What Are We Teaching Our Students?

This question titles a piece that I just published in The Irish Rover that begins:

Days after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel—killing over 1200 men, women and children, beheading babies, murdering the elderly, killing more Jews in any day since the Holocaust—hundreds of students at our nation’s most prestigious universities protested … Israel.

What are these students being taught such that they would condone Hamas’s attacks? What they are not being taught is the natural law, I argue — the moral law that structures the universe and forms of the backbone of the United Nations Charter and the proscription of war crimes in international law. The student’s protests undercut the validity of these cherished and fragile international norms.

Catholic universities are in a strong position to teach the natural law and contribute to the nation and the international community, I go on to argue . . .

Human Rights Need Religion

Last month, on December 14, 2023, I attended a remarkable meeting of religious leaders from around the world in Princeton University to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Common today is the view that religion is an enemy of human rights. The conference, though, recalled the remarkable consensus of world religious leaders that made the adoption of the UDHR possible in 1948, a story that Harvard Emeritus Professor Mary Ann Glendon has told in her book of 2002, A World Made New. Glendon was a starring speaker at the conference, along with Mr. Yahya Cholil Staquf, the General Secretary of Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim organization and a strong proponent of religious freedom. Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, evangelical Protestant, Mormon, and Buddhist thought leaders were all in attendance. Behind the conference was the Center for Shared Civilizational Values, whose efforts are detailed here. The members agreed upon a “R20 Princeton Declaration” of support for human rights from the world’s religions. If the logic behind the declaration is correct, human rights will depend on religion if they to remain globally prominent in the next 75 years just as they depended on religion for being adopted in the UDHR.

I was asked to speak about the possibility of religions changing so as to support human rights. I answered by drawing upon my own religion, Catholicism, in a seven minute set of remarks:

One of the themes of Mary Ann Glendon’s masterful narration of the crafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, A World Made New, is supremely relevant for our consultation: her story of how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came to be supported by major world religious and philosophical traditions – Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Confucianism. Religions? Human rights? Have not religions long relegated their heretics and other religions’ minorities to ghettos, dhimmi status, inquisitions, crusades, and second class citizenship? Such skepticism is not altogether misplaced. Prior to and even during modern centuries, it has been rare for any religious tradition to uphold religious freedom, one of the UDHR’s most important human rights. Religious traditions, it seems, must be capable of change if they are to become part of a global consensus on human rights.

Members of religious traditions, though, might find this backwards. If they hold their religion to be encompassingly true, they might well ask that human rights be made compatible with their religion rather than that their religion change to fit human rights.

If a religion is not compatible with certain human rights, then, it seems that we are stuck: Proponents of human rights demand that a religion change, while proponents of the religion resist this very change. A third way exists, though, that this binary choice elides. That is, a religion could change its position on human rights without compromising, and even through drawing on, its enduring claims to truth. I will argue that the Catholic Church did exactly this in its teachings on religious freedom and so became the world’s largest proponent of the global human rights cause.

The Christian Church was at first the recipient of religious repression. A Roman governor executed the Church’s founder at the behest of leaders of his own religion on account of his religious claims. All of Jesus’s apostles except for one were martyred. But then, just following the Roman Empire’s largest persecution came one of history’s greatest game-changers, the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity in 312. Constantine tolerated other religions at first, but by the end of the fourth century, the Roman Empire sharply restricted other religions. An intellectual underpinning for this restriction came in St. Augustine’s decision to support the suppression of the heretical Donatist sect in the early fifth century.

Over the following sixteen centuries, the Church sanctioned the coercion and subordination of heretics and religious minorities. The Inquisition, a Church court whose persecution Black Legends have wildly exaggerated, nevertheless mandated the execution of some 6000 heretics between the 12th and the 19th centuries. Catholic princes, sometimes with the support of bishops, forced the conversion and exile of Jews and Muslims and treated them as second class citizens in countries across medieval Europe, especially Spain. In early modern Europe Catholics and Protestants killed one another in vying to establish and rule each of their churches in their territory. Even after the Catholic Church had its last heretic hanged in 1826, popes in the 19th century continued to reject religious freedom as an “absurd and erroneous opinion” and “a putrid font of indifferentism” that they thought was rooted in the relativism of the French Revolution. As late as the 1950s, the Church in Rome taught that the state could restrict other faiths and silenced the writings of the American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, a pioneer of Catholic arguments for religious freedom.

The Church proclaimed religious freedom as a natural human right in its declaration, Dignitatis Humanae, of December 7, 1965, at the close of the Second Vatican Council. How did it come to its new position?

Certain seeds of freedom had been present since the earliest centuries. As Timothy Samuel Shah has shown, early Christian theologians such as Tertullian and Lactantius, a court adviser to Constantine, had taught religious freedom. Even during long centuries of sanctioned coercion, philosophers such as Augustine and Aquinas as well as certain bishops held that faith must be a free act and could not be coerced. They justified burning heretics on the argument that heresy, like sedition, was a threat to social cohesion and the souls of others. Thomas Aquinas compared religious heresy to counterfeit money, a threat to the entire society.

At the Council, skeptics such as Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani argued that error has no rights, but proponents replied that persons have rights, namely to search for religious truth. The doctrine that heretics could be legally punished for their social damage had been a political, not a dogmatic, one, and could be left behind without detracting from eternal truth. The council offered a basis for religious freedom, dignity, that differed from the basis on which 19th century popes rejected religious freedom, relativism. The Church’s doctrine had developed.

The Church’s pathway to religious freedom may hold lessons for other religions. Islam, like Catholicism, has a long history of denying full religious freedom. Like Catholicism, it faced secular enlightenment claims of religious tolerance that did not tolerate Islam and were unsound in their own right. Like Catholicism, Islam also contains seed of religious freedom such as the Quran’s teaching (2:256), “there is no compulsion in religion.” Muslim thought leaders such as Yahya Cholil Staquf and Mustafa Akyol have pioneered arguments for religious freedom on traditional Islamic grounds, much as Fr. Murray did for Catholicism.

Yet we should be careful not to conclude from all of this that religious traditions are stragglers, forever catching up to what secular modernity has pioneered. Living in the Roman Empire, Christians not only advocated religious freedom but also laid the foundations for human rights in their notions of the dignity of every person, equality, and universalism. Natural rights appear in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, medieval canon law, the Spanish scholastics of the fifteenth century, and modern papal encyclicals. Meanwhile, leading secular theorists of human rights such as Yale’s Samuel Moyn, argue that human rights are expressions of partisan positions, an unpromising recipe for a global consensus that rights are universally valid. Perhaps the real question is not whether religions can come to support human rights but whether human rights can be sustained without religion.

Natural Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Natural Rights

The 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights just took place December 10th. At 75, the declaration can celebrate extraordinary success in advancing human rights in international law, the foreign policies of states, and a formidable network of non-governmental organizations.

Will human rights enjoy this position 75 years from today? Signs of illness – fatal? – exist. The best guarantee of longevity is a recognition of their status as natural law. The best carriers of this recognition are religious traditions. It may be that 75 years from now human rights “will be the cause not of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, but instead of the Catholic Church, Nahdlatul Ulama (the world’s largest Muslim organization), Engaged Buddhism, and the World Jewish Congress,” I argue in a symposium published on Friday, December 8th, in Law and Liberty. The other essays argue in a similar spirit, one on the Christian contributions to the UDHR, one on right and duties in the UDHR, and one on U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s “Incendiary Centrist” report on human rights. Add Andrea Picciotti-Bayer’s piece on Harvard Professor Mary Ann Glendon’s contribution to the UDHR’s legacy in the National Catholic Register here.

A New Defense of the Human Right of Religious Freedom

Religious freedom is a fragile human right. I hold that it is a natural right, grounded in human dignity, and universally merited, but relatively rarely in history have conditions existed in which religious freedom has been enjoyed in practice and guaranteed effectively by law. Even under constitutions such as that of the United States, a pioneer and model of religious freedom, new threats have emerged in recent years. A fortiori threats are faced by the Uighur Muslims in China, Christians in Nigeria, and Bahais in most places where they live.

Religious freedom faces a different kind of threat in skepticism of its worthiness as a right — different and in some respects more thoroughgoing. The defense of religious freedom in so many places depends on the presence of the human right of religious freedom in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights, other international law instruments, the constitutions of states, and other forums whose championing of this right depends on its presence in law: eighteen states whose foreign policies promote religious freedom, five multilateral bodies, including the European Union, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. If people cease to believe that religious freedom merits its place as a human right in international law and constitutions, this presence of religious freedom there will be endangered.

Numerous intellectuals, at least in the Anglo-American world, have published skeptical arguments that religious freedom deserves a right of its own. This is worrying, for it is in the university, including its law schools, that tomorrow’s advocates of human rights are trained as international lawyers, activists, government officials and much more.

In this paper, forthcoming as an article this month in the American Journal of Jurisprudence, I offer a fresh defense of the human right of religious freedom. Here is the abstract: 

This essay presents a fresh defense of the human right of religious freedom. It addresses two versions of skepticism of this human right, one a liberal variant, which questions religious freedom’s distinctiveness, the other a post-modern variant, which questions religious freedom’s universality. The case for a universal and distinct human right of religious freedom rests upon the claim that religion is a basic human good, manifesting human dignity and warranting a human right. The essay details four respects in which religion fulfills the meaning of a basic human good. Religion is a purposive set of acts, or practices; is a definable phenomenon whose core meaning is right relationship with a superhuman power; entails both an intrinsic good and derivate goods; and is universal in its scope. Finally, crucial to the human right of religious freedom is religion’s interiority, that is, its critical involvement of will, mind, and heart.

Response is welcome.

Israel, Gaza and the Just War Ethic

The war in Israel and Gaza puts the question of justice before all of us who read and pray about it.

The National Catholic Register ran a piece Friday with three writers voicing views on the justice of the conflict, of which I am one.

I also commend this particularly Catholic perspective of the justice of the conflict by Fr. Roger Landry.

Added November 13, 2023: See the excellent analysis of the justice of the conflict by Peter Sonski, the candidate for President of the United States of the American Solidarity Party.

Healing the Wounds of Clergy Sex Abuse Through Priests

Wounds remain. That is the premise of a new white paper published by the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, Fully Equipped For Every Good Work: A Proposal of Twelve Core Competencies in Ministering to Survivors of Sexual Abuse For Seminary Formation Programs.

The White Paper

The paper offers sound wisdom and proposals for seminaries to train priests to minister to people affected by clergy sex abuse. Implemented, it could go a long way towards the healing of victim-survivors, other people involved in sex abuse, and the Catholic Church — an approach that goes beyond protection, as important as this is, and legal settlement, which is often alone unrestorative. It is authored by Fr. Thomas Berg, Dr. Timothy Lock, and Dr. Justin Anderson, and grows out of their involvement in consultations held on clergy sex abuse at the University of Notre Dame in 2021 and the University of St. Thomas in 2022. The consultations also inspired the National Catholic Restorative Justice Initiative, which works for healing from these wounds in the Church.

Exchange on Reparations for Racism in the United States

Is there a case for reparations for racism in the United States?

Public Discourse has published a shorter version of the argument I made for reparations (and apology and forgiveness) as responses to racism in the paper that I posted on this blog in April. Public Discourse asked Dr. Derryck Green to respond to my piece, which he did thoughtfully. I had read Dr. Green’s chapter in the volume, Race and Covenant: Recovering the Religious Roots for American Reconciliation, edited by Gerald R. McDermott, where he argued for forgiveness even while he took a view of reparations different (though not entirely) from my own. His and the other essays in the volume were a strong inspiration of the paper I refer to above.

Both of our perspectives are written from a Christian standpoint, drawing upon both natural law as well as the Cross and Resurrection, which we see embedded in America’s national heritage and standing as resources for healing the wounds of racism.

Speaking Against Latin America’s Roe V. Wade

A case that is potentially the Roe v. Wade of Latin America is now being considered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica. The plaintiffs in Beatriz v. El Salvador are asking the court to declare the right to abortion to be an internationally recognized human right.

Such a declaration would be a major setback for the right to life on an international scale. The right to abortion is absent from the world’s treaties, conventions, and covenants with the exception of the Maputo Protocol of the African Charter of 2003, where this right was inserted at the behest of its powerful advocates in the West. Until recent years, Latin America has been a region of strong pro-life laws, though in the past decade, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and other states have liberalized their abortion laws. A declaration of the right to abortion in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, including some 20 countries in its jurisdiction, would advance the profile and status of abortion rights around the world.

These stakes make all the more significant the testimony at this trial of Paolo Carozza, a human rights lawyer who is a professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School and the former President of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. His testimony is one of the most eloquent, forceful, and succinct statements of the human rights of the unborn that one can find. About 10 minutes long, it merits viewing and being shown in classes, lectures, and forums on the right to life. (Here is ND Law’s story on his testimony.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqFRmYT5710

Professor Carozza’s testimony is a refreshing exception to the abortion paradox, which is that the right to life of the unborn, easily the most widely violated human right in the world, enjoys little support from, and even faces the opposition of, organizations whose purpose is to promote human rights and to work for the end of their violation. On conservative estimates, about 12 million abortions take place every year around the world while over a billion have taken place since 1920, when the Soviet Union became the first country to legalize the practice.

Only a few organizations and activists advocate for the right to life of the unborn: C-FAM, Human Life International, Women Without Frontiers (which campaigns against forced abortion in China), the Holy See, Professor Brian Scarnecchia, William Saunders, the pair of scholars Thomas W. Jacobson and William Robert Johnson, and perhaps a few others. They are mice that roar, up against lions that promote global abortion rights. These include the world’s major human rights organizations. Amnesty International, the world’s oldest and largest human rights organization, decided to promote the legalization of abortion in August 2007. Human Rights Watch promotes “reproductive rights” that include abortion. A coalition of United Nations officials, certain states, non-governmental organizations, and certain international lawyers work assiduously to find abortion rights in treaties, conventions, and international initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals where no such rights are stated, and to promote abortion rights through organizations such as the World Health Organization and the World Bank. The abortion paradox also enfolds a silence about abortion among other organizations whose mission is to promote human rights and social justice broadly, including human rights, peace and social justice centers at universities, even many Catholic universities.

The result is wide popular ignorance of the global scale of abortion, far too little influence exerted for the protection of unborn life around the world, and the advance of abortion rights among international organizations and countries that we are witnessing. We need more of Professor Carozza’s testimony.

Restoring Justice in Ukraine: True Peace Means Defeating Putin and Healing the Wounds of War

The debate about war between Ukraine and Russia invokes different conceptions of peace. A minimal peace is what advocates of an immediate end to fighting propose. Genuine peace, though, realizes justice, which means not only Putin’s exit from Ukraine but also measures to heal the wounds of war. Such a justice is a Christian one of right relationship. This is what I argue in a new piece in America.

MLK not CRT: A Christian Case for Reparations for Racism in the United States

Since the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, reparations for racism have become proposed and debated more frequently and heatedly, and sometimes delivered, in the United States. A 2021 poll showed that only 28% of whites favor material reparations while 86% of blacks favor them.

The attached paper is an argument for reparations for racism in the United States that I composed. Its rationale is different, though, from those that most advocates for reparations today invoke. It is a Christian rationale. Historically, such a rationale used to be in the mainstream of the U.S. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King all invoked Christianity as they did the natural rights in the American founding. President Barack Obama invoked these themes as well. This tradition, now smothered, I tap for reparations.

Here is the abstract:

National healing for the persistent wounds of racism, America’s original sin, can be advanced through a national apology, reparations and forgiveness. The frequent practice of apologies and reparations around the world in the past generation provide precedent for such measures. Christianity’s teaching of reconciliation and accompanying notions of sin, repentance, forgiveness, and atonement provide a strong moral basis for these measures and resonate with the rationales through which the United States’s greatest champions of civil rights and equality have fought against racism and slavery. Because racism and slavery were supported with the sanction of the state, in the name of the collective body, measures of repair may now be performed by the state, in the name of the collective body. Questions of who pays, who receives, and what form reparations take are important ones and can be answered adequately. Through collective apology, reparations, and forgiveness, the United States would enact and renew its national covenant, acting in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King, Jr.