Month: March 2023

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The Justice of War, the Justice of Peace in Ukraine

This coming Tuesday, March 28th, an international conference, joinable by zoom, on the justice of war, is taking place at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine.

St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas both taught that a just war is one fought for a just peace. What does a just peace consist of in the current war between Ukraine and Russia? And how does it inform the just aims of the war? Here is the form to register for the conference. Here is the link for joining the conference.

The conference is sponsored through a Notre Dame – Ukrainian Catholic University Faculty Collaboration Grant

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Intersectionality: The Abortion Doula’s and the Catholic Church’s

An abortion doula and a historian of transgenderism ardently advocated abortion rights Monday on a zoom panel here at the University of Notre Dame titled “Reproductive Justice: Scholarship for Solidarity and Social Change.” The freedom to have abortions intersects with women’s autonomy, racial justice, and transgenderism, they argued. Intersectionality – different forms of oppression occur together and reinforce one another – is a popular concept now in academia.

While the event’s sponsors, the Gender Studies Program and the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, possess the academic freedom to stage this event, its message contradicts the mission of the University, as passages from Notre Dame’s mission statement illustrate.

As a Catholic university, one of its distinctive goals is to provide a forum where, through free inquiry and open discussion, the various lines of Catholic thought may intersect with all the forms of knowledge found in the arts, sciences, professions, and every other area of human scholarship and creativity.

What the University asks of all its scholars and students, however, is not a particular creedal affiliation, but a respect for the objectives of Notre Dame and a willingness to enter into the conversation that gives it life and character.

. . . the University seeks to cultivate in its students not only an appreciation for the great achievements of human beings, but also a disciplined sensibility to the poverty, injustice, and oppression that burden the lives of so many. The aim is to create a sense of human solidarity and concern for the common good that will bear fruit as learning becomes service to justice.

(Boldface added)

The panel presented neither a “line of Catholic thought” nor “respect for the objectives of Notre Dame,” which includes its pro-life commitment, and was not in “service to justice.”

Members of the Notre Dame community also have the freedom – and indeed something close to an obligation – to respond to the panel, which, far from being “in service to justice,” promoted the legal rights that enable the largest injustice of our time.

I attended the panel and raised a question in the Q and A period that the panelists did not choose to answer. So, I paste it here:

Given your commitment to expand the ambit of justice, ought you not to include in this ambit the human rights of unborn persons?

If the panelists wish to include marginalized people in the sphere of justice, then why do they omit unborn persons, over 2000 of whom lose their lives in the United States every day on average? These persons received hardly a mention in the entire presentation, while the right to end a pregnancy — end these persons — was affirmed again and again. The panelists’ intersectionalism does not intersect enough.

The Catholic Church’s intersectionality includes unborn persons and links the protection of their lives to the welfare of woman and racial minorities. None other than the Reverend Jesse Jackson spoke to this link in 1977, saying, “[a]bortion is black genocide” in the context of a pro-life view that he held until he sought the nomination of the Democratic Party for President. (See also this remarkable speech of his in 1977.)

From the earliest days of U.S Catholic opposition to abortion rights in the late 1960s, it has tied together its support for the rights of unborn persons, material and spiritual support for expectant mothers in both giving birth and raising their children, the responsibility of birth fathers and families, forgiveness and healing for women who have had abortions, and the building of a culture of life.

Further, the dignity of unborn person is tied to the dignity of all vulnerable persons, including the poor, immigrants, and racial minorities. The Church agrees with Vice President Hubert Humphrey that “the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” Cardinal Joseph Bernardin called this linkage the seamless garment, Pope St. John Paul II, the culture of life.

What could be more intersectional than that?

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Bishop Barron Brings It

“A Catholic university is one in which Christ holds the central integrating and organizing place among the circle of disciplines and activities at the university.”

This was the thesis of Bishop Robert Barron in one of the best statements I have encountered about the purpose of the Catholic University, delivered to a packed ballroom here at the University of Notre Dame on March 2, 2023. Here is his address.

Bishop Barron easily vies for the lead evangelist in the Catholic Church in the United States. His model and hero is Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who wrote books, gave talks, and hosted a popular television show for decades in the mid-twentieth century. I have followed Barron’s work for years from his monograph, The Priority of Christ, to his video series, Catholicism, to his hundreds of homilies, podcasts, and videos engaging passages in the Bible and cultural phenomena from baseball to Bob Dylan to Jordan Peterson.

“Because Christ is the incarnate logos, the Word and mind of God,” all of the disciplines “must find their center in Him,” argued Bishop Barron at Notre Dame, continuing on to say that “a great Catholic university is one where the relationship between Christ the Logos and all the other disciplines and activities is explored and celebrated.”

He illustrated his thesis through six disciplines, showing how their knowledge can be connected to Christ. He does not intrude upon the “autonomy” of any of these fields, respecting their canons of knowledge, much of which will be “common knowledge,” accessible to any rational person. He also shows, though, how the truths of each discipline are ordered to Christ. He would not tell a physicist how to do physics, for instance, but he would call for faculty and students who study physics to reflect on how the beauty, order, and, indeed, very existence, of the physical universe points to God.

Bishop Barron’s thesis, it seems to me, implies that at a Catholic university, every department and school would pursue a strategy for ensuring that faculty and students — indeed every student — study how their discipline reflects the truth of the Trinity as known through revelation and reason.

Many colleagues at Notre Dame take on this task in their scholarship and teaching. As a professor of political science, I developed an undergraduate lecture course, Catholicism and Politics, that introduces students to the Church’s thinking about politics and that I have taught now eleven times. I teach a graduate seminar, Christian Political Thought.

In 2017, I and then a colleague in theology, Peter Casarella, launched a course, Why The Church?, inspired by a blog post written in 2016 by Bishop Barron. Lamenting a Pew Research Center report showing young people leaving the Church, Barron rued that the Church has answers to all of the reasons they cited for heading for the exits. He issued a cri de coeur for apologists, evangelists, and theologians to “wake up!”

The course (syllabus here) adopts a “disputatio” approach that looks at the major reasons that young people leave the Church and how the Church responds. The topics are: the rationality of God, science and God, sexuality and marriage, the Church’s history, the Church’s politics, beauty and the saints, and the case for and against the Resurrection of Christ. The course is now in its fifth teaching. We have Bishop Barron and his vision of a Catholic university to thank.