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Post by pugio on Jan 8, 2015 11:04:14 GMT
I have read an intriguing article by Thomas Pinker of King's College London on the Rorate Caeli blog (apologies if the board's attention has already been drawn to this on another thread): rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2011/08/on-religious-liberty-and-hermeneutic-of.htmlHe argues that the entire debate about Vatican II teaching on religious liberty has been based on a failure to distinguish between the coercive authority of the state over citizens in religious matters and the coercive authority of the Church over the baptised. The former, he contends, was never really recognised in the first instance; and where the Church sanctioned and encouraged state religious coercion in the past, it did so as a matter of policy - not doctrine - and by lending its own ecclesiastical authority to the state for that purpose, all the while recognising that the state in and of itself had no authority to coerce in matters of religion. The Church's own coercive authority over the baptised, Pinker informs us, has never been rejected and is even recognised in the current code of canon law which was drawn up with the explicit aim of conforming to VII. If Pinker's argument is correct, it puts to bed some questions that have been at the back of my mind for some time. The argument that the Church flatly reversed its own doctrine on religious liberty had always struck me as the strongest and most credible argument levelled by the SSPX against Vatican II. And I have generally found the defenses provided by 'mainstream' theologians to be pretty unconvincing. On the face of it, however, Pinker's argument really seems to explain things. Of course, it also makes me curious as to what exactly 'coercive authority' (which Pinker defines as the right to use temporal punishments for the discipline of the baptised) might involve... To be honest, this whole discussion can be a deeply uncomfortable one for Catholics such as myself who are, as fortune would have it, children of liberal democracy, and tend to equate justice and morality with liberal democratic values, however historically contingent these may be in reality. I would really be interested to know what others make of this.
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Post by Ranger on Jan 8, 2015 17:06:20 GMT
Interesting; I hadn't realised that this was one of the SSPX's main points of contention, but then I haven't read very much about them full stop.
This is perhaps turning your post into a slightly broader point, but just to take you up on associating justice with liberal democracy, to paraphrase your words, I had a debate with an orthodox Catholic theologian (and not one with particularly traditionalist leanings as far as I know) not too long ago and he was making the case for the perfect form of government being a confessional Catholic state, which may be a democracy but under an explicitly Catholic constitution. He maintained that the Church still holds this to be the ideal as far as states go, but concedes that it might not be viable and that it is licit for us to support liberal democracies as a sort of next-best thing for pragmatic purposes. To be honest, I haven't gone to the effort of looking up what documents there are to this effect. I asked him if this had ever worked out in practice. He said that early Byzantium was the gold standard. I don't know much about Byzantine history so I can't say. He also mentioned (he's not Irish) that he thought that Bunreacht na hEireann was almost the perfect constitution for the ideal state, but that it just about falls short by not making Ireland an official Catholic state. I guess my own thoughts on the matter had been along the lines of this: given a level playing field and given a strong Church (strong in terms of holiness and missionary zeal, not political power), liberal democracy is an ideal form as we have the power to bring the Gospel freely to all people through freedom of speech and that by convincing others, the political system will ultimately reflect the good morals of the people; our current crisis is due to fatal flaws in the Church here and elsewhere in the West, and due to the gradual erosion of a level playing field by the seizure of both the media, cultural institutions and academia by liberal forces. On further reflection, however, I do realise that this analysis, whilst containing truth, is a bit simplistic in some regards. Liberal democracy has its flaws, which are most evident when differing groups cannot agree on first principles. for example, take religious freedom. Really in the West religious freedom has always meant freedom to practice Christianity, which is in line with the laws of the state; Mormons have not had the freedom to practice polygamy, and pagans have not had the freedom to perform human sacrifices, for instance, as these contravene a system of laws based on Christianity. As society moves away from Christianity, we no longer agree on first principles, which is why bakers and florists and so on in the West are going to be jailed or out of a job for not performing services for a gay wedding, for instance. Sexual liberty is now the first principle, not religious freedom or freedom of speech. Perhaps in some sense we do need a confessional state to some degree, at least in the sense of having laws based on a particular idea of the Good. Sorry, that was a little stream-of-consciousness, still thinking through what I really think about all of this!
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Post by Ranger on Jan 8, 2015 17:14:36 GMT
To return to your specific example of 'coercive authority,' one question I would raise (and I don't know the answer to this, just speculating) is whether or not Pinker is right in interpreting it as the ability to use temporal punishments against the faithful. This was what the various Inquisitions used to do, although it usually wasn't burning at the stake; their punishments were often along the lines of giving penances and forcing people to wear yellow crosses that signified that they were reformed heretics, which made use of social stigma. Could 'coercive authority' not mean that the Church is entitled to insist on obedience even in cases where one personally disagrees with Church teaching? An insistence which only carries weight if the Church carries moral authority with that individual in the first place. My own feeling is that using the law of the state to coerce people to be moral is counterproductive as it forces people to conform externally without really seeking a change of heart. I would imagine the same would apply to use of moral authority against the laity. It just appears to be counterproductive to me; people either rebel, or become pharisaical (ie concerned with outward appearances only) in response. This is why excommunications, for example, is meant to be seen not as a punishment but a final call to repentance and to see the gravity of one's sin against the Church. The only other 'punishments' I can think of are usually employed against priests who break their vows in some way and are laicised or removed from public positions, which makes sense as they are representatives of the Church and the Church has a right to ensure that its message is transmitted faithfully.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 8, 2015 18:51:11 GMT
The SSPX has always made a big issue of the Declaration on Religious Liberty - they maintain that the state should explicitly recognise the Catholic church as the one true faith, and that the ideal would be Franco Spain or the French ancien regime monarchy (albeit cleaned up). This reflects a long-running division between liberal Catholics and integralists in France, going back to the Revolution. Fr Denis Fahey, who used to campaign for the old Article 44 of Dev's constitution to be replaced by a "one true church" formula, was a CSSp like Archbishop Lefebvre (they are a very interesting - French - order in both good and bad ways). One issue which arises in connection with the Pinker distinction is that advocates of a "one true church" formula (including the late Justice George Gavan Duffy, who tried to interpret the constitution in that way in his judicial interpretations) held that one of its logical implications was that the state would recognise canon law as having the same legal force as its own enactments. (Its present status - and indeed its status throughout the history of the state - has been that the Church is a private institution like a golf club, whose rules are binding on the members insofar as they freely become and remain members.) Seeing canon law as having independent legal force would have various concrete implications, especially before Vatican II - for example, clerics could not have been prosecuted in civil courts but only before Church tribunals, unless they were degraded from their orders (remember this is what St Thomas Becket died for; consider also how the abuse scandals would have played out if such a provision had been in force, given the disastrous way the Church authorities handled matters) it would have been much more difficult, even impossible, for baptised Catholics to leave the Church; the State would impose restrictions on proselytism, and even on public worship, by non-Catholics; the NE TEMERE promises would be enforceable under state law even if both parents agreed to abandon them, etc. The late Michael Davies used to praise Franco Spain (where Protestants were not allowed to proselytise, to advertise their services, or to worship in buildings with the external appearance of churches) and even the millet system of the Ottoman Empire (the different religious communities were governed in certain respects by their own leaders, with non-Muslims subjected to various disabilities, such as having to pay extra taxes, needing permission to build or repair places of worship, etc) as exemplifying his interpretation of traditional Catholic teaching on religious liberty.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Jun 11, 2015 8:31:45 GMT
I should state that there is plenty of armchair traditionalism which extols some repressive system or another over coffee after EF Masses, without the realisation that they are the minority now and they ought to look to their own rights at present.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jun 15, 2015 11:58:55 GMT
There has been a discussion in the Irish Catholic letters page between Dr John Murray (Mater Dei and Iona Institute) and an Irish priest named Fr Mannion in the San Antonio diocese. Fr Mannion, bizarrely, uses the Declaration of Religious Liberty to defend SSM. Another nominee for the ACPI leadership council. They don't seem to cover Irish priests in foreign dioceses yet, but I'm sure they'd have an uptake if they did.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 15, 2015 20:12:57 GMT
I have seen the Declaration of Religious Liberty used in the same way by other "liberal Catholics" as underwriting the concept of the Naked Public Square (i.e. not only that the church as the church should not be the state church, but that Catholics - and of course other religious believers - should not allow their religious beliefs to influence their actions on matters of public policy). Fintan O'Toole has used a similar argument for similar ends (in his case it is that if Catholics are not to be discriminated against they should not behave differently from anyone else, because if they are different that might be legit grounds for discriminating against them).
This BTW is the kernel of truth in the Lefebvrist et al critique of the Declaration - that it implicitly reduces the truth-claims of Catholic teaching to matters of personal preference, and as such relegates them to the private sphere (and I might add that the private sphere is then restricted to vanishing point, as we see with the declarations that with the marriage-abolition amendment safely inserted in the constitution, all threat remains is to "change attitudes" - in other words to use state power to prevent the expression of the view that active homosexuality is wrong, on the grounds that the mere existence of such beliefs constitutes an act of violence against those so inclined). The problem with the Lefebvrist view is that it refers only to the ideal-type and ignores both the necessity of preserving the public peace in a country with many religions and the way state churches tend to operate in practice.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jun 16, 2015 8:52:01 GMT
To some degree the Lefebvrist position goes against historical experience.
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Post by Young Ireland on Jun 16, 2015 21:00:27 GMT
To some degree the Lefebvrist position goes against historical experience. I think the problem there is that they take a legitimate ideal, but then declare it to be the only permissible model for relations with the State. That they can't see how this would work where practising Catholics are a minority in a nominally Catholic country, let along a countries where Catholics as a whole are in the minority.
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