to be related in love, to be of and for. But sin means the damaging or the destruction of relationality. Sin is a rejection of relationality because it wants to make the human being a god. Sin is loss of relationship, disturbance of relationship...;" J. Ratzinger, "In the Beginning..." Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Div., 1990, p. 60.

75 J. Ratzinger, A Christian Orientation in a Pluralistic Democracy,? in Church, Ecumenism and Politics, Crossroads, 1988, p. 218.

76 CNS, op. cit., p. 11.

77 The non-discernment of the person conceptually could be compared in some way with Etienne Gilson's attempt to present the thomistic esse as the primum metaphysicum whose intellectual content is not susceptible to abstractive conceptualization. He remarks: "Because it lies beyond essence, existence lies beyond abstract representation, but not beyond the scope of intellectual knowledge;" Being and Some Philosophers, PIMS, 1949, p. 202. Another obvious cause of the non discernment of the dignity of the person is the weakened state of the christian faith as lived which dims the veritatis splendor of the divine image.

78 Appositely, Noonan writes: "Teaching - the main activity of appellate judges; for what else are 95 percent of their written opinions? -... Teaching is, necessarily, person to person, informing and evoking. It cannot be equated with Pavlovian conditioning as an exercise in applied force. Addressing both Holmes's bad man (...) and also the larger audience made up of the uncertain, the confused, the conforming, and the aspiring, legislators, and judges are educative. Their success is far more by persuasion that they are right than by coercion. To think of law as a science of power, unlocked by a key, badly obscures this function" (underline mine); Persons and Masks of the Law, op. cit., pp. 12-13.

79 Cf. pp. 25-26.

80 "Persons are the active and responsible subjects of social life. Intimately linked to the foundation, which is man's dignity, are the principle of solidarity and the principle of subsidiarity. By virtue of the first, man with his brothers is obliged to contribute to the common good of society at all its levels. Hence the Church's doctrine is opposed to all the forms of social or political individualism. By virtue of the second, neither the state nor any society must ever substitute itself for the initiative and responsibility of individuals and of intermediate communities at the level on which they can function, nor must they take away the room necessary for their freedom. Hence the Church's social doctrine is opposed to all forms of collectivism;" Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation, Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, March, 22, 1986, pp. 47-48.

81 John Paul II enumerates them: "the right to life at every stage of existence; the rights of the family, as the basic social community, or `cell of society;' justice in employment relationships; the rights inherent in the life of the political community as such; the rights based on the transcendent vocation of the human being, beginning with the right of freedom to profess and practice one's own religious belief;" in On Social Concern, #33. Vatican II in Gaudium et Spes #27 enumerated them negatively: "all offenses against life itself, such as murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and wilful suicide; all violations of the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture, undue psychological pressures; all offenses against human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children, degrading working conditions where men are treated as mere tools for profit rather than free and responsible persons. All these and the like are criminal: they poison civilization; and they debase the perpetrators more than the victims and militate against the honor of the creator." Also in the Pope's Letter to Families #17: "The rights of the family are closely linked to the rights of the person: if in fact the family is a communion of person, its self- realization will depend in large part on the correct application of the rights of its members. Some of these rights concern the family in an immediate way, such as the right of parents to responsible procreation and the education of children. Other rights... touch the family indirectly: among these, the right to property... and the right to work..."

82 Chisolm, 111 S. Ct. at 2376 (Scalia J. dissenting).

83 This truth as absolute is the very subject himself and therefore does not dissolve freedom but, as we saw above in Berns, is its condition. That the human person - as subject (not choosing objects) - be self determining means that he is free from having any ideology or religious establishment imposed on him. Part of his truth is that he is self determining; the other is that he must seek the true pattern according to which he must make that free determination. He must not be determined - "used" - by another, not even God. As Wojtyla says: "On the part of God, indeed, it is totally out of the question since, by giving man an intelligent and free nature, he has thereby ordained that each man alone will decide for himself the ends of his activity, and not be a blind tool of someone else's ends;" Love and Responsibility, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981, p. 27.

84 Scalia attempts to restrict the subjectivism of "interests" by restricting "rights" as limited concessions from the majority (read government). Thus he rails against "christian" chicken-in- every-pot socialism (see CNS, p. 11) which he thinks, wrongly, to be christian social doctrine. Since he works only with the abstraction of law as his truth, and not with the truth of person as gift, he misses the personalist doctrine of the Church which teaches only the person. Sed in contra: The way of the Church is person, not structure. But the person is a process of two dimensions: he/she becomes self by making the sincere gift of self (Gaudium et Spes #24). These dimensions are the basis of the two fundamental principles of subsidiarity (dignity of persons) and solidarity (service to others). The solution of the Church to poverty is not socialism but the ordinary professional work of persons as the concretion of the self gift. Scalia is stagnating behind the mask (see Noonan) of abstract law without reaching its source and truth which is persons. At best, he jury rigs with originalism. At worst, he errs by calling christianity socialism. Apposite to the point are the observations in the Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation, Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 1986, #75.

85 CNS, op cit., p. 11.

86 A. E. Leff, "Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law," 6 Duke Law Journal (1979), p. 1246.

87 ibid.


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Justice Scalia: "Originalism: The Lesser Evil"

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Originalism: The Lesser Evil
Justice Antonin Scalia

57 U. Cin. L. Rev. 849 (1989)
(Reproduced with permission)

This series of lectures is dedicated to the memory of Chief Justice William Howard Taft, an extraordinary man by any standard. A state trial judge at twenty-nine, Solicitor General of the United States at thirty-two, a United States Circuit Judge at thirty-four, Professor and Dean at the University of Cincinnati Law School, High Commissioner of the Philippines, Secretary of War, President of the United States, and Chief Justice of the United States. When a Justice of the Supreme Court is invited to give this lecture, I presume it is the great man's judicial career that is expected to be at least the jumping-off point for the discussion. That also happens to be the part of his diverse life that Taft himself most valued, judging by a statement he made at the time of his nomination to the Chief Justiceship (not only an appropriate modesty but even a fear of the Almighty gives me some pause at quoting this): "I love judges, and I love courts. They are my ideals, that typify on earth what we shall meet hereafter in heaven under a just God." n1

Taft is generally acknowledged to have been one of the greatest Chief Justices -- not so much on the basis of his opinions, perhaps because many of them ran counter to the ultimate sweep of history. One commentator observes condescendingly:

Taft's Chief Justiceship might have been constructive, but for his haunting fear of progressivism and progressives. Had he maintained the powerful position he assumed in his commerce cases and minimum wage dissent, Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923), he might have, with the backing of Holmes, Brandeis, Stone, and possibly Sanford, swung the Court along the line the great triumvirate was so eloquently staking out. Lacking in William Howard Taft was the quality Woodrow Wilson suggested as an essential requirement of statesmanship -- "a large vision of things to come." n2

This is presumably the school of history that assesses the greatness of a leader by his success in predicting where the men he is leading want to go. That is perhaps the way the world ultimately evaluates [850] things -- but one may think that Taft, having (as I have described) a more celestial view of the judge's function, had a quite accurate "vision of things to come," did not like them, and did his best, with consummate skill but ultimate lack of success, to alter the outcome. To demean him for not being Brandeis is to demean Lee for not being Grant.

Be that as it may, Taft's reputation as one of the greatest Chief Justices rests not primarily upon his opinions but upon his organizational and administrative skills which, together with his political acumen, immensely improved the quality of federal justice. As described by one biographer, in his very first year as Chief Justice, Taft "launched his campaign for reform, making appeals in speeches across the continent, presenting his case in legal periodicals and in testimony before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees." n3 He succeeded in obtaining passage of the Act of Sept. 14, 1922, n4 which established the Judicial Conference of the United States, and the Judiciary Act of 1925, n5 which finally brought the Supreme Court's unmanageable docket under control by rendering the vast majority of its jurisdiction discretionary. He successfully opposed (and this should be of particular interest to modern lawyers, for the issue is still with us) Senator Norris' bill to eliminate the diversity jurisdictional of the federal courts. n6 I am tangibly in his debt more than most of you, since he obtained for the Court its first (and current) home, the Supreme Court building that is now the symbol of equal justice under law.

But just as I may be forgiven for not addressing a subject related to Taft's accomplishments as President, I hope I may be pardoned as well for not addressing a subject dealing with judicial administration -- for that also is not my current line of territory. Rather, what leapt to my mind as I contemplated this talk was that legal opinion of the Chief Justice which is generally regarded as his most significant one -- and which he himself must have regarded as his most significant one, if his personal estimation can validly be measured by the amount of time he took to produce it, and by its sheer length. Indeed, we need not rely upon that persuasive secondary evidence, for Taft himself said of the case: "I never wrote an opinion that I felt to be so important in its effect." n7

[851] I refer to the Chief Justice's opinion for the Court in Myers v. United States, n8 which declared unconstitutional congressional attempts to restrict presidential removal of executive officers. Argument in that case was first heard on December 5, 1923. It was set for reargument and heard again the next Term, almost a year-and-a-half later, on April 13th and 14th, 1925. (In those days oral argument was, to understate the point, somewhat more protracted.) The Chief Justice's seventy page opinion for the Court, as well as a one-page dissent by Justice Holmes, a sixty-one page dissent by Justice McReynolds, and a fifty-five page dissent by Justice Brandeis, did not issue until more than a year-and-a-half after this second argument, on October 25, 1926. I have always been impressed, incidentally, by the contrast between that lengthy gestation period and the period between argument and issuance of the famous opinion, about eight-and-one-half years later, after Charles Evans Hughes had succeeded Taft as Chief Justice, in which a unanimous Supreme Court essentially overruled the analysis of Myers in fourteen quick pages. n9

Humphrey's Executor v. United States, n10 which invalidated President Franklin Roosevelt's attempt to remove a member of the Federal Trade Commission who was uncongenial to his philosophy, was argued on May 1, 1935, and decided twenty-six days later -- the same day the Court declared unconstitutional Roosevelt's National Industrial Recovery Act. n11 Many (including President Roosevelt) thought that the rapid switch in legal analysis between Myers and Humphrey's Executor had much to do with the Justices' antagonism towards the New Deal; but surely it must also reflect the great intellectual influence that Taft, an ex-President and hence a supporter of Executive power, had exercised over his colleagues.

Perhaps Chief Justice Taft's opinion in Myers came so readily to my mind as I was considering the subject of this talk because it dealt with the presidential removal power, the same issue that was before us in the most significant case we decided last term -- the independent counsel case. n12 The reason I want to discuss it, however, has nothing to do with the substantive issue; I said all I intend to about that in my lonesome dissent. What attracts my attention about the Myers opinion is not its substance but its process. It is a prime example of what, in current scholarly discourse, is known as the "originalist" [852] approach to constitutional interpretation. The objective of the Chief Justice's lengthy opinion was to establish the meaning of the Constitution, in 1789, regarding the presidential removal power. He sought to do so by examining various evidence, including not only, of course, the text of the Constitution and its overall structure, but also the contemporaneous understanding of the President's removal power (particularly the understanding of the First Congress and of the leading participants in the Constitutional Convention), the background understanding of what "executive power" consisted of under the English constitution, and the nature of the executive's removal power under the various state constitutions in existence when the federal Constitution was adopted. It is easy to understand why this would take almost three years and seventy pages. As I shall later have occasion to describe, done perfectly it might well take thirty years and 7,000 pages.

It may surprise the layman, but it will surely not surprise the lawyers here, to learn that originalism is not, and had perhaps never been, the sole method of constitutional exegesis. It would be hard to count on the fingers of both hands and the toes of both feet, yea, even on the hairs of one's youthful head, the opinions that have in fact been rendered not on the basis of what the Constitution originally meant, but on the basis of what the judges currently thought it desirable for it to mean. That is, I suppose, the sort of behavior Chief Justice Hughes was referring to when he said the Constitution is what the judges say it is. But in the past, nonoriginalist opinions have almost always had the decency to lie, or at least to dissemble, about what they were doing -- either ignoring strong evidence of original intent that contradicted the minimal recited evidence of an original intent congenial to the court's desires, or else not discussing original intent at all, speaking in terms of broad constitutional generalities with no pretense of historical support. The latter course was adopted, to sweep away Taft's analysis, in Humphrey's Executor, which announced the novel concept of constitutional powers that are neither legislative, nor executive nor judicial, but "quasi-legislative" and "quasi-judicial." n13 It is only in relatively recent years, however, that nonoriginalist exegesis has, so to speak, come out of the closet, and put itself forward overtly as an intellectually legitimate device. To be sure, in support of its venerability as a legitimate interpretive theory there is often trotted out John Marshall's statement in McCulloch v. Maryland that "we must never forget [853] it is a constitution we are expounding" n14 -- as though the implication of that statement was that our interpretation must change from age to age. But that is a canard. The real implication was quite the opposite: Marshall was saying that the Constitution had to be interpreted generously because the powers conferred upon Congress under it had to be broad enough to serve not only the needs of the federal government originally discerned but also the needs that might arise in the future. If constitutional interpretation could be adjusted as changing circumstances required, a broad initial interpretation would have been unnecessary.

Those who have not delved into the scholarly writing on constitutional law for several years may be unaware of the explicitness with which many prominent and respected commentators reject the original meaning of the Constitution as an authoritative guide. Harvard Professor Laurence H. Tribe, for example, while generally conducting his constitutional analysis under the rubric of the open-ended textual provisions such as the Ninth Amendment, does not believe that the originally understood content of those provisions has much to do with how they are to be applied today. The Constitution, he has written, "invites us, and our judges, to expand on the . . . freedoms that are uniquely our heritage," n15 and "invites a collaborative inquiry, involving both the Court and the country, into the contemporary content of freedom, fairness, and fraternity." n16 Stanford Dean Paul Brest, having (in his own words) "abandoned both consent and fidelity to the text and original understanding as the touchstones of constitutional decisionmaking," n17 concludes that "the practice of constitutional decisionmaking should enforce those, but only those, values that are fundamental to our society." n18 While Brest believes that the "text," "original understanding," "custom," "social practices," "conventional morality," and "precedent" all strongly inform the determination of those values, the conclusions drawn from all these sources are "defeasible in the light of changing public values." n19 Yale Professor Owen Fiss asserts that, whatever the Constitution might originally have meant, the courts should give "concrete meaning and application" to those values that "give our society an identity and inner coherence [and] its distinctive public [854] morality." n20 Oxford Professor (and expatriate American) Ronald Dworkin calls for "a fusion of constitutional law and moral theory." n21 Harvard Professor Richard Parker urges, somewhat more specifically, that constitutional law "take seriously and work from (while no doubt revising) the classical conception of a republic, including its elements of relative equality, mobilization of citizenry, and civic virtue." n22 More specifically still, New York University Professor David Richards suggests that it would be desirable for the courts' constitutional decisions to follow the contractarian moral theory set forth in Professor John Rawls' treatise, A Theory of Justice. n23 And I could go on.

The principal theoretical defect of nonoriginalism, in my view, is its incompatibility with the very principle that legitimizes judicial review of constitutionality. Nothing in the text of the Constitution confers upon the courts the power to inquire into, rather than passively assume, the constitutionality of federal statutes. That power is, however, reasonably implicit because, as Marshall said in Marbury v. Madison, (1) "[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is," (2) "[i]f two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each," and (3) "the constitution is to be considered, in court, as a paramount law." n24 Central to that analysis, it seems to me, is the perception that the Constitution, though it has an effect superior to other laws, is in its nature the sort of "law" that is the business of the courts -- an enactment that has a fixed meaning ascertainable through the usual devices familiar to those learned in the law. If the Constitution were not that sort of a "law," but a novel invitation to apply current societal values, what reason would there be to believe that the invitation was addressed to the courts rather than to the legislature? One simply cannot say, regarding that sort of novel enactment, that "[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department" to determine its content. Quite to the contrary, the legislature would seem a much more appropriate expositor of social values, and its determination that a statute is compatible with the Constitution should, as in England, prevail.

[855] Apart from the frailty of its theoretical underpinning, nonoriginalism confronts a practical difficulty reminiscent of the truism of elective politics that "You can't beat somebody with nobody." It is not enough to demonstrate that the other fellow's candidate (originalism) is no good; one must also agree upon another candidate to replace him. Just as it is not very meaningful for a voter to vote "non-Reagan," it is not very helpful to tell a judge to be a "non-originalist." If the law is to make any attempt at consistency and predictability, surely there must be general agreement not only that judges reject one exegetical approach (originalism), but that they adopt another. And it is hard to discern any emerging consensus among the nonoriginalists as to what this might be. Are the "fundamental values" that replace original meaning to be derived from the philosophy of Plato, or of Locke, or Mills, or Rawls, or perhaps from the latest Gallup poll? This is not to say that originalists are in entire agreement as to what the nature of their methodology is; as I shall mention shortly, there are some significant differences. But as its name suggests, it by and large represents a coherent approach, or at least an agreed-upon point of departure. As the name "nonoriginalism" suggests (and I know no other, more precise term by which this school of exegesis can be described), it represents agreement on nothing except what is the wrong approach.

Finally, I want to mention what is not a defect of nonoriginalism, but one of its supposed benefits that seems to me illusory. A bit earlier I quoted one of the most prominent nonoriginalists, Professor Tribe, to the effect that the Constitution "invites us, and our judges, to expand on the . . . freedoms that are uniquely our heritage." n25 I think it fair to say that that is a common theme of nonoriginalists in general. But why, one may reasonably ask -- once the original import of the Constitution is cast aside to be replaced by the "fundamental values" of the current society -- why are we invited only to "expand on" freedoms, and not to contract them as well? Last Term we decided a case, Coy v. Iowa, n26 in which, at the trial of a man accused of taking indecent liberties with two young girls, the girls were permitted to testify separated from the defendant by a screen which prevented them from seeing him. We held that, at least absent a specific finding that these particular witnesses needed such protection, this procedure violated that provision of the Sixth Amendment that assures a criminal defendant the right "to be confronted with the witnesses against him." n27 Let us hypothesize, however [856] (a hypothesis that may well be true), that modern American society is much more conscious of, and averse to, the effects of "emotional trauma" than was the society of 1791, and that it is, in addition, much more concerned about the emotional frailty of children and the sensitivity of young women regarding sexual abuse. If that is so, and if the nonoriginalists are right, would it not have been possible for the Court to hold that, even though in 1791 the confrontation clause clearly would not have permitted a blanket exception for such testimony, it does so today? Such a holding, of course, could hardly be characterized as an "expansion upon" preexisting freedoms. Or let me give another example that is already history: I think it highly probable that over the past two hundred years the Supreme Court, though not avowedly under the banner of "nonoriginalist" interpretation, has in fact narrowed the contract clause of the Constitution n28 well short of its original meaning. n29 Perhaps we are all content with that development -- but can it possibly be asserted that it represented an expansion, rather than a contraction, of individual liberties? Our modern society is undoubtedly not as enthusiastic about economic liberties as were the men and women of 1789; but we should not fool ourselves into believing that because we like the result the result does not represent a contraction of liberty. Nonoriginalism, in other words, is a two-way street that handles traffic both to and from individual rights.

Let me turn next to originalism, which is also not without its warts. Its greatest defect, in my view, is the difficulty of applying it correctly. Not that I agree with, or even take very seriously, the intricately elaborated scholarly criticisms to the effect that (believe it or not) words have no meaning. They have meaning enough, as the scholarly critics themselves must surely believe when they choose to express their views in text rather than music. But what is true is that it is often exceedingly difficult to plumb the original understanding of an ancient text. Properly done, the task requires the consideration of an enormous mass of material -- in the case of the Constitution and its Amendments, for example, to mention only one element, the records of the ratifying debates in all the states. Even beyond that, it requires an evaluation of the reliability of that material -- many of the reports of the ratifying debates, for example, are thought to be quite unreliable. And further still, it requires immersing oneself in the political and intellectual atmosphere of the time -- somehow placing out of mind knowledge that we have which an earlier [857] age did not, and putting on beliefs, attitudes, philosophies, prejudices and loyalties that are not those of our day. It is, in short, a task sometimes better suited to the historian than the lawyer.

Let me provide a small example of this from Chief Justice Taft's lengthy -- and on the whole admirable -- effort in Myers. One of the issues at hand (though not the only one) was what was understood to be the inherent content of the phrase "[t]he executive Power" in Article II, §1, which provides that "[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." n30 Specifically, was the phrase "the executive Power" a term of art that included the power to dismiss officers of the executive branch? Taft disposes of this question in three sentences:

In the British system, the Crown, which was the executive, had the power of appointment and removal of executive officers, and it was natural, therefore, for those who framed our Constitution to regard the words "executive power" as including both. Ex Parte Grossman, 267 U.S. 87, 110. Unlike the power of conquest of the British Crown, considered and rejected as a precedent for us in Fleming v. Page, 9 How. 603, 618, the association of removal with appointment . . . is not incompatible with our republican form of Government. n31

It will be noted that this analysis simply assumes that the English experience is relevant. That is seemingly a reasonable assumption. After all, the colonists of 1789 were Englishmen, and one would think that their notion of what "the executive Power" included would comport with that tradition. But in fact the point is not at all that clear. Senator George Wharton Pepper, who at the Court's request had filed an amicus brief and argued as amicus before the Court, contended that "none of the members of the Constitutional Convention who took part in the debates desired the President to wield the powers which at the time were exercisable by the King of England." n32 Worse still, Chief Justice Taney's opinion in the 1850 case of Fleming v. Page, n33 which Taft cited in the passage I quoted, had said the following:

[I]n the distribution of political power between the great departments of government, there is such a wide difference between the power conferred on the President of the United States, and the authority and sovereignty which belong to the English crown, that it would be altogether unsafe to reason from any supposed resemblance between them, either as regards [858] conquest in war, or any other subject where the rights and powers of the executive arm of the government are brought into question. n34

Taft's opinion adequately distinguished the holding of Fleming on the ground that it related to a different executive power, "incompatible with our republican form of Government;" n35 but did not at all come to grips with the contradiction that Taney, unlike Taft, did not think the English experience relevant to "any . . . subject where the rights and powers of the executive arm of the government are brought into question." n36 Nor did the opinion respond to the seemingly telling point made in Justice McReynolds' dissent, that Jefferson's 1783 Draft of a Fundamental Constitution for the Commonwealth of Virginia had provided:

The executive powers shall be exercised by a Governor . . . By executive powers, we mean no reference to those powers exercised under our former government by the crown as of its prerogative, nor that these shall be the standard of what may or may not be deemed the rightful powers of the Governor. n37

And finally, Taft's opinion offered no support whatever for the asserted proposition that the English experience was relevant, except for the citation to Taft's earlier opinion in Ex Parte Grossman n38 -- which quoted from an 1856 case Ex Parte Wells to the effect that "when the words to grant pardons were used in the Constitution, they conveyed to the mind the authority as exercised by the English crown. . . ." n39 But quite obviously, that the constitutional phrase "to grant Pardons" meant the same thing it meant in the English system is only marginally relevant to whether the phrase "[t]he executive Power" meant the same.

Having mentioned the gaps in Chief Justice Taft's analysis, let me suggest just some of the material he might have used to fill them. It is unquestionable that many in the founding generation "did not consider the Prerogatives of the British Monarch as a proper guide for defining the Executive powers" (those were the words of James Wilson, as recorded in Madison's notes of the Constitutional Convention). n40 Indeed, that sentiment was so widespread that the proponents [859] of the Constitution during the ratification campaign felt constrained to emphasize the important differences between British royal prerogative and the powers of the presidency. n41 That can be conceded, however, without impairing Taft's central point that a reference to "the executive Power" without further qualification would be taken as a reference to the traditional powers of the English King, except those inherently incompatible with republican government.

Research conducted years later by Professor William Winslow Crosskey would have been helpful to Taft. Referring to the royal prerogatives as described in William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, which had been published in Philadelphia in the early 1770s, Crosskey noted that many -- indeed, almost half -- of Congress' enumerated powers had been considered royal prerogatives under the law of England at the time of our Constitution's adoption. n42 For example, Blackstone wrote that the king had "the sole power of raising and regulating fleets and armies," n43 whereas, of course, these powers under our Constitution reside in Congress by virtue of article I, section 8, clauses 12 through 14. The Constitution also expressly confides in the President certain traditional royal prerogatives subject to limitations not known in the English constitution. Thus, for example, the king's absolute veto of legislation became a qualified veto subject to override by a two-thirds vote of Congress, n44 and the king's ability to conclude treaties became a presidential power to negotiate treaties, with a two-thirds vote of the Senate needed for ratification. n45

It is apparent from all this that the traditional English understanding of executive power, or, to be more precise, royal prerogatives, was fairly well known to the founding generation, since they appear repeatedly in the text of the Constitution in formulations very similar to those found in Blackstone. It can further be argued that when those prerogatives were to be reallocated in whole or part to other branches of government, or were to be limited in some other way, [860] the Constitution generally did so expressly. One could reasonably infer, therefore, that what was not expressly reassigned would -- at least absent patent incompatibility with republican principles -- remain with the executive. And far from refuting this, Jefferson's draft constitution for Virginia, alluded to earlier, could be said to support it. Why, Taft might have argued, would Jefferson have felt it necessary to specify that "[b]y executive powers, we mean no reference to those powers exercised under our former government by the crown" unless, without that specification, such reference would reasonably be assumed? n46

I am not setting forth all of this as necessarily the correct historical analysis, but as an example of how an expansion of Taft's three brief sentences might have at least begun. I should note, moreover, that those three sentences bore the burden of establishing not only (what we have just discussed) that the phrase "the executive Power" referred to the king's powers, but also that the king's powers in fact included the power to remove executive officials. Taft's opinion contains nothing to support that point, except the unsubstantiated assertion that "[i]n the British system, the Crown . . . had the power of appointment and removal of executive officers. . . ." n47 That is probably so, but the nature of the relationship between the Crown and the government in England during the relevant period was a sufficiently complicated and changing one, that something more than an ipse dixit was called for. n48

Well, I leave it to the listener's imagination how many pages would have had to have been added to Taft's seventy-page opinion, and how many months to his almost three years of intermittent labor, to flesh out this relatively minor point in a fashion that a serious historian would consider minimally adequate. And this is just one of many points that could have used elaboration. Nowadays, of course, the Supreme Court does not give itself as much time to decide cases as was customary in Taft's time. Except in those very rare instances in which a case is set for reargument, the case will be decided in the same Term in which it is first argued -- allowing at best the period between the beginning of October and the end of June, and at worst the period between the end of April and the end of June. The independent counsel case last Term n49 -- involving precisely the historical materials Myers had to consider, and then some -- was argued on April 26, and the thirty-eight-page opinion and thirty-eight-page [861] dissent (I believe in equal time) issued on June 29. Do you have any doubt that this system does not present the ideal environment for entirely accurate historical inquiry? Nor, speaking for myself at least, does it employ the ideal personnel.

I can be much more brief in describing what seems to me the second most serious objection to originalism: In its undiluted form, at least, it is medicine that seems too strong to swallow. Thus, almost every originalist would adulterate it with the doctrine of stare decisis -- so that Marbury v. Madison would stand even if Professor Raoul Berger should demonstrate unassailably that it got the meaning of the Constitution wrong. (Of course recognizing stare decisis is seemingly even more incompatible with nonoriginalist theory: If the most solemnly and democratically adopted text of the Constitution and its Amendments can be ignored on the basis of current values, what possible basis could there be for enforced adherence to a legal decision of the Supreme Court?) But stare decisis alone is not enough to prevent originalism from being what many would consider too bitter a pill. What if some state should enact a new law providing public lashing, or branding of the right hand, as punishment for certain criminal offenses? Even if it could be demonstrated unequivocally that these were not cruel and unusual measures in 1791, and even though no prior Supreme Court decision has specifically disapproved them, I doubt whether any federal judge -- even among the many who consider themselves originalists -- would sustain them against an eighth amendment challenge. It may well be, as Professor Henry Monaghan persuasively argues, that this cannot legitimately be reconciled with originalist philosophy -- that it represents the unrealistic view of the Constitution as a document intended to create a perfect society for all ages to come, whereas in fact it was a political compromise that did not pretend to create a perfect society even for its own age (as its toleration of slavery, which a majority of the founding generation recognized as an evil, well enough demonstrates). n50 Even so, I am confident that public flogging and handbranding would not be sustained by our courts, and any espousal of originalism as a practical theory of exegesis must somehow come to terms with that reality.

One way of doing so, of course, would be to say that it was originally intended that the cruel and unusual punishment clause would have an evolving content -- that "cruel and unusual" originally meant "cruel and unusual for the age in question" and not "cruel and unusual in 1791." But to be faithful to originalist philosophy, [862] one must not only say this but demonstrate it to be so on the basis of some textual or historical evidence. Perhaps the mere words "cruel and unusual" suggest an evolutionary intent more than other provisions of the Constitution, but that is far from clear; and I know of no historical evidence for that meaning. And if the faint-hearted originalist is willing simply to posit such an intent for the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause, why not for the due process clause, the equal protection clause, the privileges and immunity clause, etc.? When one goes down that road, there is really no difference between the faint-hearted originalist and the moderate nonoriginalist, except that the former finds it comforting to make up (out of whole cloth) an original evolutionary intent, and the latter thinks that superfluous. It is, I think, the fact that most originalists are faint-hearted and most nonoriginalists are moderate (that is, would not ascribe evolving content to such clear provisions as the requirement that the President be no less than thirty-five years of age) which accounts for the fact that the sharp divergence between the two philosophies does not produce an equivalently sharp divergence in judicial opinions.

Having described what I consider the principal difficulties with the originalist and nonoriginalist approaches, I suppose I owe it to the listener to say which of the two evils I prefer. It is originalism. I take the need for theoretical legitimacy seriously, and even if one assumes (as many nonoriginalists do not even bother to do) that the Constitution was originally meant to expound evolving rather than permanent values, as I discussed earlier I see no basis for believing that supervision of the evolution would have been committed to the courts. At an even more general theoretical level, orginalism seems to me more compatible with the nature and purpose of a Constitution in a democratic system. A democratic society does not, by and large, need constitutional guarantees to insure that its laws will reflect "current values." Elections take care of that quite well. The purpose of constitutional guarantees -- and in particular those constitutional guarantees of individual rights that are at the center of this controversy -- is precisely to prevent the law from reflecting certain changes in original values that the society adopting the Constitution thinks fundamentally undesirable. Or, more precisely, to require the society to devote to the subject the long and hard consideration required for a constitutional amendment before those particular values can be cast aside.

I also think that the central practical defect of nonoriginalism is fundamental and irreparable: the impossibility of achieving any consensus on what, precisely, is to replace original meaning, once [863] that is abandoned. The practical defects of originalism, on the other hand, while genuine enough, seem to me less severe. While it may indeed be unrealistic to have substantial confidence that judges and lawyers will find the correct historical answer to such refined questions of original intent as the precise content of "the executive Power," for the vast majority of questions the answer is clear. The death penalty, for example, was not cruel and unusual punishment because it is referred to in the Constitution itself; and the right of confrontation by its plain language meant, at least, being face-to-face with the person testifying against one at trial. For the nonoriginalist, even these are open questions. As for the fact that originalism is strong medicine, and that one cannot realistically expect judges (probably myself included) to apply it without a trace of constitutional perfectionism: I suppose I must respond that this is a world in which nothing is flawless, and fall back upon G. K. Chesterton's observation that a thing worth doing is worth doing badly.

It seems to me, moreover, that the practical defects of originalism are defects more appropriate for the task at hand -- that is, less likely to aggravate the most significant weakness of the system of judicial review and more likely to produce results acceptable to all. If one is hiring a reference-room librarian, and has two applicants, between whom the only substantial difference is that the one's normal conversational tone tends to be too loud and the other's too soft, it is pretty clear which of the imperfections should be preferred. Now the main danger in judicial interpretation of the Constitution -- or, for that matter, in judicial interpretation of any law -- is that the judges will mistake their own predilections for the law. Avoiding this error is the hardest part of being a conscientious judge; perhaps no conscientious judge ever succeeds entirely. Nonoriginalism, which under one or another formulation invokes "fundamental values" as the touchstone of constitutionality, plays precisely to this weakness. It is very difficult for a person to discern a difference between those political values that he personally thinks most important, and those political values that are "fundamental to our society." Thus, by the adoption of such a criterion judicial personalization of the law is enormously facilitated. (One might reduce this danger by insisting that the new "fundamental values" invoked to replace original meaning be clearly and objectively manifested in the laws of the society. But among all the varying tests suggested by nonoriginalist theoreticians, I am unaware that that one ever appears. Most if not all nonoriginalists, for example, would strike down the death penalty, though it continues to be widely adopted in both state and federal legislation.)

[864] Originalism does not aggravate the principal weakness of the system, for it establishes a historical criterion that is conceptually quite separate from the preferences of the judge himself. And the principal defect of that approach -- that historical research is always difficult and sometimes inconclusive -- will, unlike nonoriginalism, lead to a more moderate rather than a more extreme result. The inevitable tendency of judges to think that the law is what they would like it to be will, I have no doubt, cause most errors in judicial historiography to be made in the direction of projecting upon the age of 1789 current, modern values -- so that as applied, even as applied in the best of faith, originalism will (as the historical record shows) end up as something of a compromise. Perhaps not a bad characteristic for a constitutional theory. Thus, nonoriginalists can say, concerning the principal defect of originalism, "Oh happy fault." Originalism is, it seems to me, the librarian who talks too softly.

Having made that endorsement, I hasten to confess that in a crunch I may prove a faint-hearted originalist. I cannot imagine myself, any more than any other federal judge, upholding a statute that imposes the punishment of flogging. But then I cannot imagine such a case's arising either. In any event, in deciding the cases before me I expect I will rarely be confronted with making the stark choice between giving evolutionary content (not yet required by stare decisis) and not giving evolutionary content to particular constitutional provisions. The vast majority of my dissents from nonoriginalist thinking (and I hope at least some of those dissents will be majorities) will, I am sure, be able to be framed in the terms that, even if the provision in question has an evolutionary content, there is inadequate indication that any evolution in social attitudes has occurred. n51 That -- to conclude this largely theoretical talk on a note of reality -- is the real dispute that appears in the case: not between nonoriginalists on the one hand and pure originalists on the other, concerning the validity of looking at all to current values; but rather between, on the one hand, nonoriginalists, fainthearted originalists and pureoriginalists- accepting-for-the-sake-of-argument-evolutionary-content, and, on the other hand, other adherents of the same three approaches, concerning the nature and degree of evidence necessary to demonstrate that constitutional evolution has occurred.

I am left with a sense of dissatisfaction, as I am sure you are, that a discourse concerning what one would suppose to be a rather fundamental -- indeed, the most fundamental -- aspect of constitutional [865] theory and practice should end so inconclusively. But it should come as no surprise. We do not yet have an agreed upon theory for interpreting statutes, either. I find it perhaps too laudatory to say that this is the genius of the common law system; but it is at least its nature.


Footnotes

n1. Mason, William Howard Taft, in III The Justices of the Supreme Court 1789-1978 2105 (L.Friedman and F. Israel ed. 1980).
n2. Id. at 2120.
n3. Id. at 2109.
n4. Act of Sept. 14, 1922, ch. 306, 42 Stat. 837 (1922).
n5. Judiciary Act of 1925, ch. 229, 43 Stat. 936 (1925).
n6. Mason, supra note 1, at 2110.
n7. Id. at 2118.
n8. 272 U.S. 52 (1926).
n9. Humphrey's Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935).
n10. Id.
n11. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935).
n12. See Morrison v. Olsen, 108 S. Ct. 2597 (487 U.S. 654) (1988).
n13. Humphrey's Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602, 628 (1935).
n14. McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 407 (1819).
n15. L. Tribe, God Save This Honorable Court 45 (1985).
n16. L. Tribe, American Constitutional Law 771 (2d ed. 1988).
n17. Brest, The Misconceived Quest for the Original Understanding, 60 B.U.L. Rev. 204, 226 (1980).
n18. Id. at 227.
n19. Id. at 229.
n20. Fiss, The Supreme Court 1978 Term -- Forward: The Forms of Justice, 93 Harv. L. Rev. 1, 9, 11 (1979).
n21. R. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously 149 (1977).
n22. Parker, The Past of Constitutional Theory -- And Its Future, 42 Ohio St. L.J. 223, 258 n.146 (1981).
n23. Richards, Constitutional Privacy, The Right to Die and the Meaning of Life: A Moral Analysis, 22 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 327, 344-47 (1981).
n24. Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch.) 137, 177 (1803).
n25. L. Tribe, supra note 15, at 45.
n26. Coy v. Iowa, 108 S. Ct. 2798 (487 U.S. 1012) (1988).
n27. Id. at 2800.
n28. U.S. CONST. art. I, § 10, cl. 2.
n29. See, e.g., Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell, 290 U.S. 398 (1934).
n30. U.S. CONST. art. II, § 1.
n31. Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52, 118 (1926).
n32. Id. at 79.
n33. Fleming v. Page, 50 U.S. (9 HOW.) 603 (1850).
n34. Id. at 618.
n35. Myers, supra note 31 at 118.
n36. Fleming, supra note 33 at 618 (emphasis added).
n37. Myers, supra note 31 at 235.
n38. Id. at 118.
n39. Ex Parte Grossman, 267 U.S. 87, 110 (quoting Ex Parte Wells, 59 U.S. (18 HOW.) 307, 311 (1855)).
n40. See 1 M. Farrand, The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 at 65 (1966).
n41. See, e.g., The Federalist No. 67 at 452-57 (A. Hamilton) (J. Cooke ed. 1961); IV J. Elliot, The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution 107-10 (1866) (remarks of Iredell at North Carolina Convention).
n42. See 1 W. Crosskey, Politics and the Constitution 428 (1953); see also U.S. CONST. art. 1, § 8.
n43. II W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 262 n. 33 (Tucker ed. 1803).
n44. Compare id. at 260, 260-61 n.30, with U.S. CONST. art. II, § 2, cl. 2.
n45. Compare id. at 257, 257 n.21, with U.S. CONST. art. II, § 2, cl. 2.
n46. Myers, supra note 31 at 235.
n47. Id. at 118.
n48. See F. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England 387-400 (1908).
n49. Morrison, supra note 12.
n50. See Monaghan, Our Perfect Constitution, 56 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 353 (1981).
n51. See, e.g., Thompson v. Oklahoma, 108 S. Ct. 2687, 2711 (487 U.S. 815, 859) (1988) (Scalia, J., dissenting).

© 1989 University of Cincinnati Law Review.
Reproduced with kind permission.

Justice Scalia and the Death Penalty


Response from Bill Bannon to the Chaput post on Death Penalty

I say what I said at St. Louis Catholic. Probably every Pope from the time when Augustine approved the death penalty (and Romans 13:3-4 became canon and later pivotal to Aquinas) till Pius XII's affirmation of the death penalty in 1952 (and he had more secure prisons than we have now) somewhat prior to John Paul II... all of them would recognize that life sentences simply do not offer sufficient punishment in some cases to satisfy not ccc #2267 but ccc #2266 which no one quotes and which reads in part: "Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense. Punishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced by the offense."

Justice Scalia is the only publicly known Catholic to point out that this goal vanishes in #2267 where it is replaced with the safety of society as primary which #2266 said was redressing the disorder as primary (look up Romans 13:3-4 in your NAB Bible and you'll see it sides with #2266 and leaves out deterrence while mentioning redressing).

A life sentence for example could not redress what we are seeing right now in North Carolina where a little girl, Shaniya Davis, 5 years old... appears to have been sold by her mother to a man for sexual use for money and that man seems to have then murdered her and left her in the woods. Anyone who sees life sentences as compensating for that is being indulgent beyond reason.

The military has life sentences of hard labor and that would perhaps suffice but civil life sentences are composed of part time work if any/ three meals a day/ library/ basketball/ no fear of ever paying bills during unemployment/ free medical and dental.

If you think that type of life sentence redresses raping a 5 year old and killing her, I pity you and I pity any Pope who thinks that way. Most Popes throughout history would have ordered such a man killed and fast. The papal executioner Bugatti executed over 500 papal state criminals during a 50 year period from 1800 til about 1850


* * * * * *


May 2002

God’s Justice and Ours

Antonin Scalia

Before proceeding to discuss the morality of capital punishment, I want to
make clear that my views on the subject have nothing to do with how I vote in
capital cases that come before the Supreme Court. That statement would not be
true if I subscribed to the conventional fallacy that the Constitution is a
“living document”—that is, a text that means from age to age whatever the society
(or perhaps the Court) thinks it ought to mean.



In recent years, that philosophy has been particularly well enshrined in our
Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, our case law dealing with the prohibition of
“cruel and unusual punishments.” Several of our opinions have said that what
falls within this prohibition is not static, but changes from generation to
generation, to comport with “the evolving standards of decency that mark the
progress of a maturing society.” Applying that principle, the Court came close,
in 1972, to abolishing the death penalty entirely. It ultimately did not do
so, but it has imposed, under color of the Constitution, procedural and substantive
limitations that did not exist when the Eighth Amendment was adopted—and some
of which had not even been adopted by a majority of the states at the time they
were judicially decreed. For example, the Court has prohibited the death penalty
for all crimes except murder, and indeed even for what might be called run–of–the–mill
murders, as opposed to those that are somehow characterized by a high degree
of brutality or depravity. It has prohibited the mandatory imposition of the
death penalty for any crime, insisting that in all cases the jury be permitted
to consider all mitigating factors and to impose, if it wishes, a lesser sentence.
And it has imposed an age limit at the time of the offense (it is currently
seventeen) that is well above what existed at common law.



If I subscribed to the proposition that I am authorized (indeed, I suppose
compelled) to intuit and impose our “maturing” society’s “evolving standards
of decency,” this essay would be a preview of my next vote in a death penalty
case. As it is, however, the Constitution that I interpret and apply is not
living but dead—or, as I prefer to put it, enduring. It means today not what
current society (much less the Court) thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant
when it was adopted. For me, therefore, the constitutionality of the death penalty
is not a difficult, soul–wrenching question. It was clearly permitted when the
Eighth Amendment was adopted (not merely for murder, by the way, but for all
felonies—including, for example, horse–thieving, as anyone can verify by watching
a western movie). And so it is clearly permitted today. There is plenty of room
within this system for “evolving standards of decency,” but the instrument of
evolution (or, if you are more tolerant of the Court’s approach, the herald
that evolution has occurred) is not the nine lawyers who sit on the Supreme
Court of the United States, but the Congress of the United States and the legislatures
of the fifty states, who may, within their own jurisdictions, restrict or abolish
the death penalty as they wish.



But while my views on the morality of the death penalty have nothing to do
with how I vote
as a judge, they have a lot to do with whether I can
or should be a judge at all. To put the point in the blunt terms employed by
Justice Harold Blackmun towards the end of his career on the bench, when he
announced that he would henceforth vote (as Justices William Brennan and Thurgood
Marshall had previously done) to overturn all death sentences, when I sit on
a Court that reviews and affirms capital convictions, I am part of “the machinery
of death.” My vote, when joined with at least four others, is, in most cases,
the last step that permits an execution to proceed. I could not take part in
that process if I believed what was being done to be immoral.



Capital cases are much different from the other life–and–death issues that
my Court sometimes faces: abortion, for example, or legalized suicide. There
it is not the state (of which I am in a sense the last instrument) that is decreeing
death, but rather private individuals whom the state has decided not to restrain.
One may argue (as many do) that the society has a moral obligation to restrain.
That moral obligation may weigh heavily upon the voter, and upon the legislator
who enacts the laws; but a judge, I think, bears no moral guilt for the laws
society has failed to enact. Thus, my difficulty with
Roe v. Wade
is a legal rather than a moral one: I do not believe (and, for two hundred years,
no one believed) that the Constitution contains a right to abortion. And if
a state were to permit abortion on demand, I would—and could in good conscience—vote
against an attempt to invalidate that law for the same reason that I vote against
the invalidation of laws that forbid abortion on demand: because the Constitution
gives the federal government (and hence me) no power over the matter.



With the death penalty, on the other hand, I am part of the criminal–law machinery
that imposes death—which extends from the indictment, to the jury conviction,
to rejection of the last appeal. I am aware of the ethical principle that one
can give “material cooperation” to the immoral act of another when the evil
that would attend failure to cooperate is even greater (for example, helping
a burglar tie up a householder where the alternative is that the burglar would
kill the householder). I doubt whether that doctrine is even applicable to the
trial judges and jurors who must themselves determine that the death sentence
will be imposed. It seems to me these individuals are not merely engaged in
“material cooperation” with someone else’s action, but are themselves decreeing
death on behalf of the state.



The same is true of appellate judges in those states where they are charged
with “reweighing” the mitigating and aggravating factors and determining de
novo whether the death penalty should be imposed: they are themselves decreeing
death. Where (as is the case in the federal system) the appellate judge merely
determines that the sentence pronounced by the trial court is in accordance
with law, perhaps the principle of material cooperation could be applied. But
as I have said, that principle demands that the good deriving from the cooperation
exceed the evil which is assisted. I find it hard to see how any appellate judge
could find this condition to be met, unless he believes retaining his seat on
the bench (rather than resigning) is somehow essential to preservation of the
society—which is of course absurd. (As Charles de Gaulle is reputed to have
remarked when his aides told him he could not resign as President of France
because he was the indispensable man: “
Mon ami, the cemeteries are full
of indispensable men.”)



I pause here to emphasize the point that in my view the choice for the judge
who believes the death penalty to be immoral is resignation, rather than simply
ignoring duly enacted, constitutional laws and sabotaging death penalty cases.
He has, after all, taken an oath to apply the laws and has been given no power
to supplant them with rules of his own. Of course if he feels strongly enough
he can go beyond mere resignation and lead a political campaign to abolish the
death penalty—and if that fails, lead a revolution. But rewrite the laws he
cannot do. This dilemma, of course, need not be confronted by a proponent of
the “living Constitution,” who believes that it means what it ought to mean.
If the death penalty is (in his view) immoral, then it is (hey, presto!) automatically
unconstitutional, and he can continue to sit while nullifying a sanction that
has been imposed, with no suggestion of its unconstitutionality, since the beginning
of the Republic. (You can see why the “living Constitution” has such attraction
for us judges.)



It is a matter of great consequence to me, therefore, whether the death penalty
is morally acceptable. As a Roman Catholic—and being unable to jump out of my
skin—I cannot discuss that issue without reference to Christian tradition and
the Church’s Magisterium.



The death penalty is undoubtedly wrong unless one accords to the state a scope
of moral action that goes beyond what is permitted to the individual. In my
view, the major impetus behind modern aversion to the death penalty is the equation
of private morality with governmental morality. This is a predictable (though
I believe erroneous and regrettable) reaction to modern, democratic self–government.



Few doubted the morality of the death penalty in the age that believed in the
divine right of kings. Or even in earlier times.
St. Paul had this to say (I
am quoting, as you might expect, the King James version):



Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the
ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.
For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not
be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of
the same: for he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that
which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the
minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore
ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.
(Romans 13:1–5)



This is not the Old Testament, I emphasize, but St. Paul. One can understand
his words as referring only to lawfully constituted authority, or even only
to lawfully constituted authority that rules justly. But the
core of his message is that government—however you want to limit that concept—derives its moral authority from God. It is the “minister of God” with powers to “revenge,” to “execute wrath,” including even wrath by the sword (which is unmistakably a reference to the death penalty). Paul of course did not believe that the individual possessed any such powers. Only a few lines before this passage, he wrote, “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” And in this
world the Lord repaid—did justice—through His minister, the state.



These passages from Romans represent the consensus of Western thought until
very recent times. Not just of Christian or religious thought, but of secular
thought regarding the powers of the state. That consensus has been upset, I
think, by the emergence of democracy. It is easy to see the hand of the Almighty
behind rulers whose forebears, in the dim mists of history, were supposedly
anointed by God, or who at least obtained their thrones in awful and unpredictable
battles whose outcome was determined by the Lord of Hosts, that is, the Lord
of Armies. It is much more difficult to see the hand of God—or any higher moral
authority—behind the fools and rogues (as the losers would have it) whom we
ourselves elect to do our own will. How can their power to avenge—to vindicate
the “public order”—be any greater than our own?



So it is no accident, I think, that the modern view that the death penalty
is immoral is centered in the West. That has little to do with the fact that
the West has a Christian tradition, and everything to do with the fact that
the West is the home of democracy. Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian
a country is the
less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral.
Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post–Christian Europe, and has least
support in the church–going
United States. I attribute that to the fact that,
for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an
innocent person is a big deal: it is a grave sin, which causes one to lose his
soul. But losing this life, in exchange for the next? The Christian attitude
is reflected in the words Robert Bolt’s play has Thomas More saying to the headsman:
“Friend, be not afraid of your office. You send me to God.” And when Cranmer
asks whether he is sure of that, More replies, “He will not refuse one who is
so blithe to go to Him.” For the nonbeliever, on the other hand, to deprive
a man of his life is to end his existence. What a horrible act!



Besides being less likely to regard death as an utterly cataclysmic
punishment, the Christian is also
more likely to regard punishment in
general as deserved. The doctrine of free will—the ability of man to resist
temptations to evil, which God will not permit beyond man’s capacity to resist—is
central to the Christian doctrine of salvation and damnation, heaven and hell.
The post–Freudian secularist, on the other hand, is more inclined to think that
people are what their history and circumstances have made them, and there is
little sense in assigning blame.



Of course those who deny the authority of a government to exact vengeance are
not entirely logical. Many crimes—for example, domestic murder in the heat of
passion—are neither deterred by punishment meted out to others nor likely to
be committed a second time by the same offender. Yet opponents of capital punishment
do not object to sending such an offender to prison, perhaps for life. Because
he
deserves punishment. Because it is just.



The mistaken tendency to believe that a democratic government, being nothing
more than the composite will of its individual citizens, has no more moral power
or authority than they do as individuals has adverse effects in other areas
as well. It fosters civil disobedience, for example, which proceeds on the assumption
that what the individual citizen considers an unjust law—even if it does not
compel
him to act unjustly—need not be obeyed. St. Paul would not agree.
“Ye must needs be subject,” he said, “not only for wrath, but also for conscience
sake.” For conscience sake. The reaction of people of faith to this tendency
of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be
resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible.
We have done that in this country (and continental
Europe has not) by preserving
in our public life many visible reminders that—in the words of a Supreme Court
opinion from the 1940s—“we are a religious people, whose institutions presuppose
a Supreme Being.” These reminders include: “In God we trust” on our coins, “one
nation, under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance, the opening of sessions of our
legislatures with a prayer, the opening of sessions of my Court with “God save
the United States and this Honorable Court,” annual Thanksgiving proclamations
issued by our President at the direction of Congress, and constant invocations
of divine support in the speeches of our political leaders, which often conclude,
“God bless America.” All this, as I say, is most un–European, and helps explain
why our people are more inclined to understand, as St. Paul did, that government
carries the sword as “the minister of God,” to “execute wrath” upon the evildoer.



A brief story about the aftermath of September 11 nicely illustrates how different
things are in secularized
Europe. I was at a conference of European and American
lawyers and jurists in
Rome when the planes struck the twin towers. All in attendance
were transfixed by the horror of the event, and listened with rapt attention
to the President’s ensuing address to the nation. When the speech had concluded,
one of the European conferees—a religious man—confided in me how jealous he
was that the leader of my nation could conclude his address with the words “God
bless the
United States.” Such invocation of the deity, he assured me, was absolutely
unthinkable in his country, with its Napoleonic tradition of extirpating religion
from public life.



It will come as no surprise from what I have said that I do not agree with
the encyclical
Evangelium Vitae and the new Catholic catechism (or the
very latest version of the new Catholic catechism), according to which the death
penalty can only be imposed to protect rather than avenge, and that since it
is (in most modern societies) not necessary for the former purpose, it is wrong.
That, by the way, is how I read those documents—and not, as Avery Cardinal Dulles
would read them,
simply as an affirmation of two millennia of Christian teaching that retribution is a proper purpose (indeed, the principal purpose) of criminal punishment, but merely adding the “prudential judgment” that in modern circumstances condign retribution “rarely if ever” justifies death. (See “Catholicism &
Capital Punishment,” FT, April 2001.) I cannot square that interpretation with
the following passage from the encyclical:



It is clear that, for these [permissible purposes of penal justice] to be achieved, the nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not
go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity:
in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society.
Today, however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the
penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically nonexistent
.
(Emphases deleted and added.)



It is true enough that the paragraph of the encyclical that precedes this passage
acknowledges (in accord with traditional Catholic teaching) that “the primary
purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is ‘to redress the disorder
caused by the offense’” by “imposing on the offender an adequate punishment
for the crime.” But it seems to me quite impossible to interpret the later passage’s
phrase “when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society” as including
“defense” through the redress of disorder achieved by adequate punishment. Not
only does the word “defense” not readily lend itself to that strange interpretation,
but the immediately following explanation of why, in modern times, “defense”
rarely if ever requires capital punishment
has no bearing whatever upon the
adequacy of retribution
. In fact, one might say that it has an inverse
bearing.



How in the world can modernity’s “steady improvements in the organization of
the penal system” render the death penalty less condign for a particularly heinous
crime? One might think that commitment to a really horrible penal system (
Devil’s
Island
, for example) might be almost as bad as death. But nice clean cells with
television sets, exercise rooms, meals designed by nutritionists, and conjugal
visits? That would seem to render the death penalty more, rather than less,
necessary. So also would the greatly increased capacity for evil—the greatly
increased power to produce moral “disorder”—placed in individual hands by modern
technology. Could
St. Paul or St. Thomas even have envisioned a crime by an
individual (as opposed to one by a ruler, such as Herod’s slaughter of the innocents)
as enormous as that of Timothy McVeigh or of the men who destroyed three thousand
innocents in the
World Trade Center? If just retribution is a legitimate purpose
(indeed, the principal legitimate purpose) of capital punishment, can one possibly
say with a straight face that nowadays death would “rarely if ever” be appropriate?



So I take the encyclical and the latest, hot–off–the–presses version of the
catechism (a supposed encapsulation of the “deposit” of faith and the Church’s
teaching regarding a moral order that does not change) to mean that retribution
is not a valid purpose of capital punishment. Unlike such other hard Catholic
doctrines as the prohibition of birth control and of abortion, this is not a
moral position that the Church has always—or indeed
ever before—maintained.
There have been Christian opponents of the death penalty, just as there have
been Christian pacifists, but neither of those positions has ever been that
of the Church. The current predominance of opposition to the death penalty is
the legacy of Napoleon, Hegel, and Freud rather than
St. Paul and St. Augustine.
I mentioned earlier Thomas More, who has long been regarded in this country
as the patron saint of lawyers, and who has recently been declared by the Vatican
the patron saint of politicians (I am not sure that is a promotion). One of
the charges leveled by that canonized saint’s detractors was that, as Lord Chancellor,
he was too quick to impose the death penalty.



I am therefore happy to learn from the canonical experts I have consulted that
the position set forth in
Evangelium Vitae and in the latest version
of the Catholic catechism does not purport to be binding teaching—that is, it
need not be accepted by practicing Catholics, though they must give it thoughtful
and respectful consideration. It would be remarkable to think otherwise—that
a couple of paragraphs in an encyclical almost entirely devoted not to crime
and punishment but to abortion and euthanasia was intended authoritatively to
sweep aside (if one could) two thousand years of Christian teaching.



So I have given this new position thoughtful and careful consideration—and
I disagree. That is not to say I favor the death penalty (I am judicially and
judiciously neutral on that point); it is only to say that I do not find the
death penalty immoral. I am happy to have reached that conclusion, because I
like my job, and would rather not resign. And I am happy because I do not think
it would be a good thing if American Catholics running for legislative office
had to oppose the death penalty (most of them would not be elected); if American
Catholics running for Governor had to promise commutation of all death sentences
(most of them would never reach the Governor’s mansion); if American Catholics
were ineligible to go on the bench in all jurisdictions imposing the death penalty;
or if American Catholics were subject to recusal when called for jury duty in
capital cases.



I find it ironic that the Church’s new (albeit nonbinding) position on the
death penalty—which, if accepted, would have these
disastrous consequences—is
said to rest upon “prudential considerations.” Is it prudent, when one is not
certain enough about the point to proclaim it in a binding manner (and with
good reason, given the long and consistent Christian tradition to the contrary),
to effectively urge the retirement of Catholics from public life in a country
where the federal government and thirty–eight of the states (comprising about
85 percent of the population) believe the death penalty is sometimes just and
appropriate? Is it prudent to imperil acceptance of the Church’s hard but traditional
teachings on birth control and abortion and euthanasia (teachings that
have
been
proclaimed in a binding manner, a distinction that the average Catholic
layman is unlikely to grasp) by packaging them—under the wrapper “respect for
life”—with another uncongenial doctrine
that everyone knows does not represent
the traditional Christian view
? Perhaps, one is invited to conclude, all
four of them are recently made–up. We need some new staffers at the Congregation
of Prudence in the
Vatican. At least the new doctrine should have been urged
only upon secular
Europe, where it is at home.






Antonin Scalia is a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. This
article is adapted from remarks given at a conference sponsored by the Pew Forum
on Religion and Public Life at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Death Penalty: Chaput - Colorado


Let’s end the death penalty, now: NCR: March 11, 2009




Capital punishment, euthanasia, abortion and war: All these issues raise profound questions for Catholics as we reflect on the sanctity of human life. But while they all touch on human dignity, they don’t all have the same moral content.

Euthanasia and abortion are always, intrinsically wrong because they always involve an intentional killing of innocent human life. War and capital punishment, in contrast, can sometimes be morally acceptable as an expression of society’s right to self-defense.

Both Scripture and a long tradition of Catholic thought support the legitimacy of the death penalty under certain limited circumstances. But as Pope John Paul II argued so eloquently, the conditions that require the death penalty for society’s self-defense and the discharge of justice in modern, developed nations almost never exist. As a result, the right road for a civilized society is to abolish the death penalty altogether.

Readers of this column know that I’ve written and spoken many times, for many years, against the death penalty. But I’m hardly alone in that view; bishops and many lay Catholics around the world and across the United States have urged public officials to end capital punishment for more than four decades. Earlier this year the four bishops of Colorado jointly revisited the issue yet again, saying:

As the Catholic bishops of Colorado, and consistent with Christian respect for the sanctity of human life, we oppose the use of capital punishment in our state.

We believe that all people have a natural right to life, because every human being is made in the image and likeness of God, who alone is Lord of life from its beginning until its end (cf. Gn 1: 26-28).

Obviously, behavior that threatens or takes lives cannot be tolerated. Those whose actions harm others must be held accountable. Society has a right to establish laws that protect all people and promote the common good. But the need to punish violent criminals does not logically lead, in our day, to the conclusion that capital punishment should be employed.

We grieve for the victims of murder and the terrible suffering of their families. In capital murder cases, we recognize that grave punishment is needed both to serve justice and to ensure the safety of the community. But we also believe, as Pope John Paul II once observed, that improvements in the penal system of developed countries like our own make the death penalty unnecessary to protect the community.

The state of Colorado has other means available to it besides the death penalty to exact justice and render the criminal unable to do harm. We need to continue the reform of our criminal justice system, and we need to impose punishment in a way that protects society from violence while avoiding further killing under official guise.

All human life, from conception to natural death, including the life of a convicted murderer, has intrinsic value. For the sake of our own humanity, we need to turn away from a mistaken idea of justice based—in practice—on further and unneeded violence.

The Colorado General Assembly currently has before it an important and hopeful piece of legislation—House Bill (HB) 1274—that would end the death penalty in our state. Support for capital punishment has steadily eroded around the country in recent years as more people come to see the inadequacy of the death penalty as a deterrent, the racially and ethnically biased manner in which it’s often applied, and the number of innocent persons wrongly condemned to death who have been exonerated by new DNA techniques.

I ask Catholics around the archdiocese to please contact their elected state lawmakers. Please ask our legislators to support HB 1274. We need to end the death penalty now; it’s the right course for a humane society.

For information on who your legislator is and how to contact that person, visit cocatholicconference.org online or call the Colorado Catholic Conference at 303-894-8808.


Result


Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Archbishop Chaput Credited for Death Penalty Vote

The Colorado House yesterday voted 33-32 to repeal the state's death penalty. The measure now goes to the Senate. An interesting bit of drama occurred on the floor during the vote and only the Durango Herald has picked up on it, my emphases:

Debate lasted only a few minutes Tuesday, apparently because most of the 65 representatives had made up their minds. All except Ed Vigil.

The freshman Democrat from
Fort Garland sat still as the House's electronic board tallied the vote - a 32-32 tie.

Vigil, a former district attorney's investigator, thinks the death penalty is a useful tool. In a 2007 case, Jose Luis Rubi-Nava confessed to killing his girlfriend in Douglas County by dragging her behind his car. The threat of the death penalty secured Rubi-Nava's plea, Vigil said.

"As soon as the death penalty became part of the equation, he pled guilty and got a life sentence," he said.

But Vigil also was thinking about moral appeals he had heard, including from Archbishop Charles Chaput, the senior Roman Catholic clergyman in Colorado.

Vigil bit his lip and ran a hand back through his hair. Other House members stood up and looked his way as a silent minute dragged by.
At last, he reached across the desk and pushed the green button for "yes."

The death penalty
repeal passed 33-32.


Civil Trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: We Win

The case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is now coming up. The forces of right, truth and justice, as well as the practitioners of self-defense by intimidation against future civil atrocities, are scandalized by the announcement by Attorney General Eric Holder that KSM will be tried in federal – not military – court with the protection of civil law and the possibility of acquittal.

This seems outrageous and unreasonable. Bill McGurn, writing in today’s WSJ (Tuesday November 17, 2009, A23), quotes Andrew McCarthy, successful prosecutor of Omar Abdel Rajman for the first bombing of the WTC to the effect that “At first, I was of the mind that a criminal prosecution would uphold all our high-falutin’ rhetoric about the constitution and majesty of the law. But when you get down to the nitty gritty of a trial, you see one huge problem: The criminal justice system imposes limits on the government and gives the defendant all sorts of access to information, because we’d rather have the government lose than unfairly convict a man. You can’t take that position with an enemy who is at war with you and trying to bring that government down.”

My Comment: However, we reason within the context of the culture in which we find ourselves: a culture of death. Whenever we kill a man – except in the most extreme situation in which there is no other way to live except by killing him – we damage ourselves. As reminder of the development that has taken place in the Church and civil society particularly in the time around and following Vatican II, let me pass review of the bold venture of John Paul II: “On this matter [the death penalty], there is a growing tendency, both in the Church and in civil society, to demand that it be applied in a very limited way or even that it be abolished completely. The problem must be viewed in the context of a system of penal justice ever more in line with human dignity and thus, in the end, with God’s plan for man and society. The primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is ‘to redress the disorder caused by the offense.’ Public authority must redress the violation of personal and social rights by imposing on the offender an adequate punishment of the crime, as a condition for the offender to regain the exercise of his or her freedom. In this way authority also fulfills the purpose of defending public order and ensuring people’s safety, while at the same time offering the offender an incentive and help to change his or her behavior and be rehabilitated… Today… as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such casers are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”[1]

My point: we do not mete out justice by killing. We damage ourselves. I remember my thinking on 9/11 as I was in the vicinity of the WTC. My nephew was in the building and I was searching for remains. My first thoughts were the hope that there would be no retaliation on our part since there is no justice achieved that way (my mind goes to the death of Karla Faye Tucker, which achieved no justice) and we only damage ourselves, besides damaging others by the example. We perpetuate the deconstruction of the human person and dig the culture of death deeper into the fabric of society. I say march to civil trial, hew to a civil law based on Christian principles, and affirm life. Then, we win.



[1] John Paul II, “The Gospel of Life” #56.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

How Did the Church Come to be Understood as "Communio?"


Understanding the Church as “Communio” in the Light of the Revolution in the Meaning of Revelation and Faith:

Source – J. Ratzinger

[“Here ‘Revelation’ is always a concept denoting an act. The word refers to the act in which God shows himself, not to the objectified result of this act. And because this is so, the receiving subject is always also a part of the concept of ‘revelation.’ Where there is no one to perceive revelation,’ no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed. By definition, revelation requires a someone who apprehends it.” “Then revelation precedes Scripture and becomes deposited in Scripture but is not simply identical with it . This in turn means that revelation is always something greater than what is merely written down.” (Ratzinger “Milestones…. 108-109)]

The ontological starting point for unmediated realism: The Word of God.

· The Ultimate Reality: Not sensible things, but the Word of God Which-Who is the creating source of all things.

· How is this Reality known? It consists in becoming the “Act” which is the Person of the Word Himself. Therefore, one becomes the Word in oneself and experiences the truth of it in the act of transcending oneself. Therefore, objective knowing of the Greatest Reality that is is an experience of oneself in the act of going out of self.

· This is the act of the Virgin in her fiat. This is ecclesiogenesis: becoming the Church. The Church is engendered as an organism by the reception that is a “becoming” of the Word. One becomes “another Christ.”

· This act of “becoming” is called “Faith.”

Benedict XVI: Keynote Address to the Synod on the Word of God of October 2008:

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

At the beginning of our Synod the Liturgy of the Hours proposes a passage from Psalm 18 on the Word of God: praise for His Word, expression of the joy of Israel in learning it and, in it, to learn about His will and His face. I would like to meditate on a few verses of this Psalm with you.

It begins like this: “In aeternum, Domine, verbum tuum constitutum est in caelo... firmasti terram, et permanet”. This refers to the solidity of the Word. It is solid, it is the true reality on which we must base our life. Let us remember the words of Jesus who continues the words of this Psalm: “Sky and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away”. Humanly speaking, the word, my human word, is almost nothing in reality, but a breath. As soon as it is pronounced, it disappears. It seems like nothing. But already the human word has incredible force. It is words that create history, it is words that form thoughts, the thoughts that create the word. It is the word that forms history, reality.

Even more, the Word of God is the foundation of everything, it is the true reality. And to be realistic, we must rely upon this reality. We must change our notion that matter, solid things, things we can touch, is the most solid, the most certain reality. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord speaks to us about the two possible foundations for building the house of one’s life: sand and rock. He who builds on sand only builds on visible and tangible things, on success, on career, on money. Apparently these are the true realities. But all this one day will vanish. We can see this now with the fall of two large banks: this money disappears, it is nothing. And thus all things, which seem to be the true realities we can count on, are only realities of a secondary order. Who builds his life on these realities, on matter, on success, on appearances, builds upon sand. Only the Word of God is the foundation of all reality, it is as stable as the heavens and more than the heavens, it is reality. Therefore, we must change our concept of realism. The realist is he who recognizes the Word of God, in this apparently weak reality, as the foundation of all things. Realist is he who builds his life on this foundation, which is permanent. Thus the first verses of the Psalm invite us to discover what reality is and how to find the foundation of our life, how to build life.


From Cardinal Ouellet Summary on the Synod on the Word of God, October 2008: “The

Transition From Noetic Dimension of Truths to be Believed In” to Revelation as Personal Self-Communication of God.”

“Thanks to the Trinitarian and Christocentric vision of Vatican Council II, the Church renewed consciousness in its own mystery and mission. The Dogmatic Constitution, Lumen Gentium, and the pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, develop an ecclesiology of communion that relies on the renewed concept of Revelation. In fact, the dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum marked a real turning point in the manner of dealing with Divine Revelation. Instead of privileging, as before, the noetic dimension of truths to be believed in, the Council Fathers emphasized the dynamic and dialogic accent [2] of Revelation as personal self-communication of God. Thus they put down the bases for a more vivid encounter and dialogue between God who calls and His people who respond.


This turning point was vastly welcomed as a decisive fact by theologians, exegetes and pastors.[3] However, one generally recognizes the fact that the Constitution Dei Verbum was not sufficiently received and that the turning point still has not achieved all the fruits desired and expected in the life and mission of the Church.[4] Taking into account the progress to date, the question should be: why has the model of personal communication [5] not penetrated the Church's conscience, prayer, and pastoral practices as well as the theological and exegetical method? The Synod should propose concrete solutions to bridge the lacunae and find a remedy to the ignorance of the Scriptures which adds to today's difficulties in evangelization.”

Selective Reporting on Catholicism and Bloomberg: Clark Hoyt and NYT


To return to Archbishop Dolan’s umbrage at New York Time’s anti-Catholicism well documented in just the last month, it’s worthy of mention that the Time’s “ombudsman” Clark Hoyt has appeared to soften the paper’s advertising of “That Bloomberg Run- away…” (NYT Sunday Opinion, Sunday, November 15, 2009, p.10). This time Hoyt admits that “it is a tougher question whether Times coverage before the election contributed to an exaggerated sense of Bloomberg inevitability – a sense generally reflected in New York’s news media.” The polling for such an opinion was not done by the Times itself but was farmed out and processed by two polling organizations, Marist Institute for Public Opinion and Quinnipiac University polling Institute. Lee Miringoff, the director of the Marist Institute, said she “tried to warn reporters at a news conference – which the Times [Janet Elder] did not attend - that the race would be closer. The Quinnipiac article cautioned that in races that appeared to be a “blowout” - in this case for Bloomberg - tend to tighten as voting day approaches.

For example, an “article describing how Bloomberg operatives sold ‘inevitability’ while secretly fretting over private polls showing ‘alarmingly low’ numbers. It included accounts of how the campaign strong-armed one potentially difficult foe out of the race and pressured the White House to keep President Obama from helping Thompson, the Democratic nominee.”

Since Bloomberg won by a very narrow margin anticipated by “alarmingly low numbers” after an expenditure of one hundred million dollars on the campaign, leads one to think of the intense “cahoots” that the Times and Bloomberg are “in.” This is disappointing in a medium which (perhaps consummately naive to say it [but must be said]) should be in service to truth.

It is interesting that the Times is admitting its bias (not without trying to control and dampen the criticism), and trying to defend itself (or at least to soften it) in the one, against the Catholic Church (roundly denied by Hoyt), in the other, for one of its (ideological) own. I sense growing fear in the media’s elite with the proliferation of the blog.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Thomas J. Tobin, Bishop of Providence to Congressman Patrick Kennedy


November 11, 2009

Dear Congressman Kennedy

“The fact that I disagree with the hierarchy on some issues does not make me any less of a Catholic.” (Congressman Patrick Kennedy)

Since our recent correspondence has been rather public, I hope you don’t mind if I share a few reflections about your practice of the faith in this public forum. I usually wouldn’t do that – that is speak about someone’s faith in a public setting – but in our well-documented exchange of letters about health care and abortion, it has emerged as an issue. I also share these words publicly with the thought that they might be instructive to other Catholics, including those in prominent positions of leadership.

For the moment I’d like to set aside the discussion of health care reform, as important and relevant as it is, and focus on one statement contained in your letter of October 29, 2009, in which you write, “The fact that I disagree with the hierarchy on some issues does not make me any less of a Catholic.” That sentence certainly caught my attention and deserves a public response, lest it go unchallenged and lead others to believe it’s true. And it raises an important question: What does it mean to be a Catholic?

“The fact that I disagree with the hierarchy on some issues does not make me any less of a Catholic.” Well, in fact, Congressman, in a way it does. Although I wouldn’t choose those particular words, when someone rejects the teachings of the Church, especially on a grave matter, a life-and-death issue like abortion, it certainly does diminish their ecclesial communion, their unity with the Church. This principle is based on the Sacred Scripture and Tradition of the Church and is made more explicit in recent documents.

For example, the “Code of Canon Law” says, “Lay persons are bound by an obligation and possess the right to acquire a knowledge of Christian doctrine adapted to their capacity and condition so that they can live in accord with that doctrine.” (Canon 229, #1)

The “Catechism of the Catholic Church” says this: “Mindful of Christ’s words to his apostles, ‘He who hears you, hears me,’ the faithful receive with docility the teaching and directives that their pastors give them in different forms.” (#87)

Or consider this statement of the Church: “It would be a mistake to confuse the proper autonomy exercised by Catholics in political life with the claim of a principle that prescinds from the moral and social teaching of the Church.” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 2002)

There’s lots of canonical and theological verbiage there, Congressman, but what it means is that if you don’t accept the teachings of the Church your communion with the Church is flawed, or in your own words, makes you “less of a Catholic.”

But let’s get down to a more practical question; let’s approach it this way: What does it mean, really, to be a Catholic? After all, being a Catholic has to mean something, right?

Well, in simple terms – and here I refer only to those more visible, structural elements of Church membership – being a Catholic means that you’re part of a faith community that possesses a clearly defined authority and doctrine, obligations and expectations. It means that you believe and accept the teachings of the Church, especially on essential matters of faith and morals; that you belong to a local Catholic community, a parish; that you attend Mass on Sundays and receive the sacraments regularly; that you support the Church, personally, publicly, spiritually and financially.

Congressman, I’m not sure whether or not you fulfill the basic requirements of being a Catholic, so let me ask: Do you accept the teachings of the Church on essential matters of faith and morals, including our stance on abortion? Do you belong to a local Catholic community, a parish? Do you attend Mass on Sundays and receive the sacraments regularly? Do you support the Church, personally, publicly, spiritually and financially?

In your letter you say that you “embrace your faith.” Terrific. But if you don’t fulfill the basic requirements of membership, what is it exactly that makes you a Catholic? Your baptism as an infant? Your family ties? Your cultural heritage?

Your letter also says that your faith “acknowledges the existence of an imperfect humanity.” Absolutely true. But in confronting your rejection of the Church’s teaching, we’re not dealing just with “an imperfect humanity” – as we do when we wrestle with sins such as anger, pride, greed, impurity or dishonesty. We all struggle with those things, and often fail.

Your rejection of the Church’s teaching on abortion falls into a different category – it’s a deliberate and obstinate act of the will; a conscious decision that you’ve re-affirmed on many occasions. Sorry, you can’t chalk it up to an “imperfect humanity.” Your position is unacceptable to the Church and scandalous to many of our members. It absolutely diminishes your communion with the Church.

Congressman Kennedy, I write these words not to embarrass you or to judge the state of your conscience or soul. That’s ultimately between you and God. But your description of your relationship with the Church is now a matter of public record, and it needs to be challenged. I invite you, as your bishop and brother in Christ, to enter into a sincere process of discernment, conversion and repentance. It’s not too late for you to repair your relationship with the Church, redeem your public image, and emerge as an authentic “profile in courage,” especially by defending the sanctity of human life for all people, including unborn children. And if I can ever be of assistance as you travel the road of faith, I would be honored and happy to do so.

Sincerely yours,

Thomas J. Tobin

Bishop of Providence

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Leo the Great - Chalcedon (451) and the "New Adam"


The import of today’s feast is the combination of Leo’s Chalcedon and Maximus the Confessor’s Constantinople III in the Christology and consequent anthropology that has everything to do with integral human development in the Third Millennium. That is, the transition from an essentialist metaphysic of seeing the human person as “individual substance of a rational nature” to the dynamic “man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself,” is due to the dynamic understanding of the Jesus Christ, the God-man as a single Being with a single (Personal) Will obeying the Father to death. It is the anthropology of priesthood and work (mediating between self and God for others). The ramifications are immense.

The text of Chalcedon (451):

“Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all teach that with one accord we confess one and the same son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in human nature, truly God and the same with a rational soul and a body truly man, consubstantial with the Father according to divinity, and consubstantial with us, according to human nature, like unto us in all things except sin,; indeed born of the Father before the ages according to divine nature, but in the last days the same born of the virgin Mary, Mother of God according to human nature; for us and for our deliverance, one and the same Christ only begotten Son our Lord, acknowledged in two natures, without mingling, without change, indivisibly, undividedly, the distinction of the natures nowhere removed on account of the union but rather the peculiarity of each nature being kept, and uniting in one person and substance, not divided or separated into two persons, but one and the same son only begotten God Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as from the beginning the prophets taught about Him and the Lord Jesus Himself taught us, and the creed of our fathers has handed down to us.”

Two hundred thirty years intervene as the Church – not without concomitant political intrigue - tries to untangle the conundrum of how can Christ have a human will that is humanly free, and at the same time be the will of a divine Person who cannot sin. The answer is that sin is not part of true freedom. As Christ is the meaning of man, so also Christ’s freedom as man is the meaning of human freedom. This was the work of Maximus the Confessor who transcended the abstractive imagination – necessary as it is - that tends to “reify” philosophical and theological profundity. This proliferation of philosophoumena is the drawback of objectifying thought. The key consists in realizing that it is not the will as a sort of “substantialized” faculty that wills, but the person. Once philosophers talk about the will as if it were “a subsistent being,” the discourse unintentionally but tragically treats “the will” as if it were an entity in itself.

It is not. It is the tendency of the person toward the good. That realized, it becomes clear that it is the divine Person of the Logos who wills with what we call “the divine Will” and “the human will.” It is the same “I” of the Logos desire in the human mode of human willing. Hence, there is identity in the divine and the human willing which is “Personal,” the one divine Logos willing and obeying the Will of the Father to death on the Cross. This, then, is the anthropology of Redemption.

Ratzinger: “Maximus the Confessor, the great theological interpreter of this second phase of the development of the Christological dogma, illuminates this whole context by reference to Jesus’ prayer on the Mount of Olives, which, as we already saw in Thesis 1, expresses Jesus’ unique relationship to God. Indeed, it is as if we were actually looking in on the inner life of the Word-made-man. It is revealed to us in the sentence which remains the measure and model of all real prayer: ‘Not what I will, but what thou wilt’ (Mk. 14, 36). Jesus’ human will assimilates itself to the will of the Son. In doing this, he receives the Son’s identity, i.e., the complete subordination of the I to the Thou, the self-giving and self-expropriation of the I to the Thou. This is the very essence of him who is pure relation and pure act. Wherever the I give itself to the Thou, there is freedom because this involves the reception of the ‘form of God.’”[1]

This can be made even clearer by the simpler form in which Ratzinger writes it: “The Council of Constantinople has analyzed concretely the problem of the two natures and one person in Christ in view of the problem of the will of Jesus. We are reminded firmly that there exists a specific will of the man Jesus that is not absorbed into the divine will. But this human will follows the divine will and thus becomes a single will with it, not, however, in a forced way but by way of freedom. The metaphysical duplicity of a human will and a divine will is not eliminated, but in the personal sphere, the area of freedom, there is accomplished a fusion of the two, so that this becomes not one single natural will but one personal will. This free union – a mode of union created by love - is a union higher and more intimate than a purely natural union. It corresponds to the highest union which can exist, the union of the Trinity.

“The Council explains this union by a saying of the Lord given in the Gospel of John: ‘I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me’ (John 6, 38). Here the divine Logos is speaking, and speaking of the human will of Jesus in the mode by which he calls his will the will of the Logos. Wit this exegesis of John 6, 38, the Council proves the unity of the subject. In Jesus there are not two ‘I’s’ but only one. The Logos speaks of the will and human thought of Jesus using the ‘I,’ because the human will has become fully one with the will of the Logos, and with it has become pure assent to the will of the Father.”[2]

The Text of Constantinople III (680-681):

“And we proclaim equally two natural volitions or wills in him and two natural principles of action which undergo no division, no change, no partition, no confusion, in accordance with the teaching of the holy fathers. And the two natural wills not in opposition, as the impious heretics said, far from it, but his human will following, and not resisting or struggling, rather in fact subject to his divine and all powerful will. For the will of the flesh had to be moved, and yet to be subjected to the divine will, according to the most wise Athanasius. For just as his flesh is said to be and is flesh of the Word of God, so too the natural will of his flesh is said to and does belong to the Word of God, just as he says himself: I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of the Father who sent me, calling his own will that of his flesh, since his flesh too became his own. For in the same way that his all holy and blameless animate flesh was not destroyed in being made divine but remained in its own limit and category, so his human will as well was not destroyed by being made divine, but rather was preserved, according to the theologian Gregory, who says: "For his willing, when he is considered as saviour, is not in opposition to God, being made divine in its entirety"… Therefore, protecting on all sides the "no confusion" and "no division", we announce the whole in these brief words: Believing our lord Jesus Christ, even after his incarnation, to be one of the holy Trinity and our true God, we say that he has two natures [naturas] shining forth in his one subsistence[subsistentia] in which he demonstrated the miracles and the sufferings throughout his entire providential dwelling here, not in appearance but in truth, the difference of the natures being made known in the same one subsistence in that each nature wills and performs the things that are proper to it in a communion with the other; then in accord with this reasoning we hold that two natural wills and principles of action meet in correspondence for the salvation of the human race.

Constantinople III as Key to Christological-Priestly Anthropology (“Theology of the Cross): Gift of Self

This work of Constantinople III, which views Christ, the divine Person, not as a static substance with two natures (divine and human) as accidental essences in a kind of objectivized theological “erector set,” has been the key to understanding Jesus Christ as the “New Adam” and “Last Man.” It is an understanding that takes its dynamic, the dynamic of person - the "I" found in the the experience of the the divine Person as self-transcendent. It is Trinitarian dynamic translated into a metaphysics of the image. Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes #22 proclaims that “it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come, Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.” Therefore, this dynamic of the relationality of the Son to the Father is lived out through the human will and body to obedient death on the Cross. It is the full and perfect immanentization of the eschaton as the apex and goal of all human history. The supreme point of human history has already been reached, and time is granted for the integral development into that supreme achievement that is Christ.

The Being of Christ as dynamic God-man is the model for all men to actively become “priests of their own existence” (Escriva). That dynamism is personal in the sense that it is the Person who is the Agent of two ontologically distinct wills, and Who wills as one will with both (personally). Ratzinger writes:

“A theology of the incarnation situated too much on the level of essence, may be tempted to be satisfied with the ontological phenomenon: God’s being and man’s have been conjoined. This appears as the real turning-point, and in comparison with it the factual life of Jesus and his death are secondary, as it were the realization of a principle which ultimate adds nothing to the principle itself. But since it is made clear that man’s being is not that of a pure essence, and that he only attains his reality by his activity, it is at once evident that we cannot rest content with a purely essentialist outlook. Man’s being must therefore be examined precisely in its activities. If this is done, the concept of the ‘novus homo’ takes concrete shape in that of the ‘agnus innocens.’ It then becomes apparent that Jesus’ concrete reality is ‘pro me’ (and ‘pro nobis’) and for this very reason is a self-sacrificing existence in the mystery of the cross. This alone shows the wholly personal relationship to Christ, for Christ is not a great super-ego into which the I-monads are organized, but a most individual human being who looks at me personally. His relation to me is not that of a great corporate personality. He enters into a personal. Conversation of love; he has something to say to me alone, which no one else knows (cf. Rev 2. 17). Pascal’s intense piety which made him place in the Lord’s mouth the words: ‘In my agony I thought of you; I shed these drops of blood for you,’ is biblically entirely justified in view of the Pauline ‘pro me.’ Thus Christ no longer appears as a merely general form to which human existences are conformed. His exemplarity means the concrete summons to follow him, and this gives meaning to man’s cross; it calls him to share in the ‘pro me’ of Jesus Christ in a Christian ‘pro invicem’ based on the ‘cum Christo.’”[3]



[1] J. Ratzinger, “Behold the Pierced One,” Ignatius (1986) 40-41.

[2] Benedict XVI, “Journey to Easter” Crossroad (1987) 101-102.

[3] J. Ratzinger, Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II Herder and Herder ed. H. Vorgrimler (1966) Vol V, “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” “The Church and Man’s Calling – The Dignity of the Human Person,” (1966) 160.

Monday, November 09, 2009

Fall of the Berlin Wall - November 9, 2009

Centesimus Annus

Among the many factors involved in the fall of oppressive regimes, some deserve special mention. Certainly, the decisive factor which gave rise to the changes was the violation of the rights of workers. It cannot be forgotten that the fundamental crisis of systems claiming to express the rule and indeed the dictatorship of the working class began with the great upheavals which took place in Poland in the name of solidarity. It was the throngs of working people which foreswore the ideology which presumed to speak in their name. On the basis of a hard, lived experience of work and of oppression, it was they who recovered and, in a sense, rediscovered the content and principles of the Church's social doctrine.

Also worthy of emphasis is the fact that the fall of this kind of "bloc" or empire was accomplished almost everywhere by means of peaceful protest, using only the weapons of truth and justice. While Marxism held that only by exacerbating social conflicts was it possible to resolve them through violent confrontation, the protests which led to the collapse of Marxism tenaciously insisted on trying every avenue of negotiation, dialogue, and witness to the truth, appealing to the conscience of the adversary and seeking to reawaken in him a sense of shared human dignity.

It seemed that the European order resulting from the Second World War and sanctioned by the Yalta Agreements could only be overturned by another war. Instead, it has been overcome by the non-violent commitment of people who, while always refusing to yield to the force of power, succeeded time after time in finding effective ways of bearing witness to the truth. This disarmed the adversary, since violence always needs to justify itself through deceit, and to appear, however falsely, to be defending a right or responding to a threat posed by others.54 Once again I thank God for having sustained people's hearts amid difficult trials, and I pray that this example will prevail in other places and other circumstances. May people learn to fight for justice without violence, renouncing class struggle in their internal disputes, and war in international ones.

24. The second factor in the crisis was certainly the inefficiency of the economic system, which is not to be considered simply as a technical problem, but rather a consequence of the violation of the human rights to private initiative, to ownership of property and to freedom in the economic sector. To this must be added the cultural and national dimension: it is not possible to understand man on the basis of economics alone, nor to define him simply on the basis of class membership. Man is understood in a more complete way when he is situated within the sphere of culture through his language, history, and the position he takes towards the fundamental events of life, such as birth, love, work and death. At the heart of every culture lies the attitude man takes to the greatest mystery: the mystery of God. Different cultures are basically different ways of facing the question of the meaning of personal existence. When this question is eliminated, the culture and moral life of nations are corrupted. For this reason the struggle to defend work was spontaneously linked to the struggle for culture and for national rights.

But the true cause of the new developments was the spiritual void brought about by atheism, which deprived the younger generations of a sense of direction and in many cases led them, in the irrepressible search for personal identity and for the meaning of life, to rediscover the religious roots of their national cultures, and to rediscover the person of Christ himself as the existentially adequate response to the desire in every human heart for goodness, truth and life. This search was supported by the witness of those who, in difficult circumstances and under persecution, remained faithful to God. Marxism had promised to uproot the need for God from the human heart, but the results have shown that it is not possible to succeed in this without throwing the heart into turmoil.

25. The events of 1989 are an example of the success of willingness to negotiate and of the Gospel spirit in the face of an adversary determined not to be bound by moral principles. These events are a warning to those who, in the name of political realism, wish to banish law and morality from the political arena. Undoubtedly, the struggle which led to the changes of 1989 called for clarity, moderation, suffering and sacrifice. In a certain sense, it was a struggle born of prayer, and it would have been unthinkable without immense trust in God, the Lord of history, who carries the human heart in his hands. It is by uniting his own sufferings for the sake of truth and freedom to the sufferings of Christ on the Cross that man is able to accomplish the miracle of peace and is in a position to discern the often narrow path between the cowardice which gives in to evil and the violence which, under the illusion of fighting evil, only makes it worse.

Nevertheless, it cannot be forgotten that the manner in which the individual exercises his freedom is conditioned in innumerable ways. While these certainly have an influence on freedom, they do not determine it; they make the exercise of freedom more difficult or less difficult, but they cannot destroy it. Not only is it wrong from the ethical point of view to disregard human nature, which is made for freedom, but in practice it is impossible to do so. Where society is so organized as to reduce arbitrarily or even suppress the sphere in which freedom is legitimately exercised, the result is that the life of society becomes progressively disorganized and goes into decline.

Moreover, man, who was created for freedom, bears within himself the wound of original sin, which constantly draws him towards evil and puts him in need of redemption. Not only is this doctrine an integral part of Christian revelation; it also has great hermeneutical value insofar as it helps one to understand human reality. Man tends towards good, but he is also capable of evil. He can transcend his immediate interest and still remain bound to it. The social order will be all the more stable, the more it takes this fact into account and does not place in opposition personal interest and the interests of society as a whole, but rather seeks ways to bring them into fruitful harmony. In fact, where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity. When people think they possess the secret of a perfect social organization which makes evil impossible, they also think that they can use any means, including violence and deceit, in order to bring that organization into being. Politics then becomes a "secular religion" which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world. But no political society — which possesses its own autonomy and laws55 — can ever be confused with the Kingdom of God. The Gospel parable of the weeds among the wheat (cf. Mt 13:24-30; 36-43) teaches that it is for God alone to separate the subjects of the Kingdom from the subjects of the Evil One, and that this judgment will take place at the end of time. By presuming to anticipate judgment here and now, man puts himself in the place of God and sets himself against the patience of God.

Sunday, November 08, 2009

(Attempted) MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL



Archbishop Dolan’s Critique of NYT's Selective Outrage


"But if I be asked what sign we may look for to show that the advance of the Faith is at hand I would answer by a word the modern world has forgotten: Persecution. When that shall once more be at work it will be morning"

- Hilaire Belloc Survivals and New Arrivals- (borrowed from Fr. C. John McClosky's e-mail)



Archbishop Timothy Dolan objectively makes a case that simply is not permitted to be made, i.e. that the Catholic Church is invariably singled out for outrage while equal office for allowing Orthodox rabbis to settle these cases ‘internally.’”

Dolan had called for fair-play - on a level playing field - by the New York Times, and that was unconscionable. What is at stake here is the mettle of Archbishop Dolan who is now being measured by the Magisterium of the secularist media. I offer that if he continues to speak truth to power, the next move – which has already been announced – will be to dreg up and vilify him with his historic performance in St. Louis and Milwaukee. Clark Hoyt prepares us – and the archbishop – for what’s coming. Note: “(The New York Times) continues to look into the subject:”

Dolan himself has been under that microscope. The Times interviewed him months ago about his handling of sexual abuse cases in his previous posts in St. Louis and Milwaukee, and it continues to look into the subject. It is a natural inquiry given that advocates for abuse victims, while giving Dolan credit for transparency in Milwaukee, say he did not go far enough in resolving pedophilia cases there.”

In case you’ve missed the interplay, I offer the evidence for your own perusal:

1) The Archbishop’s article that the Times would not use as an op-ed.

2) That is followed by the article by Maureen Dowd that is criticized in the Archbishop’s blog.

3) That, again, is followed by today’s (November 8, 2009) “The Archbishop’s Blog.”


1) FOUL BALL!


By Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
Archbishop of New York


October is the month we relish the highpoint of our national pastime, especially when one of our own
New York teams is in the World Series!

Sadly,
America has another national pastime, this one not pleasant at all: anti-Catholicism.

It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime. Scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger Sr. referred to it as “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” while John Higham described it as “the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history.” “The anti-Semitism of the left,” is how Paul Viereck reads it, and Professor Philip Jenkins sub-titles his book on the topic “the last acceptable prejudice.”

If you want recent evidence of this unfairness against the Catholic Church, look no further than a few of these following examples of occurrences over the last couple weeks:

  • On October 14, in the pages of the New York Times, reporter Paul Vitello exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. According to the article, there were forty cases of such abuse in this tiny community last year alone. Yet the Times did not demand what it has called for incessantly when addressing the same kind of abuse by a tiny minority of priests: release of names of abusers, rollback of statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records, and total transparency. Instead, an attorney is quoted urging law enforcement officials to recognize “religious sensitivities,” and no criticism was offered of the DA’s office for allowing Orthodox rabbis to settle these cases “internally.” Given the Catholic Church’s own recent horrible experience, I am hardly in any position to criticize our Orthodox Jewish neighbors, and have no wish to do so . . . but I can criticize this kind of “selective outrage.”

Of course, this selective outrage probably should not surprise us at all, as we have seen many other examples of the phenomenon in recent years when it comes to the issue of sexual abuse. To cite but two: In 2004, Professor Carol Shakeshaft documented the wide-spread problem of sexual abuse of minors in our nation’s public schools (the study can be found here). In 2007, the Associated Press issued a series of investigative reports that also showed the numerous examples of sexual abuse by educators against public school students. Both the Shakeshaft study and the AP reports were essentially ignored, as papers such as the New York Times only seem to have priests in their crosshairs.

  • On October 16, Laurie Goodstein of the Times offered a front page, above-the-fold story on the sad episode of a Franciscan priest who had fathered a child. Even taking into account that the relationship with the mother was consensual and between two adults, and that the Franciscans have attempted to deal justly with the errant priest’s responsibilities to his son, this action is still sinful, scandalous, and indefensible. However, one still has to wonder why a quarter-century old story of a sin by a priest is now suddenly more pressing and newsworthy than the war in Afghanistan, health care, and starvation–genocide in Sudan. No other cleric from religions other than Catholic ever seems to merit such attention.
  • Five days later, October 21, the Times gave its major headline to the decision by the Vatican to welcome Anglicans who had requested union with Rome. Fair enough. Unfair, though, was the article’s observation that the Holy See lured and bid for the Anglicans. Of course, the reality is simply that for years thousands of Anglicans have been asking Rome to be accepted into the Catholic Church with a special sensitivity for their own tradition. As Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican’s chief ecumenist, observed, “We are not fishing in the Anglican pond.” Not enough for the Times; for them, this was another case of the conniving Vatican luring and bidding unsuspecting, good people, greedily capitalizing on the current internal tensions in Anglicanism.
  • Finally, the most combustible example of all came Sunday with an intemperate and scurrilous piece by Maureen Dowd on the opinion pages of the Times. In a diatribe that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish, or African-American religious issue, she digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription -- along with every other German teenage boy -- into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans.

True enough, the matter that triggered her spasm -- the current visitation of women religious by Vatican representatives -- is well-worth discussing, and hardly exempt from legitimate questioning. But her prejudice, while maybe appropriate for the Know-Nothing newspaper of the 1850’s, the Menace, has no place in a major publication today.

I do not mean to suggest that anti-catholicism is confined to the pages New York Times. Unfortunately, abundant examples can be found in many different venues. I will not even begin to try and list the many cases of anti-catholicism in the so-called entertainment media, as they are so prevalent they sometimes seem almost routine and obligatory. Elsewhere, last week, Representative Patrick Kennedy made some incredibly inaccurate and uncalled-for remarks concerning the Catholic bishops, as mentioned in this blog on Monday. Also, the New York State Legislature has levied a special payroll tax to help the Metropolitan Transportation Authority fund its deficit. This legislation calls for the public schools to be reimbursed the cost of the tax; Catholic schools, and other private schools, will not receive the reimbursement, costing each of the schools thousands – in some cases tens of thousands – of dollars, money that the parents and schools can hardly afford. (Nor can the archdiocese, which already underwrites the schools by $30 million annually.) Is it not an issue of basic fairness for ALL school-children and their parents to be treated equally?

The Catholic Church is not above criticism. We Catholics do a fair amount of it ourselves. We welcome and expect it. All we ask is that such critique be fair, rational, and accurate, what we would expect for anybody. The suspicion and bias against the Church is a national pastime that should be “rained out” for good.

I guess my own background in American history should caution me not to hold my breath.

Then again, yesterday was the Feast of Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes.

2) The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd

“The Nun’s Story”

Maureen Dowd’s Article of October 24, 2009 - NYT – op ed.

Once, in the first grade, I was late for class. I started crying in the schoolyard, terrified to go in and face the formidable Sister Hiltruda.

Father Montgomery, who looked like a handsome young priest out of a 1930s movie, found me cowering and took my hand, leading me into the classroom.

Sister Hiltruda looked ready to pop, but she couldn’t say a word to me, then or ever. There was no more unassailable patriarchy than the Catholic Church.

Nuns were second-class citizens then and — 40 years after feminism utterly changed America — they still are. The matter of women as priests is closed, a forbidden topic.

In 2004, the cardinal who would become Pope Benedict XVI wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners, resisting any adversarial roles with men and cultivating “feminine values” like “listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.”

Nuns need to be even more sepia-toned for the über-conservative pope, who was christened “God’s Rottweiler” for his enforcement of orthodoxy. Once a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth, Benedict pardoned a schismatic bishop who claimed that there was no Nazi gas chamber. He also argued on a trip to Africa that distributing condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.

The Vatican is now conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, a dwindling group with an average age of about 70, hoping to herd them back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.

Nuns who took Vatican II as a mandate for reimagining their mission “started to look uppity to an awful lot of bishops and priests and, of course, the Vatican,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.”

The church enabled rampant pedophilia, but nuns who live in apartments and do social work with ailing gays? Sacrilegious! The pope can wear Serengeti sunglasses and expensive red loafers, but shorter hems for nuns? Disgraceful!

“It’s a tragedy because nuns are the jewels of the system,” said Bob Bennett, the Washington lawyer who led the church’s lay inquiry into the pedophilia scandal. “I was of the view that if they had been listened to more, some of this stuff wouldn’t have happened.”

As the Vatican is trying to wall off the “brides of Christ,” Cask of Amontillado style, it is welcoming extreme-right Anglicans into the Catholic Church — the ones who are disgruntled about female priests and openly gay bishops. Il Papa is even willing to bend Rome’s most doggedly held dogma, against married priests — as long as they’re clutching the Anglicans’ Book of Common Prayer.

“Most of the Anglicans who want to move over to the Catholic Church under this deal are people who have scorned women as priests and have scorned gay people,” Briggs said. “The Vatican doesn’t care that these people are motivated by disdain.”

The nuns are pushing back a bit, but it’s hard, since the church has decreed that women can’t be adversarial to men. A nun writing in Commonweal as “Sister X” protests, “American women religious are being bullied.”

She recalls that Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, who heads one of the investigations, moved a meeting at the University of Notre Dame off campus to protest a performance of “The Vagina Monologues.” “It is the rare bishop,” Sister X writes, “who has any real understanding of the lives women actually lead.”

The church can be flexible, except with women. Laurie Goodstein, the Times’s religion writer, reported this month on an Illinois woman who had a son with a Franciscan priest. The church agreed to child support but was stingy with money for college and for doctors, once the son got terminal cancer. The priest had never been disciplined and was a pastor in Wisconsin — until he hit the front page. Even then, “Father” Willenborg was suspended only because the woman said that he had pressed her to have an abortion and that he had also had a sexual relationship with a teenager. (Maybe the church shouldn’t be so obdurate on condoms.)

When then-Cardinal Ratzinger was “The Enforcer” in Rome, he investigated and disciplined two American nuns. One, Jeannine Gramick, then of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, founded a ministry to reconcile gays with the church, which regards homosexual desires as “disordered.” The other, Mary Agnes Mansour of the Sisters of Mercy, headed the Michigan Department of Social Services, which, among other things, paid for abortions for poor women.

Marcy Kaptur, a Democratic congresswoman from Toledo and one of Bishop Blair’s flock, got a resolution passed commending nuns for their humble service and sacrifice. “The Vatican’s in another country,” she said. “Maybe people do things differently there. Perhaps the Holy Spirit will intervene.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

3) The Public Editor – New York Times

The Archbishop’s Blog

By CLARK HOYT

Published: November 7, 2009, p. 8

LATE last month, Paul Vitello, who covers religion for The Times, wrote a lighthearted feature about a new blogger: Archbishop Timothy Dolan, installed this year to lead the 2.5 million Catholics of the Archdiocese of New York. Little did Vitello know that before the day was out, Dolan would turn his blog on the reporter and his paper, citing news articles and a column by Maureen Dowd as examples of anti-Catholicism.

Skip to next paragraph “It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime,” the archbishop wrote. He said that if you wanted examples of the church being treated unfairly, The Times had supplied four in a couple of weeks. They included Dowd’s “intemperate and scurrilous” column about the treatment of nuns by the church hierarchy and a front-page article about a priest who had fathered a son in a long-term relationship with a parishioner.

Dolan originally submitted his blog post to The Times as an Op-Ed article, and I heard from readers wanting to know why it wasn’t published. David Shipley, the Op-Ed editor, said that his page “has never been the forum for direct responses to articles.” He suggested that the archbishop submit a letter to the editor, but Dolan declined. He told me he knew that a letter to the editor would have to be condensed and he feared that key points would be lost.

The result was the sharp blog attack on The Times from a man who was greeted in the paper six months earlier as warm, flexible and not given to confrontation. Dolan’s criticism touched a nerve with other Catholics with whom I spoke, who feel their faith is under assault in the secular world, and it raised interesting questions about what is fair to report and criticize about the leadership of a religion that is in a unique position of influence: It is both a spiritual home to a quarter of the American population, and a major institution than runs school systems, provides social services and seeks to shape public policy.

Never far from such discussions is the media’s coverage of the church’s pedophilia scandal. One of the examples Dolan cited on his blog was a front-page article in The Times about child sexual abuse in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn. He said it lacked the “outrage” that he said marked coverage of pedophilia in the Catholic Church.

“Why aren’t other people under the same microscope we are?” Dolan asked me. He said child sexual abuse is a broad social problem, yet media coverage seems to focus most on Catholics.

Dolan himself has been under that microscope. The Times interviewed him months ago about his handling of sexual abuse cases in his previous posts in St. Louis and Milwaukee, and it continues to look into the subject. It is a natural inquiry given that advocates for abuse victims, while giving Dolan credit for transparency in Milwaukee, say he did not go far enough in resolving pedophilia cases there.

Times reporters defended the paper’s coverage. Laurie Goodstein, the national religion correspondent, said The Times had reported about sex abuse by clergy of many faiths but that the Catholics’ story was far bigger because there were more priests accused, more people making allegations, more legal wrangling and settlements, and a longer history. And Vitello said of his article about abuse in the Jewish community that his job was to provide information and let readers decide whether to be outraged.

Dolan seemed particularly offended by Dowd’s column, in which she wrote that the Vatican was hoping to herd nuns “back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.” She said the “über-conservative” Pope Benedict XVI, while a cardinal, had urged women to be submissive partners. She brought up issues like the pope’s conscription into the Hitler Youth, and his statement that condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.

Dolan wrote that Dowd dug “deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible.” The subject she raised was legitimate, he said, but her language was more like the prejudice in Know-Nothing papers of the 1850s.

“Far from being anti-Catholic, my column was an expression of one Catholic’s anger and anguish about the moral crisis in her church,” Dowd told me. “It’s not right to call legitimate — and widely shared — complaints about the church hierarchy anti-Catholic, any more than it’s right to call opposition to the policies of a White House anti-American.”

Dolan said he was not trying to stifle dissent. “We welcome criticism of the Catholic Church,” he said. “We need it. What I’m talking about is the ‘how’ of it. Is it measured? Is it temperate?” He said Dowd was serving up “raw red meat.”

Dowd said the issues she raised went to what she sees as the pope’s extreme conservatism and his judgment. “Should I blandly express outrage at the church continuing to treat women as second-class citizens?” she asked. Bland is not what Dowd does. I thought she was well within a columnist’s bounds.

Goodstein, who wrote the article about the priest with a son, said she was vexed by the criticism from Dolan, whom she once described in The Times as a “healer bishop.” Dolan said the affair described in her story was a quarter-century old, and he wondered why it was more newsworthy than subjects like the war in Afghanistan, health care and genocide in Sudan — subjects that The Times, in fact, covers extensively. In a letter to Dolan, Goodstein said he had neglected to mention in his blog that the priest’s son, now 22, was dying from brain cancer and believed the church had failed him, while his father remained a priest.

There is an inherent tension between journalism, which is supposed to be skeptical of authority, and a church that places great emphasis on it. James Martin, a priest and an editor of the Jesuit magazine America, said that, as someone with a foot in each camp, he believes reporters at The Times work hard to get stories right, though he sometimes questions the prominence and frequency of articles about the church’s sex scandal.

Dowd’s column? It was “over the top in mocking the pope,” he said. “Then again, she did that to Bill Clinton.” Martin said he didn’t think most Catholics appreciated reporters’ efforts to be accurate and fair. “On the other hand, I don’t think editors realize how tired Catholics are of seeing the Church portrayed through the lens of sex abuse,” he said.

I think it is hard to pick a handful of examples, as Dolan did, and make a case that The Times has been “anti-Catholic.” Along with unblinking coverage of church controversies, the paper covered his selection as archbishop extensively and for the most part warmly. Goodstein is receiving an award this weekend from the American Academy of Religion for a touching front-page series on priests from abroad serving U.S. parishes.

Could the newspaper sometimes choose a better word in a story or pay more attention to transgressions in other parts of society? Yes. Has it been guilty of anti-Catholicism? I don’t buy it.

Me: I do!