Notes: Wednesday, October 5-Monday, October 10, 2011

1. A key for understanding one of the most contentious parts of Dignitatis humanæ?

One of the most objectionable parts of Dignitatis humanæ is where one reads that, in dealing with matters which do not belong to the component of the common good which (component) that Declaration calls "public order", "the usages of society are to be the usages of freedom in their full range: that is, the freedom of man is to be respected as far as possible and is not to be curtailed except when and insofar as necessary". But Pius XII. spoke for Tradition when he said, in the Allocution Ci riesce, that “religious and moral error must always be impeded, when it is possible”, so when it comes to man's (psychological and physical, but not moral) freedom to disseminate error, it should be curtailed, not 'respected', as far as possible, and only 'respected' when and insofar as necessary. Now in the text of a recent lecture by The Rev. Fr. Frank Brennan S.J. A.O. (brought to my attention by a comment by Fr. Brennan at the CathNews post on that lecture), I was interested to read this quotation from The Rev. Fr. Robert Drinan S.J., writing in Theological Studies in 1970:

This author has no easy solutions or ready options for the Catholic legislator, jurist, or spokesman on the question of abortion and the law. Perhaps the central issue was described in the reasoning of John Courtney Murray SJ, who, while not addressing himself to the question of abortion, wrote as follows about the criminal law: 'The moral aspirations of law are minimal. Law seeks to establish and maintain only that minimum of actualized morality that is necessary for the healthy functioning of the social order ... It enforces only what is minimally acceptable, and in this sense socially necessary ... Therefore the law, mindful of its nature, is required to be tolerant of many evils that morality condemns.'
[ellipses in the original]

Labels: Dignitatis Humanæ, John Courtenay Murray, political science, religious liberty

2. "Putin eyes new economic Soviet Union"

http://www.smh.com.au/world/putin-eyes-new-economic-soviet-union-20111005-1l9jc.html?skin=text-only

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/vladimir-putin-plans-new-superpower-from-old-soviet-republics/story-e6frg6so-1226159572404

Labels: Russia, Vladimir Putin

3. Msgr. Pozzo on, among other things, a future "reunification of the two forms[, i.e., the Traditional Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo Missæ], with elements that come together and complement one another"

http://wdtprs.com/blog/2011/10/video-interview-with-the-secretary-of-the-pont-comm-ecclesia-dei/

http://www.angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39160

Labels: Guido Pozzo, liturgy, N.O.M., T.L.M.

4. Dr. Farrell on how "[t]he demographics of women giving birth in Australia have changed dramatically in the past 50 years":

... The total number of babies a woman has in her lifetime has declined from a peak of 3.5 in 1961 to 1.9 in 2009. There has also been a tendency for women to have their babies at older ages. The median age of women giving birth in Australia reached a low of 25.4 in 1971 and rose to a peak of 30.8 in 2006. The proportion of older women giving birth has also risen, with mothers aged over 35 rising from 11 per cent in 1991 to 23 per cent in 2008.
[http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/life-choices-for-women-20111006-1lbkv.html?skin=text-only]

Labels: demography

5. "Ireland Justice Minister fails to defend nation’s pro-life laws at UN hearing"

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39210

Labels: Alan Shatter

6. "A clause [of the Sovereign Grant Bill] allows for an heir to the throne who is not the Duke of Cornwall to receive revenues from the Duchy of Cornwall"

http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life/new-law-gives-equal-rights-to-female-royals-20111010-1lgay.html?skin=text-only

Labels: Sovereign Grant Bill

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Francis Borgia, Confessor, A.D. 2011

Notes: Saturday-Monday, November 13-15, 2010

1. Figures on Catholic religious in Australia today

http://www.smh.com.au/national/down-but-not-out-catholic-orders-shrink-by-half-but-energy-unchanged-20101112-17r78.html?skin=text-only

Main points from the article (which CathNews featured):

• There were 8422 "religious personnel" (including retired religious) in Australia in 2009, down from 17029 in 1976.
• "The median age is 73, and only 8.2 per cent are aged under 50, whereas 26.6 per cent are aged 80 or more."
• "Three-quarters of all religious came from Australia and the rest came from 75 different nations, with Ireland, New Zealand and Vietnam the greatest source countries."
• "[T]he tradition of being taught by a nun or a brother in a Catholic school belongs mostly to previous generations. While 48 per cent of the religious worked in education in 1976, that cohort has shrunk to 12 per cent, as lay-people have taken over Catholic education."
• Despite the decline in membership, "40 congregations out of 109 said they were ''not contemplating change''".

2. Figures on whether a sample of Australians agreed or disagreed with the following statements: "Homosexual couples should be allowed to adopt children", "I believe homosexuality is immoral", "I consider myself a homosexual"

http://www.smh.com.au/national/country-divided-as-support-for-gay-marriage-varies-wildly-20101114-17sq4.html?skin=text-only
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/the-tricky-political-topography-of-samesex-marriage-20101115-17t6y.html?skin=text-only

Neither the descriptive report nor its analysis focus on the figure which I regard as the most remarkable: Only 3% of Australians identify as homosexual. (Terra has more on this.)

3. Mr. Rowney on the philosphical distinction between intended consequences and merely foreseen ones

http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=24169

I was surprised to see Mr. Rowney write that

Even utilitarians need to decide where they stand on this one. Do they side with Hume and Mill on the Aristotelian side or with Sidgwick, Adams, Singer and the Consequentialists on the other?

since I thought that utilitarianism was an inherently consequentialist moral philosophy.

4. Dr. Jones (responding to Msgr. Williamson) on the teachings of Vatican II

http://angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34678

I disagree with Dr. Jones's conclusions, but I was interested to read the following:

John Courtney [sic] Murray ... was working for Henry Luce’s Time/Life empire, which had intimate connections with the CIA. [That story] will appear in the pages of Culture Wars and a forthcoming book by David Wemhoff.

5. Another benefit of which male same-sex couples deprive their respective children

From a letter by Mrs. Babette Francis in The Australian today:

... the significance of breastfeeding in early education should not be overlooked.

During breastfeeding, an infant's eyes focus on its mother's face and it learns from her "baby-talk" and conversation, whereas bottle-fed babies look away from the mother towards the bottle, and are sometimes propped up with pillows with no adult holding the bottle. ...
[http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/breast-versus-bottle/comments-fn558imw-1225953455135]

Reginaldvs Cantvar

Feast of St. Albert the Great, Bishop, Confessor, Doctor of the Church, A.D. 2010

H.H. The Pope on religious liberty

According to the Vatican Information Service (V.I.S.) e-mail bulletin for October 2, 2008, H.H. The Pope told the Ordinaries of Kazakhstan and Central Asia that

the force of law must never itself become iniquity, nor can the free exercise of religion be limited, because freely to profess one's faith is a fundamental and universally-recognised human right".

Benedict XVI highlighted how "the Church does not impose but freely proposes the Catholic faith, well aware that conversion is the mysterious fruit of the action of the Holy Spirit. Faith is a gift and a work of God, and hence excludes any form of proselytism that forces, allures or entices people by trickery to embrace it. A person may open to the faith after mature and responsible reflection, and must be able freely to realise that intimate aspiration. This benefits not only the individual, but all society, because the faithful observance of divine precepts helps to build a more just and united form of coexistence".
(my emphasis)

Note His Holiness’ very careful choice of words in the highlighted portion of the first quoted paragraph. To say that “everyone has a natural right to the free exercise of religion” (call this proposition A) is not erroneous, since it does not specify the object of this right. But if one were to add the words ‘any’ and ‘whether Catholic or non-Catholic’, so that the proposition becomes “everyone has a natural right to the free exercise of any religion, whether Catholic or non-Catholic” (call this proposition B), then this would indeed be erroneous. It is the diction of proposition A, as one finds in Dignitatis Humanæ, that has got me wondering whether Dr. Sudlow was right when he said that

I see no reason why a confessional State and religious liberty, not in the Enlightenment sense but as understood by Dignitatis Humanae, cannot be reconciled http://thesensiblebond.blogspot.com/2008/07/confessions-of-nobody-or-why-i-quit.html

and that in fact it was Fr. Murray who was wrong when he inferred, in the commentary to his translation of Dignitatis Humanæ, that

The Church does not make, as a matter of right or divine law, the claim that she should be established as ‘the religion of the state’

and that

The freedoms listed here are those which the Catholic Church claims for herself. The Declaration likewise claims those for all Churches and religious communities.
(both quotations from The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty by Mr. Michael Davies)

One might object that the Holy Father’s reference to ‘freely professing one’s faith’ is problematic, but this need not be the case. ‘One’s faith’ can still mean either Catholic or non-Catholic faith.

Nonetheless, the problem of imprecision and misemphasis remains. It’s like saying ‘it is not sinful to do servile work on the weekend’; the statement can be true or false depending on the object i.e. it is false to say that ‘it is not sinful to work on either day of the weekend, whether Saturday or Sunday.”

As for the second highlighted portion, this is not at all in doubt, but unfortunately the straw man of ‘confessional State implies forced belief’ (usually invoked by Americanists) crops up all too frequently in discussions on religious liberty. See, for example, the following discussion at Fr. Zuhlsdorf’s blog:

http://wdtprs.com/blog/2008/07/scholion-benedicts-address-to-non-catholic-christian-leaders/

If I find the time I might do a post in which I elaborate on the question of subjective vs. objective rights in Dignitatis Humanæ.

Reginaldvs Cantvar

Rev. Fr. John Courtenay Murray S.J.: R.I.P.

I note that two days ago, August 16, was the forty-first anniversary of the death of Rev. Fr. John Courtenay Murray S.J. His misconceived theory of the State, his Americanism, his belief in a right for false religions to air their lies, and his highly suspect opinions on contraception (all documented in Mr. Michael Davies’s excellent The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty) notwithstanding, may he rest in peace.

Reginaldvs Cantvar