Commonweal June 15, 2012 Issue: The Bishops and Religious Liberty

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LETTERS
The contraception mandate, migrant workers, the new missal
All tAlk Margaret OBrien Steinfelss critique of the U.S. Catholic bishops refusal to accept the various forms of accommodation in the Department of Health and Human Services contraception-coverage mandate ignores a key point (A Losing Strategy, May 4). The incredibly narrow definition of a religious employer, which Steinfels herself criticizes, remains exactly as it always has been. What the Obama administration now suggests in its most recent proposed rule is that those institutionsother than houses of worshipthat have a religious objection will be allowed to talk as though they are a religious employer, yet through their health plans they will have to act exactly like an atheist organization. Every employee of such organizations will automatically have to accept coverage for contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugsand they must allow their teenage daughters to have this coverage as well, with confidentialitywhether the employee wants such coverage or not. The organizations can claim that they did not do this or agree to it, but the effect will be the same. Their decisions about benefits for their own employees will simply be taken away from them and given to others, potentially including hostile third parties like Planned Parenthood in the case of self-insured plans. Protecting a religious organization from being forced to act immorally, by depriving it of the ability to act at all, is no way to serve religious freedom. How could anyone rest easy with the governments enshrining into law a definition of religious ministry so narrow as to exclude the work of the Good Samaritan, the model of caring for the stranger for the sole reason that the stranger was in need?
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emptions from generally applicable laws or from funding actions that one finds morally objectionable are not usefully addressed by overheated rhetoric that dwells on protecting teenage daughters, fending off Planned Parenthood, and the equation of nonreligious organizations with atheist ones. Contrary to Sr. Walshs claim, the Obama administration has not proposed to force employees of accommodated religious institutions to accept contraception coverage. The idea is that such employees will be offered the coverage, which they are free to reject. Walshs letter suggests why the bishops claims to be negotiating with the government seem unconvincing: Is it a negotiation they want or a capitulation? My question, as I hinted in the final sentence of my column: Do they know what theyre doing? I have my doubts.
margaret obrien steinfels
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the more things chAnge I was moved by the article Vale la Pena? (Joseph Sorrentino, April 20) and not at all surprised to see that the plight of farmworkers has not changed very much since the days when Cesar Chavez took up this cause. The simple irony continues to be that the people who work so hard to pick beautiful, nutritious produce for our tables are unable to afford the same for their own families.
kathleen siddons
Manchester, Conn.
Commonweal . June 15, 2012
The next issue of Commonweal will be dated July 13, 2012
Washington, D.C. The writer is director of media relations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. the Author replies I do not rest easy with the HHS mandates definition of religious ministry. But the complexities of providing religious ex-
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Commonweal
JUNE 15, 2012 VOLUME C X X XIX NUMBER 12
Article
The Bishops & Religious Liberty
8 William A. Galston 11 Michael P. Moreland 13 Cathleen Kaveny 15 Douglas Laycock 17 Mark Silk 19 Peter Steinfels
26 24 2 4 5
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letters commonweal online editorial Gamblers Autonomous
columnist
6 is desire enough? John Garvey
Books
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From the Verdicts post When I Was a Child, by Edward T. Wheeler:
arilynne Robinson is an eloquent polemicist. I nod in agreement with her prose even as I half-wonder over the target of her attacks. Every essay in her new collection, When I Was a Child I Read Books, asserts the mystery of divine creation and admits no place for the reductive force of modern scientific atheism. Amongst other things, she redefines Calvinism, offers a contrarian view of the strictures of Mosaic law, and dispels East Coast condescension toward a Western upbringing. Many of her paragraphs offer sentences that might serve as points for meditation. Marilynne Robinson, much like her narrator, Rev. John Ames, in Gilead, is a superb monologist. Her essay Imagination & Community (Commonweal, March 9) won me over in its first paragraph: Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library. I dont know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly, I wonder how many of them I ever will read. That has done nothing to dampen my pleasure in acquiring more books. Here I found a declaration that confirmed the joy of buying and possessing books: as if in a purchase one acquired not just the substance of the book but established an intima-
cy with its author and its characters. Robinson is not writing about collecting or acquisitive greed, but community; in the filling of bookshelves with volumes we are expanding our connections with others: I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. Later she writes: I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification. I puzzle over this: We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself. All the force of this assertion lies in articulable, for language, she argues, is the great communal enterprise. Her essays show her refusal to reduce the human to the material. Her great novels, Housekeeping, Home, and Gilead, do this even more so. To understand writing in this way is to understand language sacramentallyan outward sign of the conferring of grace. In Gilead, John Ames reflects on his role as preacher. He says, A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation.... There are three parties to it, of course, but so are there even to the most private thoughtthe self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. That is a remarkable thing to consider. So are the essays in When I Was a Child I Read Books. n
This book correctly shows that the Churchs reversal of anti-Judaism is one of the most dramatic responses to the signs of the time in the history of Christianity.
PAULA KANE, University of Pittsburgh
[Lawler] demonstrates conclusively that at key points in Kertzers argument he has done violence to his sources... which renders suspect his appeal to history. Scholars cannot afford to ignore this book.
WILLIAM L. PORTIER, University of Dayton
P bli h d by Published b Catholic University of America Press
... a meticulous examination of the questionable use of sources ... calls into question Kertzers conclusions and objectivity. Even Lawlers obiter dicta make rewarding reading! THOMAS J. SHELLEY, Fordham University Through the retrieval of sources and the rereading of texts in their historical setting, Lawler goes beyond the mere correction of shocking errors to radically overturn The Popes Against the Jews. He makes a compelling case.
C. J. T. TALAR, University of St. Thomas, Houston
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Were the Popes Against the Jews? discusses in detail several writers favored in Commonweal.
From the Editors
Gamblers Autonomous
amie Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, was until recently one of the few high-profile bankers who had both the credibility and the nerve to oppose stricter regulation of Wall Street. He had credibility because JPMorgan had managed to weather the 2008 financial crisis better than most of its rivals, emerging as the nations largest bank. As for nerve, Dimon has always been blessed with an abundance of it. He is the sort of man who doesnt hesitate to describe regulatory proposals of which he disapproves as anti-American or infantile. Dimons self-confidence may be unshakable, but his credibility as a critic of financial reform took a hit last month when he disclosed that JPMorgans chief investment office in London had lost at least $2 billion by selling the same kind of credit derivatives that nearly sank the U.S. economy four years ago. He attributed the loss to errors, sloppiness, and bad judgment, while lamenting that the news would play right into the hands of a bunch of pundits out there. (About that, at least, he was not wrong.) Dimon was quick to add that JPMorgan still expected to earn $4 billion this quartera point echoed by the financial industrys defenders on Capitol Hill. At a House Financial Services Committee hearing the following day, Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) tried to dampen the uproar over Dimons announcement, pointing out that the bank remained one of the most profitable financial institutions in the country and insisting that there is no risk from this loss to depositors or taxpayers. That is beside the point. Next time the situation could be much worseinvolving greater losses or a bank less able to absorb themand without strong, well-enforced regulation, there is almost certain to be a next time. The nations biggest bank-holding companies, which have grown since 2008, are still free to make risky bets with federally insured money. If bankers win these bets, they get rich (or richer); if they lose too much, the government will bail them out in order to protect the economy from collateral damage. It was to prevent the need for more such bailouts that Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Bill in 2010. Ever since then, lobbyists, including many from JPMorgan, have been trying to delay or dilute Dodd-Franks provisions. The financial industry has been especially intent on weakening the so-called Volcker Rule, which would forbid institutions that benefit from federal deposit insurance from speculating with depositors money. Lobbyists have argued that an exception to this rule should be made for hedging (that is, trading intended to offset the risks of a banks other investments).
Dimon has said that the trades that lost JPMorgan so much money were part of a hedging strategy and so may not have been prevented by the Volcker Rule, as if that were an argument against the rule itself. In fact, its only an argument against making an exception for hedgingan exception Dimon supports. As Noam Scheiber of the New Republic put it, If the classic definition of chutzpah is killing your parents and then pleading for mercy as an orphan, then Wall Streets version is gutting a regulation and then claiming its pointless because it didnt stop you from screwing up. Lobbyists have also tried to scuttle the Dodd-Frank rule that would require derivatives to be traded on transparent exchanges, allowing regulators to spot a big trading loss before it punches a hole in a banks balance sheet. The banks would prefer to keep such trading out of sight, which is one reason they now do much of it overseas. Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commision, has introduced a proposal that would apply Dodd-Franks new regulations to the foreign subsidiaries of U.S. banks. Together with the new transparency requirements, such a cross-border rule would probably have saved JP Morgan from its multibillion-dollar error. Even more could be done to discourage banks from making dangerous bets. A financial-transaction tax, for example, would help curb reckless speculation by slowing it down. (It would also raise some needed revenue: Congresss Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that a tax of just 0.03 percent on all transactions would bring in $350 billion over ten years.) Better still, Congress could simply go back to the defunct Glass-Steagall Act, which, by completely separating commercial from investment banking, prevented major financial panics for more than sixty years. The real danger now is that Dodd-Frank will suffer the same fate as Glass-Steagall. Republican lawmakers and presidential candidate Mitt Romney have vowed to repeal it, and this is one campaign promise they are likely to keep. For them, and for too many Democrats, people like Dimon really are the masters of the universe: not infallible, perhaps, but smarter than politicians, regulators, and the ordinary consumers whose money they gamble with. The GOP is counting on voters either to forget what happened on Wall Street in 2008 or to remember it as a one-off event that no one could have predicted or prevented. But JPMorgans recent blunder is yet another sign that there are worse crises to come if Washington continues to let Wall Street write its own rules. n
COLUMNIST
John Garvey
Is Desire Enough?
sex & the christiAn trAdition
t seems to me that there are two competing currents of thought about sexual morality, both of them too narrowly conceived to be very helpful. According to one of them, the traditional arguments of orthodox Christianity are a sufficient answer to the questions raised by every aspect of sexual desire. Nothing about those arguments can be seriously questioned. Those who do have serious questions about them are accused of bad faith. The other current of thought recommends openness to the satisfaction of all desires. All sexual desires in particular are natural and therefore not to be rejected or left unsatisfied. In other words, the Zeitgeist is right. How does a Christian deal with these two currents? The question matters pastorally. The one position can wound people who need to be consoled and reconciled, while both positions reduce Christianity to morality in its narrowest senseobeying certain rules, or ignoring themand so allow us to avoid the deeper struggle of real conversion. The vision of humanity we are given in the resurrected Christ is what Christians are called to. It involves ascesis the unfashionable demand that we live in our bodies in a new way, whether we are married or single. We know that we cant cling to any desire that holds us to what is passing. And everything is passing: we must be ready to let it all go. This does not give us an easy place in our economic and social order, but that isnt what the gospel was meant to do. One way the teachers of the Christian tradition have tried to deal with our lurches of desire is to watchas Buddhist monks do with the practice of mindfulnesshow we are moved by our desires from a position of stillness. Dont let desire drag you one way or another, but see it as clearly as you can. Any move we make should be made against a background of stillness, and,
though this takes discipline, it is not only possible but necessary. Reacting to how we feel in the moment without that necessary stillness will move us away from a sense of Gods presence. This is not in itself a question of moralityand thats the point: if Christianity is about transformation, it is not about obeying rules or obedience to a code. It is about acting with the awareness that you are in Gods presence, and called to live compassionately. This has everything to do with the current debates over homosexuals and their place in the church. It is certainly true that from its beginning the church has taught that only married heterosexual behavior can be blessed, but even this was conceded grudgingly in some circles. It can be argued that this teaching owed more to Stoicism than to any biblical source, but it is undeniably part of the tradition. Any sexual act that was a departure from the heterosexual norm was sinful. Gore Vidal once said that there are no homosexuals, only homosexual acts. On this point, at least, he was in agreement with medieval Christian morality. Vidal wanted to get away from defining the self completely in terms of sexual orientation; but, worthy as this goal is, the question of basic
Resisting desire
orientation (not a part of the ancient or medieval understanding) cant be passed over so easily. We really have learned a great deal about sexuality that the church fathers simply did not know. There is a minority for whom same-sex attraction is the norm. The church tells them and them alonethat they must be celibate. In theory, the church says the same thing to the divorced, the single, and the widowed, but for all of these others there remains the possibility of meeting the beloved and enjoying sexual satisfaction. This is, at the very least, a serious pastoral problem. But the other side of the question carries its own set of difficulties. Does the fact that I desire something always mean that my desire should be met, in just the way I want it to be met? To raise a very difficult point, might it be that those who are attracted to people of the same sex are called to something unlike heterosexual gratificationsomething involving asceticism that might help enlighten the rest of us? Neither the married nor the celibate can speak from any Olympian height about the experience of the other. And we need both forms of witness. No one who is not married can begin to approach or understand the reality of Gods fatherhood in the way parents can, and celibacy offers an eschatological perspective we all need to learn from. Civility is possible: the exchange in these pages between Eve Tushnet and Luke Timothy Johnson was exemplary (June 15, 2007). The notion that there is only one Christian way to look at these questions is not only wrong; it is driving away people who should feel at home with us. And who can blame them? It is not that they cannot bear the truth. They know that moralism is not what the Cross and the empty tomb are about. n
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ARTICLE
The Bishops & Religious Liberty

William A. Galston, Michael P. Moreland, Cathleen Kaveny, Douglas Laycock, Mark Silk, Peter Steinfels
n April, the Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement, Our First, Most Cherished Liberty, warning against what the bishops consider to be unprecedented threats to religious freedom from various governmental actions. In their statement, the bishops called for a Fortnight for Freedom (June 21July 4), in which Catholics will be asked to study, pray, and take public action in response to the threats described by the bishops. Much of the controversy surrounding the statement concerns the bishops rejection of the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act and their subsequent refusal to accept the accommodation proposed by the Obama administration. That compromise still required that contraception coverage be made available to employees of some Catholic institutions, but kept nonexempt institutions from having to provide or pay for it. Insurance companies or other third parties will have to cover the costs. In Our First, Most Cherished Liberty, the bishops raise other, equally important concerns about threats to religious freedom in areas such as immigration law and adoption services run by religious organizations. Commonweal has editorialized on the contraception mandate and other issues of religious liberty, agreeing with the bishops on some points, but also expressing some dissatisfaction with the USCCBs rhetoric, arguments, and tactics. In an effort to respond more fully both to the bishops statement and the challenges facing religious groups and institutions that seek to be full participants in the public square, we have asked a number of distinguished scholars and commentators for their evaluation of the bishops statement and initiative. nizations, as a critic of the Obama administrations initial announcement on the coverage of contraceptive services, and as the co-author (along with Melissa Rogers) of a recent Brookings Institution report that sympathetically considers the conscience-based claims of health-care providers. Nonetheless, I find it impossible to agree with most of the bishops arguments. Let me start with Pope Benedicts January 19 address to the U.S. bishops, which the document under review quotes extensively. The pope cites concerns about certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of religion. He expresses worries about concerted efforts...to deny the right of conscientious objection on the part of Catholic individuals and institutions with regard to cooperation in intrinsically evil practices and also about a tendency to reduce religious freedom to mere freedom of worship without guarantees of respect for freedom of conscience. As the pope is no doubt aware, while freedom of religion is indeed most cherished in the United States, it is far from absoluteeven in core matters of worship. While proposals to limit religious free exercise must discharge a heavy burden of proof, no one doubts the propriety of certain time,
William A. Galston
he recent statement of the U.S. Catholic bishops on religious liberty warrants sustained reflection sine ira et studio. In so doing, we must decouple our inquiry from the overwrought polemics of our polarized politics. The church is not conducting a war on women, and the Obama administration is not waging a war on religion. There is instead a genuine disagreement over the respective roles of civil law and faith (even faith informed by reason). There is no guarantee that the requirements of citizenship and faith will prove fully compatible in a religiously diverse and nontheocratic society, and there is also disagreement about what to do when they come into conflict. I propose to examine Our First, Most Cherished Liberty not simply as an intervention in a political debatethough it is thatbut as a document that claims to be grounded in history, constitutionalism, and natural law as well as an empirical analysis of the current situation. I write as a political theorist who has defended the principle of maximum feasible accommodation for the practices of faith-based orga-
place, and manner restrictions. Free exercise doesnt entail the right to conduct a loud revival meeting in a residential neighborhood at 2 a.m. Nor would anyone seriously argue that the claims of religious free exercise extend to human sacrifice (as opposed to animal sacrifice, which does enjoy First Amendment protection). There are some bedrock civil concerns that the law may enforce, regardless of their effects on particular religions. But the scope of these concerns is a matter of continuing debate. Consider a famous episode in American history. On October 29, 1919, the National Prohibition Act (popularly known as the Volstead Act), which created the legal definition of intoxicating liquor and specified penalties for producing it, passed over President Woodrow Wilsons veto and stood as the law of the land until 1933. The act created a number of exemptions to the Prohibition regime, of which two are especially noteworthy. First, it allowed physicians to prescribe liquor to individuals for medicinal purposes and to employ it pursuant to treatment for alcoholism in certified treatment programs. Second, the act stated that nothing it contained should be construed as applying to wine for sacramental purposes, or like religious rites, and it permitted the sale or transfer of wine to rabbis, ministers, priests, or an officer duly authorized by any church or congregation. Suppose the act had not exempted physicians. The omission would have been subject to criticism on policy grounds, but no one would have suggested that it ran afoul of constitutional norms. If the act had failed to exempt wine for sacramental purposes, however, there would have been both a political firestorm and a First Amendment challenge. Would it have succeeded? The use of sacramental wine lies at the heart of more than one religion. The Code of Canon Law of the Catholic Church prescribes that the most holy Sacrifice of the Eucharist must be celebrated in bread, and in wine to which a small quantity of water is to be added. For its part, Jewish law commands the drinking of wine during the Passover Seder, specifying not only the familiar four cups but also a minimum quantity to be consumed. (There is no maximum.) Comprehensive prohibition without exemptions would have prevented faithful Jews and Catholics from acting as their religion requires. But when a parallel issue came before the Supreme Court in 1990, Justice Antonin Scaliaa famously staunch Catholicruled against the claim that the ceremonial use of peyote in Native American religious rites warranted exemption from drug laws of general application. At the heart of his majority opinion in Employment Division v. Smith was the concern that such accommodation creates a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself. The legislature may, if it chooses, write specific accommodations into law. But in the absence of explicit provisions, individuals may not claim exemption from the law as a matter of right. This principle suggests that if the Congress had not included re-
There are compelling reasons within modern states to carve out a protected space for dissenting moral voices. But in the end, the tension between the laws of the state and the demands of faith cannot be fully resolved.
ligious exemptions in the Volstead Act, neither Catholics nor Jews would have had a valid First Amendment claim. I have long argued that Scalias opinion was deeply misguided. Nonetheless, the Court has not overruled it in the two decades since it was handed down. The reactions it sparkednot only the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 but also a welter of judicial decisions at various levels of the federal systemtestify to the unresolved debate over the limits of conscience-based claims against broad legislation. From that standpoint, it is a mistake for the pope (or anyone else) to speak of freedom of religion as a fixed concept in American culture or constitutionalism. The phrase delimits a zone with a contested periphery. The bishops are entitled to argue for their conception of conscientious claims. But they cannot fairly assert that government action based on a different conception breaches a settled understanding. This brings me to Pope Benedicts second concerna reductive secularism which would delegitimize the churchs participation in public debate about the issues which are determining the fate of American society. No doubt there are some intellectuals who want to rule religiously based arguments out of bounds in political argument. But that is hardly the dominant tendency in our society. Many people have taken issue with the content of the bishops statement, but few have contested their right to issue it or to press their case in both the legislature and the court of public opinion. American political discourse is in no imminent danger of secularization, as the recent Republican presidential nomination contest amply demonstrated. Pope Benedict cites the need for an engaged, articulate, and well-formed Catholic laity endowed with a strong critical sense vis--vis the dominant culture. Here at least he has something real to worry about. A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found substantial majorities of Catholics in favor of requiring religiously affiliated socialservice agencies, colleges, and hospitals to provide their employees with health-care plans that cover contraception or birth control at no cost. Here, as with same-sex marriage, the shepherds no longer control their flock. There is no reason to believe that this will change anytime soon.
his brings me to the bishops statement, which goes well beyond Pope Benedict in a key respect. While the pope focuses on claims of conscience, the bishops emphasize the distinction between conscientious objection and an unjust law: Conscientious objection permits some relief to those who object to a just law.... An unjust law is no law at all. It cannot be obeyed. They insist that If we face today the prospect of unjust laws, then Catholics in America... must have the courage not to obey them. This is a remarkable argument on several levels. A difficulty lurks at the surface: in our pluralistic society, agreement on what justice is and what it requires is incomplete. Each individual and group is entitled to make a public argument about justice, and there is a place for civil disobedience. But to avoid anarchy, public decisions about justiceembedded in laware entitled to substantial deference. As far as I can see, the bishops make no effort to understand why their antagonists think that justice requires what the Catholic hierarchy thinks it forbids. But assume for the sake of argument that agreement on justice were more robust than it is; then what? Most human laws fall short of perfect justice and are in some respects unjust. Are we required to disobey all of them? Surely principled casuistry is essential: we must do our best to weigh the good against the bad, the just against the unjust, to reach an all-things-considered judgment. There are many Catholics who believe that the Republican budget the House of Representatives recently endorsed imposes unacceptable burdens on the poor and violates core principles of social justice. If that budget were to become law, would Catholics be required to disobey it? This brings us to the most remarkable feature of the bishops argumenttheir insistence that if a law is unjust, we must disobey it. It is easy to accept a less demanding formulation: if a law is unjust, we may disobey it, because we have a moral warrant to do so. But there is a huge gap between may and must. The principle that we are forbidden to participate in evil is far too broad. We participate in evil to some extent whenever our tax dollars support activities that violate what is just and right. Are we obligated to stop paying taxes? Here again, principled casuistry is needed. We must do our best to determine the degree of participation, its proximity to or remoteness from our agency, and the balance of justice and injustice in the act. It would be easier to sympathize with the bishops statement if it displayed some awareness of these moral complexities. In the spirit of charity, I have saved for last the weakest point in the bishops thesis. Civil society and public law do not occupy separate spheres hermetically sealed from one another. Public policy typically shapes the institutions of civil society (for example, the complex laws of tax exemption), and when those institutions encounter the public realm, friction often ensues. The real question is the extent to which, and the basis upon which, law may legitimately constrain civil associations, of which religious associations are a distinc-
tive species enjoying special moral and constitutional claims. There are two categories of cases to consider. First, religious associations may choose to participate in public programs, which typically come with strings attached. When the church receives Caesars money, it does not ipso facto become Gods money. It may well be that Caesar should refrain from attaching conditions to the receipt of public funds and in so doing encourage the widest possible participation in programs that advance the common good. But for better or worse, that is Caesars decision. It is then up to the institutions of civil society to decide whether the conditions are too onerous to bear. In the second category of cases, of which the disputed HHS contraception mandate in an example, religious institutions use only their own resources. In such instances, it is natural to think that governments regulatory role is at most minimal. That is not always true, however. For example, according to federal law, no agency can refuse to authorize a prospective adoption because it objects to placement across racial or ethnic lines. This is not a condition imposed on the receipt of funds. It is rather a per se civil-rights provision, whether or not money changes hands. Since 1983, moreover, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Bob Jones case, federal law has allowed the IRS to withdraw tax-exempt status from any institution found to be practicing racial discrimination. In its majority decision, signed by eight justices, the Court ruled that institutionsincluding religious institutionsseeking tax-exempt status must not only serve a public purpose but must do so in ways that are not contrary to established public policy, that serve the public interest, and that are not grossly at odds with the common community conscience. Many religious organizations take the position that opposing same-sex sexual relations, marriage, and adoption cannot be equated with opposing comparable interracial activities, in part because the conscience of the community concerning gays and lesbians remains unsettled. As a matter of fact, that is correctfor now. But some states have already moved to settle the issue in favor of same-sex couples, and more (though not all) are likely to follow as public sentiment continues to change. There is no guarantee that public opinion will converge on what justice requires. The conscience of the community has often erred and will continue to do so. There are compelling reasons within modern states to carve out a protected space for dissenting moral voices. But in the end, the tension between the laws of the state and the demands of faith cannot be fully resolved. It can only be managed, which means that understanding and goodwill on both sides is essential. These are scarce virtues in our shrill and divided times. n William A. Galston holds the Ezra Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institutions Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a senior fellow. He is a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton and the author of Liberal Purposes, among other books.
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Michael P. Moreland
rguments about religious freedom begin with one of two conf licting sets of assumptions in the background. According to the first, the state possesses plenary authority and subsidiary institutions (churches, corporations of various kinds, and families, for example) are wholly subject to regulation by the state. Even if there are legally enforceable limits on the states power to regulate such institutions (as there are in the Constitution), they are themselves a product of political will and self-imposed limits on the states authority. The clearest exponent of this view is Thomas Hobbes, arguably the greatest political philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition. According to the other set of assumptions, groups in civil society (and, in the Catholic understanding, preeminently the church) exist independently of the state. The limits to the states ability to regulate such groups are not merely a concession on the part of the state but are the result of a genuine differentiation of jurisdiction between the authority of the state and the authority of subsidiary institutions, even if the boundaries between these different jurisdictions are often confused and have to be worked out on a case-by-case basis. In his essay Are There Two or One? in We Hold These Truths (1960), the American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray argues for this view, which has deep roots in the Catholic traditionyou can find it in the work of Gelasius I and Robert Bellarmine. The contemporary American debate over religious freedom reflects this conflict about the authority of the state over the institutions of civil society. The list of examples of threats to religious freedom in Our First, Most Cherished Liberty is impressive, and the document is rightly concerned about troubling recent trends regarding religious freedom. Much of the document is markedly liberal (in the classical sense). The opening paragraph is sanguine about the congruence of Catholicism and America: To be Catholic and American should mean not having to choose one over the other. Our allegiances are distinct, but they need not be contradictory, and should instead be complementary. This document was probably not the right place to challenge settled American understandings of religious freedom, but a more comprehensive statement would want to consider the reservations about liberalism found in the work of Catholic intellectuals such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. The section of Our First, Most Cherished Liberty titled Religious Liberty Is More than Freedom of Worship is perhaps the most interesting part of the document. There the bishops committee tries to mount a challenge to the prevailing individualistic understanding of religious freedom. That understandingowing to the influence of John Lockes A Letter on Toleration on the framers of the First Amendmentis primarily concerned with freedom of individual conscience. Indeed, an early draft of the First Amendment
Vatican II: Teaching and Understanding the Council After 50 Years Sept. 20-22, 2012 University of St. Thomas St. Paul, Minn.
Keynote speakers
Father John OMalley, S.J., Ph.D. University Professor, Georgetown University Father Jan Michael Joncas, S.L.D., S.L.L. Associate Professor of Catholic Studies and Theology, University of St. Thomas Sister Maureen Sullivan, O.P., Ph.D. Associate Professor of Theology, St. Anselm College Sister Katarina Schuth, O.S.F., Ph.D. Chair for the Social Scientific Study of Religion, University of St. Thomas For more information please visit www.stthomas.edu/theology/vatican2.
An academic conference sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Theology Department of the University of St. Thomas.
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substituted conscience for religion. A distinctly Catholic contribution to the debate over religious freedom should emphasize institutional aspects of religious belieffreedom of the church, not merely freedom of conscience. The task of vindicating the freedom of the church in contemporary discourse requires recovering some neglected figures in the Christian social tradition. Among those figures are the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century English pluralists, notably the legal historian F. W. Maitland (18501906) and the political theorist John Neville Figgis (18661919). These English pluralists provide an incisive account of political authority, the history of common-law principles of incorporation, and the place of churches and other corporate bodies in the modern state. If the law allows men to form permanently organized groups, wrote Maitland in his essay Moral Personality and Legal Personality, those groups will be for common opinion right-and-dutybearing units. Figgis was an Anglican clergyman who spent most of his adult life as a member of the Community of the Resurrection, an Anglican monastic community in West Yorkshire. He studied under the liberal Catholic historian and politician Lord Acton at Cambridge, and Figgis was the initial editor of many of Actons writings. Figgis argued that Hobbess account of sovereignty (denying that groups can exist except by concession of the state) was a venerable superstition and
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Tocqueville saw that individualism and statism reinforce each other over time, crowding out communities and other forms of associational life.
that it was as a series of groups that our social life presents itself, all having some of the qualities of public law and most of them showing clear signs of a life of their own, inherent and not derived from the concession of the State. As Figgis posed the question in his underappreciated classic Churches in the Modern State (1913):
Does the Church exist by some inward living force, with powers of self-development like a person; or is she a mere aggregate, a fortuitous concourse of ecclesiastical atoms, treated it may be as one for purposes of convenience, but with no real claim to a mind or will of her own, except so far as the civil power sees good to invest her for the nonce with a fiction of unity?
against the Hobbesian state by asserting that groups are real and that they possess real personality. What we actually see in the world, Figgis claimed, is not on the one hand the State, and on the other a mass of unrelated individuals; but a vast complex of gathered unions, in which alone we find individuals. I read parts of Our First, Most Cherished Liberty as a call for a renewed appreciation of the importance of institutional pluralism in a liberal society. The disagreement over such subjects as the HHS contraception mandate is many thingsa debate within American constitutional law, a debate within American Catholicism about the legacy of Humanae vitaebut it is, in my view, foremost a debate over whether and how the coercive power of the state should be employed against the institutions of civil society. Catholicism (and especially American Catholicism) is a peculiarly institutional form of religious faith, with social-service agencies, hospitals, and schools at every level. Catholic institutions are, not surprisingly, on the front lines of battles between state regulation and church autonomy. Ones position in the current debate will vary depending on whether one embraces (in Nancy Rosenblums phrase) the logic of congruence between public and private ordering or a robust commitment to the freedom of civil society. As Rosenblum and Robert Post put it in the introduction to Civil Society and Government (Princeton, 2002):
Advocates of congruence fear that the multiplication of intermediate institutions does not mediate but balkanizes public life. They are apprehensive that plural associations and groups amplify self-interest, encourage arrant interestgroup politics, exaggerate cultural egocentrism, and defy government. What is needed, in their view, is a strong assertion of public values and policies designed to loosen the hold of particular affiliations, so that members will be empowered to look beyond their groups and to identify themselves as members of the larger political community. The logic of congruence envisions civil society as reflecting common values and practices all the way down.
According to Figgis, the state can set out requirements for the recognition of societies, but all this does not and need not imply that corporate personality is the gift of the sovereign, a mere name to be granted or withheld at its pleasure. As summarized by David Runciman in his book Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge, 1997), Figgiss central concept in Churches in the Modern State was society as a communitas communitatum (a community of communities). By it, writes Runciman, Figgis understood a society made up of self-formed and self-governing associations, each of which co-existed in a broader framework, itself capable of generating a sense of community. This broader community was the state, but although broader, it did not condition the lives of those lesser groups that it contained. The state cannot interfere with the internal decisions of churches not because the state has granted an exemption from an otherwise generally applicable law but because religious institutions are free and autonomous groups within the state. The task for those who would defend Figgiss pluralism and the freedom of the church amid the current debate is to weaken the hold of the Hobbesian picture of sovereignty that holds us in its grip. Figgis and the English pluralists argued
The debate over religious freedom to which the Our First, Most Cherished Liberty contributes is just one part of a larger debate about the scope and scale of government. In the grand tradition of Anglo-American liberalism, limited government is an essential component of genuine freedom individual liberty of conscience, the freedom of the church, and a free civil society. As the atomism of American life and our disconnectedness from one another and from our religious traditions increases, so does the reach of the state into matters that have long been a matter of private ordering. The logic of congruence is fueled both by overweening regulation and by individualism and atomism. All of this was diagnosed by Tocqueville, who saw that individualism and statism reinforce each other over time, crowding out religious communities and other forms of associational life:
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It frequently happens that the members of the community promote the influence of the central power without intending to. Democratic eras are periods of experiment, innovation, and adventure. There is always a multitude of men engaged in difficult or novel undertakings, which they follow by themselves without shackling themselves to their fellows. Such persons will admit, as a general principle, that the public authority ought not to interfere in private concerns; but, by an exception to that rule, each of them craves its assistance in the particular concern on which he is engaged and seeks to draw upon the influence of the government for his own benefit, although he would restrict it on all other occasions. If a large number of men applies this particular exception to a great variety of different purposes, the sphere of the central power extends itself imperceptibly in all directions, although everyone wishes it to be circumscribed.
Religious freedom has never been an absolute right, but has had to be balanced against competing state interests. Moreover, those interests must be assessed from the vantage point of the lawmakers, not the religious objector.
Of course, unlike the Amish in the Yoder case, the bishops do not want to withdraw into a sectarian corner. As many passages in the bishops statement make clear, they want to participate more broadly in American life, and to shape the American ethos in accordance with their own values. For example, the bishops proclaim that what is at stake is... whether the state alone will determine who gets to contribute to the common good, and how they get to do it. This impetus toward public influence seems to be operating in the bishops dubious claim that it is essential to understand the distinction between conscientious objection and an unjust law. Conscientious objection permits some relief to those who object to a just law for reasons of conscienceconscription being the most well-known example. An unjust law is no law at all. It cannot be obeyed, and therefore one does not seek relief from it, but rather its repeal. It seems to me that this line of reasoning about unjust law is at the heart of the bishops stance on the contraception mandate. In February, they flatly rejected the administrations attempts to insulate Catholic employers from the mandate by requiring third-parties to pay for and provide contraception coverage to employees of nonexempt Catholic institutions. Nor did the bishops propose any accommodations themselves. Instead, they claimed the only moral option is the complete repeal of the mandate. Why is the mandate an unjust law? Because contraception is intrinsically immoralor so the bishops say. This position is consistent with the Catholic view that the magisterium is the authoritative interpreter of the natural law. But it goes far beyond the American understanding of religious liberty. Of course, there are constitutional limits, but generally in a representative democracy such as ours, the majority has the power to determine through the legislative process what counts as a just and unjust law. The bishops can propose. But it is ultimately up to the voters and their representatives to dispose. There are other problems with the statement. Several of
Our First, Most Cherished Liberty was composed in light of some concrete examples of threats to religious freedom that the bishops committee wished to address. But if the document and the tumultuous debate within the church about the HHS mandate are to have a lasting legacy, it will be in awakening American Catholics and their fellow citizens to an awareness of the great good of institutional pluralism and the limits of the modern state. Michael P. Moreland is vice dean and professor of law at Villanova University School of Law.
Cathleen Kaveny
ur First, Most Cherished Liberty reflects the bishops deep ambivalence about whether they prefer the protection afforded a religious minority in the United States or whether they want to be an influential force in the moral mainstream. The first option will likely require them to accept some marginalization, while the second exposes them to uncomfortable pushback from opposing forces. Their statement suggests they want to have it both ways, but that outcome seems highly unlikely, at least within the American legal and political framework. The bishops tend to frame their complaint in terms of religious liberty. Yet most religious-liberty cases involve minority religious groups seeking to be left alone to pursue holiness as they see fit, free from the baleful attention or coercion of the majority. They want to worship as they wish (Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, 1993) or educate their children as they think faith requires (Wisconsin v. Yoder, 1972). Recognizing themselves as religious and moral minorities, most religious-liberty plaintiffs do not try to influence the broader community. Nor do they attempt to recast American society in their own image.
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the examples of religious oppression cited by the bishops do not stand up to close scrutiny. For example, the bishops cite a 2009 bill in the Connecticut legislature that would have forced Catholic parishes to be restructured according to a congregationalist model. What the bishops fail to note is that a chorus of legal experts immediately shot the bill down as flagrantly unconstitutional. It was killed by a unanimous committee vote two weeks after it was proposed. The bishops note that several states have passed laws that prohibit harboring undocumented immigrants, and what the church deems Christian charity and pastoral care to those immigrants. They point in particular to Alabamas 2011 law targeting the undocumented as perhaps the most egregious. Yet they fail to inform the reader that the Obama administration immediately challenged the Alabama law on the grounds that it conflicted with federal immigration law, which is far more humane. A federal district court quickly issued a preliminary injunction barring enforcement of those aspects of the statute to which the bishops objected. Why are the bishops providing the faithful with only half the story? Two other examples are more complicated. The bishops highlight the refusal of several states and municipalities to grant licenses to Catholic adoption agencies that would not place children with same-sex couples. Also mentioned is the decision not to renew the federal contract of the USCCBs Migration and Refugee Services, because it would not provide or refer for contraceptive or abortion services for victims of human trafficking. I do not think these are examples of the government infringing on the religious liberty of the Catholic Church. Instead, the bishops are dealing with the difficult problem of finding a modus vivendi with a fast evolving moral consensus that conflicts with traditional Catholic teachings. As a matter of public morality, the country increasingly rejects discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Most people understand this to be the logical extension of protections already provided to individuals on the basis of sex, race, and religion. So it is not entirely surprising that Catholic Charities is refused a license because it wont place a child with same-sex couples. Atheist Charities would be refused a license, too, if it made the same decisionor if it refused to place a child with Catholics, for that matter. The situation involving the contract for victims of human trafficking also reflects the conflict between Catholic moral teaching and the broader moral consensus. The federal government is using government fundstaxpayer moneyto hire someone to act on its behalf in serving a vulnerable population. Contraception and abortion are, in fact, not only legally protected, but constitutionally protected choices. Victims of human trafficking may not have a clear idea about how to access these services on their own; they may not even speak English. Is it really outrageous for the government to give strong preference to organizations that will at least offer referrals for the full range of legally permissible gynecological and obstetric care?
What about the fact that the bishops Migration and Refugee Services has a sterling track record? That fact complicates the picture, but does not settle the question. Consider a hypothetical that raises a mirror-image problem. Suppose the Freedom from Religion Foundation also provided excellent care to victims, but refused to give them information or help finding local churches or religious support groups. Would the bishops be upset if the government ruled them out as a contractor on the grounds that they were hampering the exercise of the victims right to freely worship as they see fit? Probably not. But whats the difference? Catholics need to think hard about what neutral principle the government should apply in making distinctions in cases like these. Frankly, Im not sure there is one. Finally, the most striking aspect of the bishops claims about religious liberty is the absolute nature of their assertions (they dont really make arguments). They give the reader virtually no hint that such questions must be assessed in a framework of competing rights and duties, particularly the duty to promote the common good. This is ironic from a theological perspective. Vatican IIs Declaration on Religious Freedom recognizes that there are due limits on the exercise of religious freedom, including the need to promote a just public order, and preserve the equality of the citizens before the law. For years, Catholic moralists and lawyers have railed against the assertion of rights claims without any consideration of relational responsibilities. (See Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, 1993.) Nor does the bishops rights absolutism make much sense as a legal strategy. American law does not treat religious freedom as an absolute right. The leading case interpreting the Free Exercise Clause, Employment Division v. Smith (1990), holds that the Constitution does not require lawmakers to give religious exemptions to neutral laws of general applicability, provided no other constitutional rights are involved. Even under the stricter, compelling state interest test that governed in the pre-Smith era, religious freedom was never an absolute right, but had to be balanced against competing state interests. Moreover, those interests must be assessed from the vantage point of the lawmakers, not the religious objector. The case that seems most on point with regard to the contraception mandate is United States v. Lee (1982). It was decided under the stricter test that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act still applies to federal regulations such as the mandate. In that instance, the Supreme Court held that it was constitutionally permissible for the federal government to force Amish employers to pay Social Security taxes for their employees, although both the payment and receipt of Social Security taxes violated their religious beliefs, and although the employees in question were Amish themselves. Why should it be permissible to force Amish employers to pay Social Security taxes but not to force Catholic employers to pay for contraception? I dont see a compelling distinction between the two cases. In Lee, the Court noted
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that the Social Security system in the United States serves the public interest by providing a comprehensive insurance system with a variety of benefits available to all participants, with costs shared by employers and employees. A similar claim could be made about employer-based health reform. Moreover, the Court noted that it would be difficult to accommodate the comprehensive Social Security system with myriad exceptions flowing from a wide variety of religious beliefs. The administrative difficulty would be even greater with comprehensive health reform, since objections would run not merely to payment, but to various and sundry covered services. Noting that Congress had made an exemption for selfemployed Amish, the Lee Court stated it need not go further by making an accommodation for Amish who employ other Amish, such as the plaintiff. The reasoning is instructive:
When followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity. Granting an exemption from Social Security taxes to an employer operates to impose the employers religious faith on the employees.
contraception will in fact contribute to the common good. And they are free to make that argument in the public square. But just as a member of Peace Church cannot politically demand that the only way to respect his or her religious liberty is to end a war for everyone, so the bishops cannot insist that the only way to respect our religious liberty is to repeal the contraceptive mandate for everyone. It just doesnt work that way. Cathleen Kaveny teaches law and theology at the University of Notre Dame.
Douglas Laycock
he bishops statement on religious liberty is better than many such statements, but it is also a missed opportunity. The statement is not unduly alarmist, but many find it so. And because its fundamental points are more asserted than arguedbecause it says nothing about any contrary argument or countervailing interestit can neither persuade those who disagree nor prepare the faithful for further debate. Some of its examples are well chosen; some are not. It wisely includes the example of state immigration laws that prevent the church from ministering to illegal aliens. This is important both for its own sake and because it shows that serious attacks on religious liberty come from the right as well as the left. The statement says nothing about antisharia legislation or widespread opposition to the building of mosquestwo more examples of attacks on religious liberty from the right. Some of the statements examples are actually understated. It includes the examples of Hastings Law School excluding the Christian Legal Society and of New York City barring churches from renting worship space in public schools, but it fails to explain that neither of these incidents is isolated. There have been similar disputes across the country. The statement refers to a 2009 bill in Connecticut to require lay control of Catholic parishesa bill that drew widespread condemnation and was withdrawn within days of the first public notice. Including an isolated bill that was defeated three years ago inaccurately suggests that all the good examples have already been listed. The dispute over Catholic administration of government programs for victims of human trafficking is a hard case, too complex to explore here, but it is presented in the bishops statement as though it were easy. The statement is oblivious to the likelihood that it will be misused for partisan purposes. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of waging a war on religionof being the most antireligious administration in history. These charges are nonsense, but they are part of the context in which the statement will be received.
It seems to me that this last point is decisive with respect to the contraception mandate. The vast majority of Americans do not believe that the use of contraception is intrinsically immoral. In fact, they think it is a morally appropriate way to fulfill their responsibilities to themselves and to their families. In this context, granting an exemption to Catholic institutions would effectively impose the Catholic employers understanding of morality on the employee just as surely as granting a Social Security tax exemption to Amish employers would. Congress did eventually grant Social Security tax exemptions to the Amish hiring their coreligionists, since both employer and employee rejected the costs and benefits of Social Security. That exemption was not constitutionally required. It was, however, constitutionally permitted and even constitutionally sensible. I think the same thing could be said about the latest attempt on the part of the Obama administration to accommodate Catholic employers, such as universities and hospitals, which do not meet the strict criteria for the exemption. On the one hand, such employers will not be required to provide or arrange for contraception coverage. On the other, employees will have access to such coverage through insurance companies or third-party administrators. I see no reason to disbelieve the actuaries who say that it is revenue-neutral to do so, since it reduces the rate of unexpected pregnancies across covered populations. According to Lee, To maintain an organized society that guarantees religious freedom to a great variety of faiths requires that some practices yield to the common good. The bishops do not agree, of course, that expanding access to
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The bishops cannot base their teachings on opinion polls, but if they intend to argue effectively for religious liberty, they need to acknowledge the difficult ground on which they stand.
This is why it would have been valuable to include more than one example of attacks on religious liberty from the right, and to state explicitly that attacks on religious liberty come from both directions. And this is why the bishops should have included attacks on religious liberty to which the Obama administration has responded. All over the country, zoning boards and neighborhood associations seek to prevent the building of new churches and synagogues. The Justice Department has responded aggressively to these efforts in both the Bush and Obama administrations. Obama has continued George W. Bushs faith-based initiative, which seeks to include religious providers of social services in government contracts, and he has resisted intense pressure to deprive participating religious organizations of their existing statutory right to prefer members of their own faith in their hiring decisions. Most problematic is the statements reliance on a distinction between just laws that violate the tenets of a particular faith, for which the solution is an exemption, and unjust laws for which the only solution is repeal. The relevance of this distinction and the scope of its application are left unstated. The apparent implication is that all the examples listed in the bishops statement involve laws that are unjust in this sensea claim that many readers will find absurd. In attacking all these laws as unjust, the bishops confuse their argument for religious liberty with their arguments on other moral issues. Laws banning sexual-orientation discrimination will not seem unjust to any of the people who need to be persuaded that religious liberty requires an exemption for the church. The bishops are of course free to demand that government and secular social-service agencies exclude gays and lesbians and unmarried straight couples from adopting children or providing foster care. But that is not an argument for religious liberty; it is an argument for regulating secular life. The contraception example is even worse. Do the bishops mean that the requirement that health-insurance plans cover contraception must be repealed? Or do they mean the Affordable Care Act must be repealed? They do not say, and given the widespread calls for repeal of the whole act, ambiguity on
that point is inexcusable. Would the bishops really deprive millions of Americans of health care rather than seek an exemption from the one implementation rule that deprives Catholic institutions of religious liberty? I hope not. And I hope that they will clarify this point in their two weeks of Catholic teaching on religious liberty leading up to July 4. Let us assume they mean only that the requirement to cover contraception is unjust. The argument for a religious exemption is strong; the claim that the law is so unjust that the only solution is to repeal it will persuade no one. It is not unjust to require Microsoft to cover contraception. The bishops condemn contraception, but few Catholics pay them any mind, and most Americans find the Catholic teaching incomprehensible. Contraception is a paradigmatic example of a practice that violates the idiosyncratic teaching of one faith. The statement quotes Bishop William Lori saying that the issue is not whether contraception may be prohibited, or whether the government may support it, but whether religious institutions may be forced to provide it. Precisely. That is the religious-liberty issue, and that effective point is lost by rhetorical excess about seeking repeal rather than exemptions. The requirement to cover contraception includes a requirement to cover sterilization and morning-after and week-after contraceptives that the bishops view as causing very early abortions. So the bishops believe they are being asked to pay for the killing of human beings. Many Americans who view the matter differently might nevertheless agree that those who believe that these pills kill human beings should not be required to pay for them. The claim to conscientious objection to abortion is powerful. But the point is largely lost when the statement expressly rejects conscientious objection in favor of repeal, when it mentions contraception ten times and abortion only four, and when it treats the two interchangeably and gives almost no separate emphasis to the requirement that employers pay for what the bishops believe are abortions. Much of the current threat to religious liberty flows from these deep disagreements over sexual morality. The difference between exemption and repeal is the difference between seeking religious liberty for Catholic institutions and seeking to impose Catholic moral teaching on the nation. The bishops can argue for either or both, but conflating the two fatally undermines the argument for religious liberty. What the bishops view as seriously sinful, many Americans (in the cases of abortion and same-sex relationships), or most Americans (in the case of contraception), view as fundamental human rights. The bishops cannot base their teachings on opinion polls, but if they intend to argue effectively for religious liberty, they need to acknowledge the difficult ground on which they stand. The bishops claim liberty for themselves, and for the large institutions they control, while also fighting to restrict the liberty of others with respect to abortion, emergency contraception, and same-sex relationships. Persistent opposition
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to the liberty of others makes enemies; many Americans on the other side of these issues now view the bishops as a powerful force for evil. Why should anyone who disagrees with the bishops on sexual morality respect their broad claim to religious liberty? That is the challenge that defenders of religious liberty must answer. There can be no compromise on abortion; the moral imperatives on both sides run too deep. With respect to same-sex relationships, the obvious compromise is for the churches to leave same-sex couples alone and for the gayrights movement to leave the churches alone. Live and let live may be unacceptable to either side. But if the bishops demand that government discriminate against same-sex couples in adoption and marriage, they can hardly be surprised when the gay-rights movement responds with hostility. There has been effective compromise on contraception: the bishops teach against it but have not for decades sought to make it illegal. Routine contraception is a legal and political issue only with respect to health insurance. And here, Catholic institutions must be free to live by Catholic teachings. Those who choose to work or study in Catholic institutions will bear some of the costs, but they cannot impose their non-Catholic morality on Catholic institutions. Religious institutions have provided education and health care for centuries. If government can secularize such institutions as soon as they employ, admit, or minister to nonCatholics (all inevitabilities in our pluralistic society), an important part of religious liberty as it has long existed will be lost. That is the position that has to be defended. The bishops statement does not effectively defend that position, in part because it does not acknowledge the real issues, and in part because it confuses the churchs right to live by its own religious teachings with its desire to have many of those teachings enacted into law. Douglas Laycock is professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Virginia. He addresses the reasons for the current hostility to religious liberty at greater length in Sex, Atheism, and the Free Exercise of Religion, in volume 88 of the University of Detroit Mercy Law Review.
In Schindlers view, this conception is not simply about providing rules of the road in a pluralistic democratic society. It embodies an idea of human nature that ensures that the rights of rational adults will prevail in any conflict with differently conceived rightssuch as a right to life asserted on behalf of a fetus. Schindler grants that, for immediate political ends, those who wish to defend their religious preferences might be justified in wrapping themselves prudentially in the mantle of liberal rights. But he warns that Catholics need to understand that the issue is not properly conceived as a matter of the consistent application of an idea of rights (as immunities) commonly embraced by the various parties. If they dont understand that, they will continue to aid and abet the dominant liberalisms hidden logic of repression. There can be no question that Our First, Most Cherished Liberty is full of commonly embraced rights rhetoric. What we ask is nothing more than that our God-given right to religious liberty be respected, say the bishops. We ask nothing less than that the Constitution and laws of the United States, which recognize that right, be respected. Indeed, the document is not at all an enunciation of a Catholic understanding of religious liberty but rather an exercise in latter-day Americanism, including what might charitably be termed a prettified account of the churchs historical approach to the subject. In its third paragraph, for instance, Our First, Most Cherished Liberty offers the following example of how Catholics in America have discharged this duty of guarding freedom admirably for many generations.
In 1887, when the archbishop of Baltimore, James Gibbons, was made the second American cardinal, he defended the American heritage of religious liberty during his visit to Rome to receive the red hat. Speaking of the great progress the Catholic Church had made in the United States, he attributed it to the civil liberty we enjoy in our enlightened republic. Indeed, he made a bolder claim, namely that in the genial atmosphere of liberty [the church] blossoms like a rose.
Mark Silk
n the latest issue of Communio, David L. Schindler fires a shot across the bow of the USCCBs campaign against the Obama administrations contraception-coverage mandate and other perceived assaults on religion liberty in America. Professor of theology at Catholic Universitys Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family as well as editor of Communio, Schindler devotes twenty-five pages to a natural-law critique of the liberal conception of rightsand its use in mounting a defense of religious liberty.
What the document fails to note is that Romes response was to anathematize Gibbonss embrace of his countrys approach to religious liberty as heretical. Two generations would pass before American bishops were again to find their tongues on the subject. To be sure, the USCCB does say that the churchs religious-liberty record leaves something to be desired: As Catholics, we know that our history has shadows too in terms of religious liberty, when we did not extend to others the proper respect for this first freedom. But that scarcely seems like an adequate acknowledgement of the churchs longstanding condemnation of religious liberty, such as in Pius IXs Syllabus of Errors (Error 77: In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should
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If the bishops were truly concerned about religious liberty as customarily embraced, they ought to have given some attention to Free Exercise claims that would permit behaviors of which they disapprove, such as polygamy.
be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship). And thats to say nothing of what the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions did to those condemned as heretics and apostates. Be that as it may, the Second Vatican Council did manage something of a volte-face for the church, such that the U.S. bishops can now stand up for religious liberty with impunity. In Our First, Most Cherished Liberty, they cite seven concrete examples of how it is currently under threat. Some are local trivialities, like the outlandish 2009 Connecticut bill to reorganize Catholic governance along congregational lines, which was going nowhere and went nowhere. Most of the others involve legal issues of church and state where the bishops have no leg to stand on in court. Thus, they consider it a violation of their religious liberty to be denied public money to carry out their good works on their own terms. No one, however, has a constitutional right to a government contract. The best constitutional claim the bishopsand other religious leadershave would appear to be against Alabama, where the states new anti-immigration law restricts the ability of churches to offer religious services to illegal immigrants. On that one, I hope they win. But as conservatives have started again acknowledging in the wake of President Barack Obamas recent criticism of the Supreme Court, the courts are the venue where threats against constitutional rights are handled in America. What is at stake, say the bishops, is whether America will continue to have a free, creative, and robust civil societyor whether the state alone will determine who gets to contribute to the common good, and how they get to do it. In fact, the state alone does get to set the ground rules for what groups and individuals may or may not do as they contribute to the common good. If that arm of the state known as the judicial system determines that a law is an unconstitutional violation of the guarantee of Free Exercise or the prohibition of Establishment, then it goes away. Thats how our system of we, the people governance works. Given the dubious argumentation and the high rhetorical gloss of Our First, Most Cherished Liberty, I confess some uncertainty as to whether it is a statement of principle
or merely a prudential document. If the bishops were truly concerned about religious liberty as customarily embraced, they ought to have given some attention to Free Exercise claims that would permit behaviors of which they disapprove, such as polygamy. They would also have taken note of Employment Division v. Smith, which has done more than any other recent Supreme Court decision to restrict religious liberty in the liberal sense by limiting Free Exercise claims to laws that are not neutral or generally applicable. Of course, the bishops might have refrained from mentioning Smith because they did not want to be seen to be criticizing its author, Justice Antonin Scalia, a hero of many conservative Catholics. Another possibility, however, is that for all their embrace of rights rhetoric, what the bishops are really interested in is not religious freedom in the liberal juridical sense, but in the kind of state support of majoritarian religion that Scalia and his fellow conservative justices have been promoting in much of their First Amendment jurisprudence. In this, the USCCBs real agenda would be closer to David Schindlers, who in his editorial emphasizes the churchs position that the state has a dutyto recognize religion and to favor conditions that foster its growth. Let me conclude with what is unquestionably the oddest part of the bishops statementits apparent simultaneous avowal and disavowal of civil disobedience in the face of threats to religious liberty. This section evidently refers to the bishops preoccupation with the contraception-coverage mandate under the health-care law. It seems that the mandateand thereby the law itself?is so unjust that no accommodation is acceptable, and so it must not be obeyed. Exactly how a religious employer could conscientiously disobey in this case is not clear, since in its current form theres nothing the employer can do not to provide the mandated coverage short of doing away with health insurance altogether (as the Franciscan University of Steubenville has done with student coverage). And its not against the law to decide not to provide employees with health insurance. You just have to pay a fine. But then, according to the bishops, conscientious objection can only provide relief from a just law, and since the mandate is unjust, and therefore no law at all, one must try to repeal it rather than just seeking an exemption. Apparently, the bishops will use their Fortnight for Freedom to lobby Congress to repeal mandatory contraception coverage. Meanwhile, they will engage in civil disobedience of the mandateif they can figure out how to do it, and if the Supreme Court has not by then declared the mandate an unconstitutional violation of the right of free exercise. Mark Silk is director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life and Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College. Co-author of One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics, he is editor of Religion in the News and blogs for Religion News Service at www.religionnews.com/blogs/mark-silk.
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Peter Steinfels
hreats to religious freedom have been a constant in American history. So have alarmist religious appeals that stir public hysteria, serve partisan ends, and degrade religion and politics alike. Eternal vigilance is appropriate in both cases. Thanks to such vigilance, religious freedom has steadily broadened its embrace over the course of our nations history. That it might now be narrowed, however, is not at all impossible. There is a species of conservatism that wants religious freedom for the Judeo-Christian us but would obstruct it for the Islamic or non-believing others. There is a species of liberalism that views religion as an irrational and retrograde intruder into public life and to the greatest extent possible would restrict it to the private sphere. This liberalism honors freedom of individual conscience (whether religious or not) and respects freedom of congregational worship but is antagonistic to freedom of the religious community as an institutional actor in allegedly secular space. The dividing line between exempt and nonexempt religious bodies in the HHS insurance mandates regarding preventative health-care services for women reflects this liberal tendency. Catholic Charities, Catholic health care, and Catholic higher education did not qualify for the religious exemption precisely because of traits that most Catholics, especially since Vatican II, prizenamely, that these institutions did not serve only fellow believers, hire only fellow believers, or engage in catechizing and proselytizing. A New York Times editorial praising the HHS stance inadvertently exposed the absurdity of this dividing line when it described these institutions as the churchs nonreligious arms. The bishops were right to protest this categorization. They were joined by many others across the political spectrum, Catholics and non-Catholics, however much they may have regretted waging this skirmish on the inhospitable terrain of a mandate regarding contraception. The administration has been back-pedaling through various accommodations, including a rethinking of the definition of exempt and nonexempt and a declaration that whatever definition emerges will not set a precedent for any other purpose. The bishops have rejected these accommodations as meaningless. Instead, they have subsumed their concerns under a full-throated campaign in defense of religious freedom. Their campaign is poorly conceived and runs a high risk of harming the very causes it would defend. But it is understandable. Every struggle over religious freedom has a cultural and political context, whether the nativist response to alien Irish papists in mid-nineteenthcentury America or the anti-Muslim prejudice prompted by fear of terrorism. The current explosion of episcopal fervor for religious freedom has had a long fuse. It is rooted in the long-standing battle over abortion and in the newer wave
of changing attitudes toward same-sex unions. It is rooted in the bishops belated realization of their diminished hold over Catholic opinion and Catholic institutionsand in the implausible belief that this diminishment would not be the case if only the clergy had been more assertive in enforcing Catholic teachings, largely about sexuality and gender. Finally, it is rooted in a kind of panic, constantly nurtured by prolife activists and conservative intellectuals, at the election of a Democratic administration marked by prochoice and same-sex sympathies. The bishops are not wrong to recognize that they are opposing culturally and, for that matter, financially powerful currents regarding abortion and same-sex marriage. Prochoice organizations aim at more than legal access; they want to mainstream abortion as simply one more medical procedure, often unhappy and, like many other medical procedures, unwantedbut certainly not morally problematic. The HHS mandates were widely described as providing preventive reproductive services. I can testify that many of my prochoice friends, fellow journalists, and liberal activists deeply and sincerely believe that abortion falls into that category no less than contraception, perhaps even more so. Mainstreaming is also the objective of most advocates of same-sex marriage, who deeply and sincerely believe that nothing but a bigotry as unacceptable as racial bigotry underlies any institutional privileging of heterosexual unions. Both movements, for abortion and for same-sex marriage, seek not only legal rights but moral legitimacy, and they are thus on a collision course with religious institutions that constitute morally credible islands of resistance to this mainstreaming. So Catholic institutions face any number of skirmishes about conscience clauses, antidiscrimination statutes, hospital mergers, licensing requirements, refusals of funding, tax exemption, insurance policies, and legal mandates. If the bishops had any comprehensive strategy for meeting these challenges, defending religious freedom would certainly be an essential component. Such a strategy would be measured and carefully targeted; it would combine public argument, sensitive pastoral leadership, legal defense, and the political savvy that knows where, in a pluralist society, a line can be drawn, how coalitions are nurtured, and when compromise is appropriate. What has emerged instead is a series of ad hoc gestures in which assertiveness has become the flip side of defensiveness. This state of mind can be seen in the 2004 controversy about withholding Communion from prochoice Catholic (i.e., mostly Democratic) politicians; in the consequent USCCB declaration on Catholics in Political Life barring awards, honors, or platforms for such individuals; and in the piling on over President Barack Obamas commencement address at Notre Dame. This state of mind showed itself in the national postcard campaign the bishops launched in mid-election 2008. That campaign raised a worst-case alarm about an until-then marginal Freedom of Choice Act. It foreshadowed the bishops worst case reading about funding abortion under health-care reform.
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For most people, being exempt on moral or religious grounds from directly taking part in some action is quite different from paying taxes or insurance premiums that fund a wide variety of social measures, including some measures one finds morally objectionable. Quakers may be exempt from fighting in combat; they are not exempt from paying the taxes that support the Defense Department.
Before the Obama administration was one year old, leading bishops began signing onto The Manhattan Declaration, an impassioned Call to Christian Conscience, drafted by conservative Catholic philosopher and frequent GOP adviser Robert P. George and evangelical scholar Timothy George. The declaration tied the same two issuesabortion and same-sex marriage as the cutting-edge attacks on human dignityto an ominous scenario of threats to religious liberty and religious institutions. The Manhattan Declaration is a well-crafted document; I would accept some of its arguments about the cheapening of life and erosion of the marriage culture and reject others. Important for present purposes, however, is its tone: Beleaguered believers are called to close ranks and enlist in an urgent stand against a hostile culture. The soul of our freedoms if not of our civilization hangs in the balance. The declarations message of a shrinking zone of religious freedom is crucial to this appeal. Complicated and contested arguments against abortion and same-sex relations are much more easily advanced under the universally applauded banner of religious freedom. Opponents of abortion and same-sex marriage, so often accused of imposing their views, are in fact imposed upon. They become aggrieved victims, the sine qua non, it seems, of American politics. his spirit of anxiety and confrontation, assertiveness and defensiveness, has increasingly animated the USCCBs public stances, especially toward the Obama administration. It has now propelled the bishops into their ill-conceived and potentially self-defeating campaign to defend religious freedom. The campaign appears unusually well-organized and well-funded. It has exceptional visibility and pride of place on the USCCBs website and among its activities. It features opening and closing episcopal liturgies in Baltimore and Washington, parish bulletin inserts, and specially composed prayers. Our First, Most Cherished Liberty, its charter document, summons up heroic past struggles for liberty and persecuted Christians around the world; it invokes everyone from John Carroll to Pope Benedict, from Lord Baltimore and James Madison to Martin Luther King Jr., to say nothing of Jesus Christ. But the great battle for our first, most cherished liberty, it turns out, pivots on an indirect payment of an insurance premium for health-care coverage that includes contraception. What a comedown! In reality, most bishops know that contraception is not the best ground on which to take a stand. Fewer bishopsand many laypeople untutored in the plethora of subtle churchstate disputesmay realize how unimpressive are the seven examples that purport to demonstrate religious liberty under attack. Should Northern Arapaho Native Americans who need bald eagle feathers for religious rituals be exempt from restrictions on hunting those birds off their reservation in Wyoming? Should ultra-Orthodox Jews who believe they cannot report cases of sexual abuse of minors to civil authorities without rabbinical approval be exempt from New Yorks reporting laws? Should the growing number of nonbelieving troops in the U.S. military have a counterpart to religious chaplains who would attend to their ethical and familial needs in an appropriately secular or humanist manner? Questions like these, to cite only a few that have come to my attention in the short time since the bishops launched their campaign, are constantly occupying our courts and legislatures. It is to our nations credit that we take them seriously, but they are often difficult to resolve and all too easy to construe into one trend or another. The bishops reasoning about religious exemption is similarly wanting. The definition used by Health and Human Services to distinguish exempt from nonexempt religious bodiesand used earlier by California and other states as well as regional offices of the National Labor Relations Boardis indeed objectionable. Unfortunately, the bishops have pushed the idea of exemption far beyond the breaking point. For most people, being exempt on moral or religious grounds from directly taking part in some action, like bearing
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arms or performing an abortion or eating forbidden foods or undergoing forbidden medical procedures, is quite different from paying taxes or insurance premiums that fund a wide variety of social measures for others, including some measures one finds morally objectionable. Quakers may be exempt on religious grounds from fighting in combat; they are not exempt from paying the taxes that support the Defense Department. Jehovahs Witnesses may be exempt from participating in the classroom Pledge of Allegiance; they are not exempt from paying school taxes. The bishops are not only blurring this common-sense line in a way that may come back to haunt them, they are also pushing the claim to religious exemption from indirect support beyond that of religious organizations to that of any individual employer or employee with religious objections to contraceptive services. This opens vast problems and actually undermines the USCCBs original concern about the HHS definition of exempt and nonexempt religious organizations. So consider: The bishops are mounting a crusade for religious freedom (1) in regard to Catholic educational, health-care, and social services whose religious character (especially of Catholic colleges, universities, and hospitals) church authorities routinely suspect and whose personnel they constantly alienate; (2) in regard to forms of exemption that are hugely expansive and highly debatable; and (3) in regard to church teachings that fewer and fewer Catholics accept. This is not an obvious formula for success. And failure will have a high cost. Exemption from direct participation in morally objectionable actions is one thing. Exemption from indirectly paying for others peoples morally objectionable actions is another. By appearing to equate the two, the bishops put at risk the former in advancing a very vulnerable case against the latter. But the most obvious dangers are, first, discrediting the cause of religious liberty itself and, second, discrediting the Catholic Church. Both arise from the direct entanglement of religion and its leaders with partisan politics. Freedom from such direct entanglement, as Tocqueville classically argued, has redounded to the benefit of both religion and politics in the United States. As Commonweal has editorialized, the bishops will have to take extraordinary care to keep their campaign from appearing like a direct intervention by the churchs leadership in the 2012 presidential election. Having already handed Republican primary candidates the occasion to denounce a war on religion and a war on Catholicism, the bishops now propose to focus all the energies the Catholic community can muster in a special way this summer. Perhaps the bishops imagine that their simple disavowal that this ought not to be a partisan issue will remove all scent of a standard wedge issue calculated to affect just enough Catholic votes in swing states. It will not go unnoticed that this proposal was drafted by an episcopal committee notable for outspoken Obama critics and with the help of lay consultants heavy on GOP appointees, advisers, and stalwarts
(at least one Romney adviser, Mary Ann Glendon, as well as Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, once a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and before that an assistant to Jesse Helms).
Peter Steinfels is co-director of the Fordham Center on Faith and Culture, and the author of A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America.
erhaps the bishops imagine that the ringing rhetoric and sweeping generalities of Our First, Most Cherished Liberty will patch over the cracks in their specific arguments about religious exemption from generally applicable laws. In truth, the melodramatic tone of Our First, Most Cherished Liberty and the Fortnight for Freedom, which very consciously associates the churchs present situation with the martyrdoms of Thomas More, John the Baptist, Peter and Paul, and the unnamed victims of the Emperor Nero, has quite predictably given rise to apocalyptic speeches and YouTube videos in which the forces of Christ and of freedom are arrayed against those of Obama. Will the Catholic Church become to the First Amendment what the National Rifle Association is to the Second? That will only do injury to both Catholic faith and religious freedom. Cynicism about political manipulation of religion is already rife. It may well be the leading factor in the massive drift of young people from any religious identification. Thankfully, cynicism about the political manipulation of religious freedom is not so widespread. Give it time. And fodder. A final irony: The bishops believe, accurately I think, that the churchs contribution to the common good depends on the vital religious presence in civil society of Catholic educational, health care, and social service institutions. Yet in the case of institutions that the bishops dont directly control, primarily in higher education and health care, relations grow increasingly adversarial rather than collaborative. Is this another example of destroying the village in order to save it? On June 1315, a week before the Fortnight for Freedom, the Catholic bishops will gather for their annual spring meeting. Will any among them raise probing questions about the course on which their leaders have set the church? Will anyone ask exactly what goals it is meant to reach and how likely this current campaign is to attain them? How will it avoid the appearance of partisan politics? How do these actions fit into the larger pastoral needs of the church? What alternatives were considered? Would someone even be bold enough to suggest that the church needs to revisit some of its teachings on sexuality and marriage if it wishes to effectively address topics like contraception and same-sex unions? Two hours are scheduled to discuss the religious freedom issue. Voices of 99.9 percent of the churchthe laity and priestswill be absent. One hopes that the bishops might overcome their usual deference and have a frank and honest exchange of views when so much is at stake. n
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SCREEN
Richard Alleva
See Sick
We hAve A pope
ff, off, you lendings! cries King Lear as he strips himself of the royal robes and reduces himself to the state of an unaccommodated man, living with the rest of unprivileged humanity. Hes deranged when he does this, but in many myths and fairy tales, kings, counts, and caliphs shed their identities with cool-headed deliberation: they want to become wiser rulers by getting to know the ruled. The disguised potentate keeps reappearing in drama and literature. Posing as a priest, the Duke of Vienna in Measure for Measure witnesses the harm his harsh laws have wrought; Tsar Peter the Great, in the hugely popular nineteenth-century operetta Zar und Zimmermann, helps young lovers while pretending to be a carpenter; and in the opening episode of the 70s TV series Lou Grant, the hero, a newly hired editor, walks through his newsroom to take the pulse of the reporters before they realize who he is. But this myth doesnt suit most modern political stories. Democratic heads of state have pollsters to gauge public opinion, and totalitarian rulers answer public rumblings with gunfire. So it was a stroke of genius for Italian writer-director-actor Nanni Moretti to realize that there is still one supreme, nondemocratic sovereign living in palatial splendor, royally robed, surrounded by courtiers and obsequious ministers, and guarded by soldiers armed with halberds and swordsa ruler we could still imagine walking in disguise among common folk. The pope. We Have a Pope is a satire but a surprisingly gentle one. Moretti mocks the protocols of papal election and Vatican secretiveness mostly by depicting the alltoo-human frailty of churchmen caught in the conclave machinery. An early scene sets the tone. As the cardinals process into the election chamber, their
vestments create an impressive splash of red and white against the marble surroundings. But somewhere at the head of the line, an unseen impediment holds up traffic. Un momento! a distant voice sings out, and for half a minute of screen time ecclesiastical pomp is put on embarrassing hold as the princes squirm, sweat, and stare into the middle distance. We laugh, but there are no close-ups of huffed faces designed to make us jeer. The cardinals wait patiently, and all this momentousness losing momentum evokes nothing but our common-creature empathy. This minor mishap foreshadows an epic gridlock. On being elected pope, a Frenchman named Melville (Michel Piccoli) declares, God sees abilities in me I dont have. Undergoing what appears to be a nervous breakdown (later he will describe his inchoate feelings as psychological sinusitis), Melville refuses to assume Peters throne. Vatican officials block all news of the crisis, an-
nouncing only that the new, unnamed pontiff has taken some time off for prayer and ref lection before meeting his flock. An agnostic but sympathetic psychoanalyst (wittily played by Moretti himself) is called in to help the pope but to no effect. (Wouldnt the Vatican have chosen a Christian psychiatrist?) A second analystwho just happens to be the ex-wife of the firstis consulted. After his first appointment with her, Melville eludes his handlers and wanders anonymously into the bustle of Rome. Meanwhile, thousands of the faithful keep vigil in St. Peters Square and millions more puzzle before their TV sets. The pope is on a sort of semi-senescent, semi-philosophical pilgrimage, an escape from responsibility but also a quest for meaning. He mutters to himself, cadges food, calls his staff from borrowed cell phones to reassure them, keeps his appointments with the female psychoanalyst, observes Roman street
sacher film
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and caf life, occasionally glimpses news about the consternation hes caused, and finally attaches himself to a theater company about to premier Chekhovs The Seagull. The first hour of this 105-minute movie succeeds in blending humor and poignancy. Many moments linger in the mind: the deliberating cardinals tapping their pens, at first desultorily and then in unison as their one shared thought Please, dear God, not me!becomes audible on the soundtrack; Melville, before his escape, benevolently beaming at members of the Swiss Guard on drill in the papal gardens (they dont know what to make of the pixyish cleric); a montage of the cardinals, coddled prisoners of the Vatican until Melvilles election is officially announced, occupying themselves before bedtime with jigsaw puzzles, exercise bikes, extra glasses of wine, etc. The films keenest satire is in a scene where the psychoanalyst Moretti takes on the new pope in a session whose boundaries have been strictly set by the Vaticans bureaucracy. (Can I ask about his relationship with his mother? No. His dreams? Within limits. His sexual fantasies? Absolutely not!) All the cardinals hover like Hitchcocks birds, ready to swoop in should the interview get too Freudian. Michel Piccoli is now over eightyfive years old and no longer projects the wolfishness that made the sociopaths, playboys, and gamblers he used to play so memorable. Age has filled out his face and bestowed on it a mildness and quizzicality that suits the part of Melville perfectly. In the performances of some elderly actors you may uncomfortably sense the director capitalizing on, even exploiting, infirmity. But, like James Cagney in Ragtime, Piccoli makes you aware of a residual strength behind the fragility, a keenness ever ready to burst through the woolgathering. This keeps the audience in some suspense while watching Melville struggle against his doubts and terrors. So far, so great. Yet We Have a Pope loses its momentum in its last forty-five minutes. The inventiveness flags, the
satire loses its edge, and even some of the poignancy evaporates. Of course, the storyline has to split into parallel tracks once the pope escapes from the Vatican. From then on, most of the satire is confined to scenes of the sequestered cardinals and Morettis psychiatrist exasperating one another back at the palace, while Melvilles Roman odyssey concentrates the storys tenderness. This in itself would not have been a flaw had the satire remained sharp and the poignancy truly felt, but they dont. Moretti portrays the cardinals the same way Hollywood screwball comedies treated Shriners: as overgrown boys on a lark. None of them are memorable even as caricatures, and Moretti is finally reduced to conjuring up a volleyball competition for these wild and crazy guys in red, with the good doctor as referee. Lame. For the popes wanderings to come to some sort of culmination, he would have needed substantial encounters with residents of Rome, ordinary people who could have convincingly evoked from him a new appreciation of human need. His stay with the theater troupe was probably meant to do this, but the actors are no more individualized than the cardinals, except for one who goes off his rocker and starts reciting the entire playeveryones lines, not just his own. We get the point. A pope must certainly play his crucial role within the church, but must his voice be the only one heard? We may or may not feel that this symbolism is worthy of the problem, but the real drama must emerge from the way the situation changes Melvilles heart and strengthens his resolve. His involvement with the troupe doesnt do this. The actual turning point comes when Melville attends a Mass celebrated by a young priest who in his sermon urges humility in trying to understand the will of God. This inspires the popes final decision, a declaration of great humility. Very neat, but given Melvilles insecurity, wasnt his problem a matter of too much humility all along? We Have a Pope is a fine, funny movie, but, dramatically speaking, it runs in place. n
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BOOKS
William Storrar
Blame It on Scotus
The Unintended Reformation
How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society Brad Gregory
Harvard University Press, $39.95, 592 pp.
was a child of the 1950s and 60s, but came of age in a medieval intellectual tradition. A boy from a medieval village, I first taught at a medieval university (Aberdeen). My mentor there had spent a scholarly lifetime in the Vatican archives assessing the church in late medieval Europe. Inspired by his definitive biography of the universitys founder, the reforming humanist bishop William Elphinstone, I published an essay on the contemporary relevance of Erasmuss approach to church reform. Subsequently, as a professor of theology and director of an interdisciplinary research center in theology and public issues at the University of Edinburgh, I adopted an approach to university and public life formed by the public-spirited piety of Elphinstone, Erasmus, and John XXIII. No one informed me that this mix of medieval formation and Catholic reform was simply not possible. No one, that is, until I read Brad Gregorys book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Imagine my shock to discover that, far from being the conduit of catholicity I had always thought myself to be, I was in fact a cause of secularism. Why? Because according to GregoryI was actually a Protestant, a religious revolutionary who was meant to have destroyed the Christian order of medieval Europe, not embraced it as his own. I was a case of theological false consciousness, that
walking, talking oxymoron, a medieval Protestant. Oops! My mistake. The thesis of Gregorys intellectual tour de force is simple: Protestants created the modern world; Brad saw it and it was not good. As its title implies, The Unintended Reformation argues that the present unhappy state of the Western world is rooted in a set of unintended consequences triggered by sixteenthcentury reformers who sought to address the moral shortcomings of the medieval church by appealing to the authority of Scripture. In doing so, they unwittingly opened a Protestant Pandoras box of woes, releasing the evils of individualism, secularism, and consumerism, and in the process ending, in Gregorys words, over one thousand years of Christianity as a framework for shared intellectual life in the Latin West. And so in Gregorys court the Protestant Reformers are arraigned for the manslaughterif not murderof our happy medieval estate of integrated living and thinking. Three other names appear as accessories on the charge sheet. The first is John Duns Scotus, the medieval Franciscan theologian and scholastic philosopher. By arguing that we must use the same terms to speak of God and the created world
John Duns Scotus
univocally, rather than by analogy as Thomas Aquinas argued, the Subtle Doctor or original Dunce (depending on your point of view) started the Enlightenment heirs of the Reformation on the road to the inevitable conclusion that we have no need of a supreme being to explain the natural world. A fellow Franciscan, the razor-wielding William of Ockham, hastened them on their way. The third culprit is not a person but a discipline, modern historiography and its practitioners, guilty of manifold crimes: exiling the medieval past to explanatory darkness; dividing history into an archipelago of sub-disciplinary islands; and excluding religion from the scholarly conversation on hidden metaphysical grounds. Such comprehensive errors lead Gregory to conclude his analysis with a spirited call to unsecularize the academy. In making his ambitious case, Gregory identifies six pernicious unforeseen ramifications of the Protestant Reformation. First, God was excluded, as the Western intellectual tradition embraced Scotist univocity and the linked Protestant hostility to a sacramental view of the universe. Second, doctrines were relativized, with the exclusion of God foreclosing the possibility of agreement about truth claims, laying the basis for the hyperpluralism that has dogged Western thought from the Protestant exegetes of the Reformation right up to our own modern philosophers. Third, as Christendom split apart, warring Catholics and Protestants looked to the rising nation-states to protect their interests, and churches ended up being controlled by their erstwhile protectors; gradually the medieval values of solidarity in the family, church, and society gave way to modern individualism, in which Protestants emphasized grace alone for
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salvation, and did so under the guise of a liberty guaranteed by the liberal state. Fourth, with the loss of such communities as the social context for cultivating virtue, morality became a matter of subjective definition by autonomous individuals demanding their rights. Fifth, the economy became detached from ethics, in distinction to the medieval world, where they were inseparable; what was once seen as avarice, a deadly sin, was demoted to mere acquisitivenessor even boosted as enlightened self-interest, laying the basis for such moral calamities as rampant consumerism and financial deregulation. Finally, Gregory charges, the doctrinal disagreements of the Reformation era and the ideological and institutional responses they engendered prefigured todays secularization and specialization of knowledge, a knowledge routinely pursued with little or no concern for its relation to life.
regory deserves our gratitude for daring to break from the confines of his academic guild and raise questions of fundamental public concern. Why is the world in the state its in? How did we get here? And what has become of the university? In Gregorys view, the answers show how dismayingly far we have sunk. Instead of the medieval ideal of moral communities of solidarity living in a creation made by a creator beyond our ken but not our love, we inhabit a world characterized by little thought of God or neighbor. Instead of a community of scholars dedicated to the integration of all knowledge in the knowledge of God, we now have secular universities of increasing specialization that exclude God. Speaking as someone who leads an independent ecumenical institute for advanced research dedicated to generating theological ideas with global impact, I can say with confidence that Gregory has my full attention. His cry is music to my ears. Why then do I disagree with the argument he sets out with such erudite eloquence? Let me touch on three points. First,
Gregorys take on Duns Scotus is not uncontested. Not all agree that Scotuss argument for a univocity of being led inexorably to the Enlightenment expulsion of God from a self-explanatory nature and the secular modern university; Thomas Williams, for example, argued persuasively in a 2005 essay in Modern Theology that the doctrine of univocity is a semantic doctrine, and although Scotus does associate some ontological claims with that doctrine, it is highly misleading to talk...about a univocalist ontology. Second, Gregorys binary and absolute distinction between the medieval Roman Catholic and Reformation Protestant worlds is no longer tenable. There has been a major shift in our understanding of the relation between different religious traditions, one that sees faith boundaries as both highly porous and mutually informative. The recent work of Peter Schfer on the origins of rabbinic Judaism in the Common Era, The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other, asserts the fluidity of boundaries both within and between religions, and describes identities that are less stable and boundaries that are more permeable than has been previously thought. I would argue for the same permeability in understanding the relationship between Roman and Reformation Christianity. And third, pace Gregorys view of the all-conquering supersessionism of the modern academy, there exist major examples of contemporary research that start with the medieval era in analyzing the modern world. One thinks, for example, of the work of Saskia Sassen on the origins of globalization in her Territory, Authority, Rights, with its telling subtitle: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. At a deeper level, I believe that when it comes to the liberal consequences of the Reformation, its Scotist precursor, and Enlightenment aftermath, there is a tale to be told besides the one presented in The Unintended Reformationa different account of the same history. Appropriately, it is also a Catholic story. It is the story of the intended liberal
consequences of the Reformation and Enlightenment and their embrace by a Catholic Church at ease with secularity. The Australian Catholic theologian Robert Gascoigne tells this other story in his 2009 book The Church and Secularity: Two Stories of Liberal Society. Gascoigne acknowledges the story of the church and liberal society that informs Gregorys genealogy of the modern world. This liberal narrativethe one Gregory blames for its corrosive effectsunderstands freedom in terms of the autonomous individual and his right to pursue private notions of the good without any societal restrictions beyond those necessary to protect property and personal security. This narrative is inherently secularizing, casting any religiously informed notion of the common good in the public square as an unacceptable restriction on individual freedom and rights. But the other liberal story, the one Gascoigne champions, tells of a freedom that can only be found in community and a shared quest for the common good. In that quest, religiously informed values, voices, and votes are to be welcomed, above all in a common defense of human rights as the Catholic as well as secular condition for human flourishing. Gascoigne puts it this way:
The freedom that is fundamental to liberal societies can be the source and guarantee of the love, solidarity, and respect that make authentic community possible. Liberal society, refraining from imposed traditions of meaning and social hierarchies, has the potential to encourage the free development of mutual respect and affinity, without the intrusion of rank and the temptation of hypocrisy. Yet it is also true that the disengagement of individual freedom from socially reinforced traditions of meaning and the expectations of social custom can become the rejection of any meaning and value outside the ego, the mere assertion of the desire to dominate, control, and consume, the destruction of the ethical substance that enables individuals to develop and express themselves in a social milieu. In this sense, liberal society can and does tell two stories: a positive story of freedom of conscience and the development of unconstrained community, as well as a negative story of self-centeredness, vacuity, and the commodification of human values.
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It is the negative story of liberal society that Gregory tells with such astonishing architectonic reach, from the medieval era of faith to the Madoff era of financial scams. But it is not the whole story, by any means. To raise doubts about Gregorys thesis is simply to acknowledge the terrific intellectual energy and dialogical purchase of his thinking. His book opens a new round in the great debate on liberal modernity, and its range and interconnected detail invite entry into that debate and dialogue at many points. For mean oxymoronic medieval Protestantthe heart of the matter is whether Gregory can acknowledge that there are in fact two stories of the church and liberal society, and thus be persuaded that all is not lost in the modern academy. For there is hope beyond Gregorys despair, and it lies with the churchs affirmation of the other story of liberal society, the one behind Robert Gascoignes call for the Christian faiths own understanding of freedom, as the response to Gods gift of life and lovean understanding, he writes, that can serve to nourish all expressions of freedom in liberal society that are orientated to mutual respect and just relationships. The Unintended Reformation is a landmark publication to rank alongside John Milbanks Theology and Social Theorya profound work of original scholarship with a provocative thesis that will shift the parameters of academic and public debate on religion, thought, and society. My point is not to disagree with such a magisterial work, but merely to encourage readers to consider that other, more hopeful story of secularity and the modern world. As John XXIII put it in his journal entry for January 8, 1903: Yesterday my learned professor of Church History gave us excellent advice, particularly useful to me: read little, little but well. The Unintended Reformation is not little, but we should all read it well. n William Storrar is director of the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey.
Bernard P. Prusak
When Popes Were Papas

A History of the Popes
From Peter to the Present John W. OMalley, SJ
Sheed & Ward, $19.95, 368 pp.
he papacy is the oldest living institution in the Western world, John OMalley notes in his introduction to A History of the Popes, and as vital today as perhaps ever in its history. Given the negative attributes that the book ascribes to various popes over the centuries, the papacys ongoing vitality is indeed remarkable, but also somewhat contextual. As OMalley observes, for the past hundred years, the papacy has played a larger role in Catholics self-definition than ever before. Modern means of communication and travel have been a significant factorand have enabled ever more centralization. By contrast, in the year 1200, for instance, perhaps 2 percent of the population knew there was such an institution as the papacy or believed it had anything significant to do with their religion. The bishops of Rome, called popes (from the Latin papa or father) since the fifth century, have always cared for and been linked to the tombs of Peter and Paul. From the time of Leo the Great (440461) they claimed to be the
vicar of Peter. Only with Innocent III (11981216) did they exclusively claim the title vicar of Christ. Especially after the fall of the Roman empires, they provided for the needy in their city and sought to protect Rome and surrounding territories from foreign invaders, which involved having an army. For many centuries before 1870, popes were also temporal monarchs ruling the papal states that extended from Naples north and east across the peninsula toward Venice. They claimed the power to crown kings and emperors. Such functions have not been part of the job description for popes of the past century. Significantly, in the wake of Vatican II, Paul VI gave renewed emphasis to the title Servant of the Servants of God. OMalley makes clear that he writes as a historian, not a theologian. He tells a pared-down story of the papacy, skipping over long periods to focus on defining moments of papal history. His approach is effective and the historical anecdotes provide a very readable insight into the development of the papacy. The first chapter reviews the biblical and archeological evidence regarding Peters role and his link to the city of Rome. In asking whether Peter was the first bishop (Greek episkopos or over-
Pope Alexander VI
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seer) of Rome and thus the first pope, OMalley maintains that the Christian community at Rome well into the second century operated as a collection of separate communities without any central structure, and concedes, if a bishop is an overseer who leads all the Christian communities within a city, then it seems Peter was not the bishop of Rome. But he immediately labels that position narrow and unimaginative, arguing that, if Peter has eaten and drunk with Jesus, and witnessed the resurrection, he must have exercised a leadership role greater than that of a single presbyter. If that is true, then it follows that Peter can, with qualification but justly, be called the first bishop of Rome. And if he is the first bishop of Rome, then he is the first pope. In the second century, Linus was listed as the first bishop of Rome; Peter was considered an apostle, a higher status than bishop. While other historians follow that list, OMalley follows the Vaticans Annuario Pontificio in listing Peter as the first pope, reaffirming at the end of the book his argument that Peter presumably exercised a special leadership role in the community, which is what we mean by a bishop. However, in the second chapter, the author acknowledges that the second-century text The Shepherd of Hermas spoke of the Church of Rome having many rulers, and adds that Rome eventually followed the pattern of a single bishop that had emerged in other churches. Such details seem to counter stretching the meaning of the term bishop so that Peter can be called the first bishop of Rome. Turning to the late second and third centuries, the author notes that a number of the bishops of Rome were married, and a few were descendants of previous popes. We are introduced to Victor, Callixtus (and his rigorist opponent, Hippolytus, the first antipope), and Stephen, the first pope to invoke Matthew 16:18, You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, as a basis for papal primacy over other churches. Some dark hours in papal history are detailed. Pope John VIII (872882) was
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it had been extorted from the king by his barons without papal consent. Innocent VIII (148492) was the first pope to acknowledge openly that he had fathered two children before he was ordained. In 1492, Alexander VI was elected. He fathered nine children by different women and, most scandalous, two while he was pope. The Reformation was looming. Pius VII, elected in 1799, imbibed a love of learning that was broader than was common among Italian clerics of the time. He read Locke and Diderot, and quoted Rousseau in a homily. He was respected even in Protestant lands for the way he had dealt with Napoleon and for the priestly view he took of his office. By contrast, Pius VIII (182930) imposed a harsh police regime whose puritanical extremes would have been ludicrous had they not been so fanatically enforced. He put Jews back in the ghettos and had the gates fitted with locks. Gregory XVI, elected in 1831, was a person of narrow vision who banned railroads in the papal states. His first encyclical, Mirari vos, issued in 1832, viewed freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and separation of church and state as false ideas. Leo XIII, elected in 1878 made John Henry Newman, who wrote
poisoned and clubbed to death by one or more of his clerics. From his death to the death of John XII in 964, the papacy was immersed in plots, counterplots, bribes, threats, choreographed violence, and shifting alliances between factions and Roman families. While noting that there were some decent and hard-working popes, the author catalogues the intrigues of this scandalous era, which includes a pope who was the son of a previous popes mistress. The book offers many interesting tidbits. The first pope-elect who took a new name was Mercury in 533, who, being named after a pagan god, assumed the name John II. Most remember Gregory VII as a reformer pope who brought the emperor Henry to repentance at Canossa for his practice of lay investiturenaming unworthy bishops. In his Dictatus papae from 1075, Gregory claimed that the pope is the only one whose feet are kissed by all princes and that he may depose emperors. We learn that Gregorys close collaborator, St. Peter Damian, once called him my holy Satan, and that no pope died hated by more people than Gregory VII. In 1215, the year in which he convoked the Fourth Lateran Council, Innocent III sided with the king of England and declared the Magna Carta void because
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a book arguing that doctrine changed over time, a cardinal. Leo also issued Rerum novarum, the first encyclical on social questions such as a just wage and the right of workers to organize, providing a model for subsequent popes. However, Leo saw the papacy as having the answers to all questions, and he did all in his power to underscore its absolute authority. Turning to more recent popes, OMalley says that John XXIII, who convened Vatican II, was himself, as he said of the church, benign, patient, full of mercy and goodness. The author documents Pope John Paul IIs accomplishments but also notes that in the bishops synods he convoked in the Vatican, it became clear that his mind was made up on most of the questions before the bishops had a chance to speak. National episcopal conferences gradually lost what little margin they had for independent decision-making. That stood in contrast with the Second Vatican Councils attempts to reverse the centralizing process in church governance. The author reports that the pope sometimes displayed a willfulness that startled even his most fervent admirers, as in the case of appointing and then refusing to remove a radical reactionary Swiss bishop. That indicated his determination to demand unquestioned acceptance of papal decisions, cost what it may. Under John Pauls leadership, the Holy See
seemed all too often prematurely to have taken sides. The result of this strategy was counterproductive. Rather than ensure unity, it sharpened differences within Catholicism and engendered rancor and suspicion. Real Catholics accused those with whom they disagreed of disloyalty and even heresy, and they felt they had backup in the highest quarters.
Jonathan Tuttle
Neither Here Nor There

1Q84
Haruki Murakami
Knopf, $30.50, 944 pp.
t the beginning of Haruki Murakamis 1Q84, a taxi driver in 1984 Tokyo suggests that his passenger, a young woman late for an appointment, beat the traffic by stepping out of his cab and walking to the nearest emergency pull-off. He follows his advice with a warning: After you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change
a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. But dont let appearances fool you. Theres always only one reality. Theres always only one reality isnt something youd expect to hear in a novel containing telepathic cult leaders, multiple moons, and prescient crows. But within the first few pages of Murakamis mysterious novel, the sentence appears twice, and once in bold type. The words form a seemingly impossible law that the rest of the novel dares usand its charactersto contradict. We often take for granted that there
With regard to Pope Benedict XVI, OMalley writes, we wait to see what he will make of his time as Servant of the Servants of God. n Bernard P. Prusak is professor and chair of the Theology and Religious Studies Department at Villanova University.
knopf
Haruki Murakami
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are multiple realities. The notion that my experience, your experience, the bottom of the ocean, and the far side of the moon all exist in the same reality is hard to swallow. At the end of a long day, we pick up a novel with the expectation that we are entering another world, or at least another version of this one. But Murakamis taxi driver is not the last character in this book to warn against the ease of parallel worlds. This is no imitation world, no imaginary world, no metaphysical world, says another. After the young woman, Aomame, descends from Inbound Expressway Number 3, she does indeed begin to sense a change in the everyday look of things. Some of this change is small (the police carry different guns); some of it large (there are now two moons in the sky). Unable to comprehend her new experience, Aomame simply calls it 1Q84, a pun on the Japanese pronunciation for the number nine and a term that signifies a year of questions. This is not to say that 1Q84 is that much stranger than 1984. After all, the appointment Aomame was late for was a hit job. She had been hired a few years prior by a wealthy dowager to assassinate abusive husbands. All of this is carried out in 1Q84 exactly as it would have been in 1984. Aomame enters the targets hotel room posing as a hotel employee, asks to see a spot on the back of his neck, then stabs him with an ice pick, instantly stopping his heart and leaving only a small puncture wound. Its the kind of movie-trailer drama that poses questions of genre in the readers mind. Is this a thriller? A mystery? Science fiction? And while 1Q84 doesnt follow the rules of any one genre, its characters and plot points all share the same dime-novel overstatement. The prime example of this comes long before the flow of time has switched from 1984 to 1Q84, when a ten-year-old Aomame silently reaches out to hold the hand of her classmate Tengo, an experience, we are told rather flatly, that changed their lives forever and set this story in motion.
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In alternating chapters, the novel focuses on Tengo and Aomame separately. Murakami leaves the reader guessing far into the book how and whether the two characters are connected. Tengo is as outwardly unassuming as Aomame. He teaches math part time, works on a novel part time, and keeps one day a week open for his married girlfriend. Like Aomame, he has a vague sense of purposelessness, despite his comfort. Both characters feel their lives have ended before really beginning, and so they both nonchalantly take on assignments that threaten their lives. Aomame agrees to the most complicated assassination of her career, killing the leader of a powerful cult, while Tengo secretly agrees to rewrite a manuscript by the cult leaders seventeen-year-old daughter. Each of these assignments comes with a surreal hitch. The novel Tengo rewrites, which becomes a bestseller, is about a set of malevolent beings called Little People, who crawl from the mouth of a dead goat and spin doppelgangers out of the air. But it turns out to be a memoir, not a novel. The Little People are indeed a force in this world, and all goes well as long as they are countered by an equal, less malevolent force in a kind of Manichean equilibrium. But whether these forces are fictional or nonfictional is less important to Murakami and his characters than whether they make for a good story. Storytelling is the active ingredient in the year 1Q84. Both Tengo and Aomame carry with them little personal mythologies, just as we all do, detailed landscapes made of memory. The trick is to line up all the narratives you encounteryours and everyone elsesin a way that gets you what you want, which, in the case of Tengo and Aomame, is to find each other. Murakamis richness of allusionhis comparison of everything and anything to a great Western novelreinforces the idea of scattered, miniature worlds, but the novel nearly sinks under the weight of so much portentous reference. Just when we are beginning to understand that the book we are reading about could also be the book we are reading, Aomame picks up a copy of Prousts In Search of Lost Time; another veil drops between us and the main plot. Murakamis dialogue suffers from the opposite problem: it is too direct, unnaturally efficient. Characters speak only to get what they want. The false starts, insecurities, and inconsequential playfulness of everyday speech are absent. In 1Q84, Murakami presents some fascinating ideas about the nature of narrativeand, in particular, about the way well-told stories lure us with the promise of other worlds, even when we know all along there is really only one. But Murakami fails to dramatize these ideas properly in his own narrative. We see characters consumed by tales of Little People and strange moons, but by the end of 1Q84 we are neither here nor there. n Jonathan Tuttle is a writer and graduate student in Durham, North Carolina.
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LETTERS continued from page 2

identity crisis? Cathleen Kavenys column Catholic Kosher (June 1) is excellent. The moralityas-identity-politics phenomenon did not start with Archbishop William Loris comparison of the contraception mandate with forcing a kosher deli to serve ham sandwiches. Neither did it start over contraception. If memory serves, during the 1984 feud between Gov. Mario Cuomo and Cardinal John OConnor of New York, Cuomo said he was personally opposed to abortion because he was Catholic, not because it was immoral. Likewise, when OConnor criticized him, it was not primarily because Cuomo was defending an evil, but because he was violating Catholic teaching. Being prolife is often treated as a marker of Catholic identity rather than a genuine commitment to the unborn. Not, I suspect, to the same extent that natural family planning can be, but nonetheless in ways that Aquinas never would have been able to recognize. I also find it ironic that as more and more on the left begin to see the problems with many forms of identity politicsin some ways accepting a decades-old conservative argumentit is being utilized more and more adamantly on the right. andy buechel Arlington, Mass. none of the ABove Regarding Cup or Chalice? (John R. Donahue, June 1): Chalice may not be the right word, but cup isnt either. To contemporary ears, cup does not suggest wine: it suggests coffee or tea and a vessel with a handle. Glass, which we would usually use for a wine vessel, wont do either, since we are not recalling an event at which a glass vessel was used. Chalice does sound too grand, but it may actually fit the Passover setting better. I dont know if firstcentury Jews used special vessels for the cups of wine at Passover, but Jews of succeeding centuries certainly have. We simply do not have an English word that is a perfect substitute for the Greek word. The new translators choice may not have been the best, but it avoids problems that cup presents.
brian abel ragen
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THE LAST WORD

The church is remiss if it does not preach on Sunday what the church has been saying in its formal documents since Pope Leo XIII. The church has a pastoral obligation to challenge the human tendency to consider maintenance of the status quo our most important goal. Here Zacchaeus ought to be our model. He rejected the notion that he was entitled to profit at other peoples expense. orming a Christian conscience means exposing it to the hard He recognized that personal conversion involved a commitment to sayings of Jesus, which call for a self-emptying commitment justice. Scripture tells us that after his conversion he vowed to give to the whole law: love of God and love of all other human half of what he had to the poor and make restitution fourfold beings. Jesus used as an example of this love a widow who gave to those he had wronged as a tax collector. her last two coins to support the temple. He didnt call his disciples If this kind of conversion is not at the heart of the churchs attention to this woman just so that they would admire her; he was pastoral teaching, then the church is allowing Catholics to ignore making a point about the wealthy people who also contributed or even reject the risky truth of the gospel. This is the crisis in to the temple but whose contributions came from their excess. contemporary Christianity. What Christians in twenty-first-century Jesus couched this lesson in terms of the very poor and the America most need to guard against is not secular persecution very rich. Most people, falling into neither category, take no risk or forced conversion to Islam, but the secret infidel that lives by assenting to Jesus words: They have all contributed from within every Christian, the nonbeliever willing to go through the their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has contributed motions of a ritual but unwilling to risk his own comfort. all she had. Yet those who are materially secure and comfortable The separation of daily life from the word of God can be quantibut not wealthy might respond differently if they looked at these fied in the form of unreasonable words from another angle. Jesus profits and excessive interest. didnt just disapprove of the fact Our economic system not only that the wealthy gave less than fails to act in the interest of the they could have. He also pointed truly poor but often acts against out that the poor woman gave their interests. For example, everything she had, and he apthere is a pattern in urban reproved. If Jesus thought it was development in which housing reasonable for that woman to that serves the truly poor is degive away all she had, then he clared unfit or obsolete and then expected the rest of us to act razed, permanently depriving with a similar generosity. the poor of their homes. Where Bishops and priests who the poor once lived, expensive continue the ministry of Jesus housing for the middle class should teach that same lesson. goes up instead. This happens The parish is a place to arouse James Tissot, The Widows Mite, ca. 1886 not because of a lack of reconsciences, inspire conversion, sources but because of a lack of will to consider the poor first. prompt action. It is a place to address issues in the community Our culture accepts the idea that those who make it in our outside the church. The parish is not a sanctuary designed to economy are justified in accumulating wealth and material posoffer uncritical self-assuranceGod, I thank you that I am not sessions without regard for those who are left out. This idea is like other men. Too many people turn from the comforts of the common not only among the widely reviled one percent but liturgy back to the pursuit of their private comfort and security, also among those in the middle, including Catholics who go to without regard to how their pursuit affects others. They are conchurch every Sunday with no fear of being called to account. If, ditioned by a culture that regards luxury as the best measure of instead of flattering their flocks moral vanity, our priests and bisha successful life. ops would challenge them to repudiate greed, more middle-class Our political and economic system concentrates power and Catholics might take personal responsibility for the authentic wealth in the hands of a small minority and so guarantees the human development of their brothers and sisters in need. Doroexistence of a permanent underclass, whose members live without thy Day said her mission was to comfort the afflicted and afflict stable employment, decent housing, and proper education and the comfortable. Many of the people at Mass each Sunday are health care. Programs administered by governments and nongovcomfortable. They shouldnt leave without being reminded of the ernmental organizations purport to address the problems of poverty. afflicted all around them. n An affluent Christian may believe such programs free him from any personal responsibility for the poor. This is an illusion. As Pope Benedict XVI has written, What the fight against poverty really rev. Brian mccormick is the founder and chief executive officer needs are men and women who live in a profoundly fraternal way of Martin House Foundation, whose programs provide housing, and are able to accompany individuals, families, and communities education, job training, youth activities, and transitional housing on journeys of authentic human development. for the homeless.
The Secret Infidel

Brian McCormick
brooklyn museum
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Commonweal June 15, 2012 Issue: The Bishops and Religious Liberty

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Commonweal June 15, 2012 Issue: The Bishops and Religious Liberty

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Commonweal

Paul Baumann Grant Gallicho, Matthew Boudway, Mollie Wilson OReilly

Susanne Washburn Christine Neulieb

Christa A. Kerber Rosemary Deen Richard Alleva, Rand Richards Cooper

KeriLee Horan 212-662-4200

Regan Pickett commonwealads@gmail.com 540-349-5736 Thomas Baker

Commonweal . June 15, 2012

The next issue of Commonweal will be dated July 13, 2012

Cover design: Cecilia Guerrero Rezes

the lAst Word

Nanni Moretti (left) and Michel Piccoli in We Have a Pope

From the Verdicts post When I Was a Child, by Edward T. Wheeler:

Commonweal . June 15, 2012

P bli h d by Published b Catholic University of America Press

From the Editors

Commonweal . June 15, 2012

Commonweal . June 15, 2012

Special Sale For Commonweal Readers

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The Bishops & Religious Liberty

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John Duns Scotus

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When Popes Were Papas

Debating Same-Sex marriage

Commonweal . June 15, 2012

Neither Here Nor There

Commonweal . June 15, 2012

Compelled by Faith to Live the Single Life?

Commonweal . June 15, 2012

LETTERS continued from page 2

Saint Louis, Mo.

Commonweal . June 15, 2012

THE LAST WORD

The Secret Infidel

Commonweal . June 15, 2012

Faith Life Politics Culture

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