The garden would be built as the Church marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Dallas Charter, the response of the U.S. Bishops to revelations of sex abuse in 2002.

Let us take stock: Has the Church been healed?

The Charter has brought about much-needed security for youth through its norms for the protection of minors, and has made the U.S. Church far more responsive to abuse claims. Accountability for bishops was advanced through the Vatican’s 2019 document, Vos Estis Lux Mundi. Bishops and priests have voiced apologies and offered masses of reparation and healing. Dioceses have rendered millions of dollars in restitution. In recent years, 162 dioceses and 43 religious order provinces in the United States have published lists of accused priests and religious, serving transparency and the learning of truth. Numerous bishops, priests, and other religious have reached out to, and offered pastoral support for, survivors.

Let us now move on, some say.

But wounds remain. The revelations of then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s abuses in 2018 gave the lie to the belief that clerical abuse was a past problem, and left open the question of how much more had not been brought to light. The largest and most persistent wounds of all, though, are those of victims, or survivors, of abuse who continue to suffer in mind, body, spirit, and family relationships. Many have left the Church with no plan to come back. Persistent wounds erode trust towards the Church among its members.

What the Church has done and what remains for it to do raises the question of justice, the theme of this blog. The protection protocols, restitution, airing of truth, and accountability belong to the justice of rendering due, or fulfilling rights, and are indispensable. The justice of the Bible – the justice of right relationship – though, calls for a holistic healing of wounds through principles that also go beyond due such as mercy, care, and forgiveness, all capitulated in reconciliation, the holistic restoration of right relationship. St. Paul writes of God’s salvation of the world through Cross and Resurrection as justice and means by it a justice that restores persons and relationships. It is this justice, enacted in solidarity with Christ, through which survivors of abuse and the Church as a whole may find healing.

This justice, also known as restorative justice, is the idea behind the proposed garden. It will be a place where survivors of abuse of any kind can find peace and can receive the Church’s prayers and care for them.

Here is the vision statement for the garden:

As clergy sexual abuse survivors from across the United States, in relationship with the Church, we offer empathy and acknowledgment to all survivors of any kind of abuse. In this sacred healing space, we invite the entire Body of Christ into the journey of accompaniment and reconciliation, imploring God’s mercy to bring healing to the lives of everyone harmed by abuse in the Church. Pledge with us to continue working to respect, protect, defend, and restore the dignity that all deserve as children of God.

Leading the initiative is Michael Hoffman, a Chicago businessman and Executive Director of the National Catholic Restorative Justice Initiative. Mike is a survivor of clergy sexual abuse who has found healing in the Church and and has committed his life to helping other survivors heal and to restoring the Church. He led an effort to establish a healing garden in the Archdiocese of Chicago, which was dedicated in 2011 under Cardinal Francis George. Now, he is leading a working group consisting mostly of survivors in developing and proposing the national garden. (See this excellent short video that Mike narrates produced by the Archdiocese of Chicago.).

The proposal for the garden arose from consultations held at the University of Notre Dame in 2021 and the University of St. Thomas in 2022 to consider the lessons of national truth and reconciliation processes for addressing the wounds of clergy abuse. Out of these consultations arose the National Catholic Restorative Justice Initiative, of which Mike Hoffman is the Executive Director.

The President of Catholic University of America, Peter Kilpatrick, has given the project his enthusiastic support (the east side of Caldwell Hall is envisioned, see above photograph); and supporting the project are also nine U.S. bishops and archbishops, eight Catholic organizations, five Catholic academic institutions and three parishes.

The initiative is now raising funds with a target of spring 2027.

For more writings:

This piece by Fr. Tom Berg of the National Catholic Restorative Justice Initiative, is on restorative justice in the abuse crisis.

This piece by Professor Emily Ransom at Belmont Abbey College is on forgiveness after abuse.

For pieces that I have written on justice, healing, and the abuse crisis, see here.

These “Partners in Healing” have pledged prayerful support for the National Healing Garden”

Bishops

• Cardinal Blase Cupich, Archdiocese of Chicago

• Archbishop José Gomez, Archdiocese of Los Angeles

• Archbishop Jeffrey Grob, Archdiocese of Milwaukee

• Archbishop Bernard Hebda, Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis

• Bishop Ronald Hicks, Diocese of Joliet

• Archbishop Emeritus George Lucas, Archdiocese of Omaha

• Archbishop Michael McGovern, Archdiocese of Omaha

• Archbishop Shawn McKnight, Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas

• Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades, Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend

Organizations

• ACTA Foundation, Fr. Larry Dowling - dedicated to the promotion of creative efforts in adult catechesis.

• Awake - A community of abuse survivors, concerned Catholics, and allies committed to awakening, transformation, and healing from the wounds of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

• Catholic Mobilizing Network - a national organization that mobilizes Catholics and all people of goodwill to value life over death, to end the use of the death penalty, to transform the U.S. criminal legal system from punitive to restorative, and to build capacity in U.S. society to engage in restorative practices.

• FADICA - Catholic philanthropy network

• Global Collaborative - a survivor-led network of child advocacy organizations, survivor networks, academic and faith-based institutions, and governments committed to ending child sexual abuse, and supporting victims and survivors of childhood trauma in their healing.

• Initiative on Restorative Justice and Healing - IRJH seeks to respond to harm that occurs from leadership and institutional failures, racial injustice, and polarization in a way that promotes accountability and healing.

• Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors – Bishop Luis Manuel Ali Herrera, Secretary; Teresa Kettelkamp, Adjunct Secretary.

• Prevent Child Abuse – Illinois – key leadership in Illinois for prevention education and public awareness, community outreach, public policy advocacy, and promotion of effective prevention programs.

• VIRTUS– The mission of the VIRTUS Programs is to educate and empower everyone (individually and collectively) to ensure optimal safe environments for children and the vulnerable.

Academic Institutions

• Pontifical Gregorian University, Fr. Hans Zollner, SJ - Institute of Anthropology. Interdisciplinary Studies on Human Dignity and Care.

• Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rev. Prof Jordi Pujol, Department of Church Communications.

• McGrath Institute for Church Life, University of Notre Dame.

• Catholic Theological Union – Catholic graduate school of theology training men and women for lay and ordained ministry within the Catholic Church.

• St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary - The seminary’s primary mission is to foster the human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral formation of candidates for the Roman Catholic priesthood so that as ordained ministers they share the joy of the Gospel with all.

Parishes

• Holy Name Cathedral Parish – Fr. Greg Sakowicz, Rector

• Saint Mary of the Woods Parish – Fr. Rich Jakubik Pastor

• The Basilica of Saint Mary, Minneapolis – Fr. Daniel Griffith, Rector

First, this justice affirms rights and classic liberalism.

Justice in the Bible, the justice of right relationship, consists of the entirety of commandments and these include both those that render due and those that exceed due. Due is synonymous with rights. So, the justice of right relationship does not reject but rather affirms the rights.

Christian justice possesses a uniquely strong foundation for rights – the dignity of the human person created in the image of God. Dignity means infinite worth. Because the human person is infinitely worthy, his dignity is inviolable. Manifesting dignity are basic goods, or forms of fulfillment, such as life, health, and knowledge. To violate the human goods of a person is to violate her dignity.

People have rights to life, religious belief and practice, property, speech, safe working conditions, a homeland, and many other goods. Rights are especially precious for the vulnerable: unborn persons, the poor, slaves, prisoners, migrants, workers in sweatshops, and many others. Rights are greatly worthy because they define actions that must or must not be done; that are specified with respect to who performs them, who is their beneficiary, and what the action consists of; and that are dischargeable, or capable of being completed. Without rights, actions are judged by a vaguer calculus of interests, one that cannot account for prohibitions and requirements – for why no one may torture someone else, for instance.

I take issue, then, with Christian skeptics of rights. Most of them argue that rights are modern inventions rooted in self-interest and individualism and used recklessly to justify anything and everything. Moral duties assuredly exist, they say, but not rights.

Rights, though, are defensible when they are natural rights that are grounded in human dignity. Rights run deep in the Christian tradition. They are prominent in modern Catholic social thought, widely found in Protestant thought, and extend back to the writings of early Church fathers such as Lactantius, Tertullian, and the Cappadocian fathers. I argue, too, that Christian thought contains a stronger foundation for rights than contemporary secular theories that ground rights on self-interest or radical autonomy. The American Founding (The Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution), the world’s constitutions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, then, are rightly viewed as historic moral achievements. They are not departures from but rather have their strongest foundation in Christian principles.

Liberalism likewise is defensible. Today, “post-liberal” thinkers want to reject liberalism because they say that it is based on relativism, radical autonomy, and self-interest and undermines social cohesion and happiness. Other Christian thinkers such as liberation theologians reject liberalism from the left. I share much of the social diagnosis of post-liberal thinkers and agree with liberation thinkers that structural injustices exist. These insights, though, do not negate liberalism, which is classically a political doctrine that affirms rights, liberties, the separation of powers, the rule of law, and free markets. Whereas some versions of liberalism are aggressively secular, and some are rooted in relativism or radical autonomy, the core of liberalism is not so and finds its strongest foundation in theistic natural law and human dignity. I defend Christian liberalism – not to be confused with liberal Christianity, which smothers the supernatural and embraces false moral norms – but rather a liberalism that places rights and their siblings on a firm foundation.

Second, this justice incorporates “beyond-due” principles.

Due is not enough. The justice of right relationship entails not only rights but also principles that exceed rights such as mercy, gift, generosity, hospitality, care, forgiveness, and love of enemies. These principles are mostly what philosophers call “imperfect” duties, meaning that they are open-ended or discretionary with respect to whom they are directed and how they are discharged. There is a wideness in God’s justice.

Broadly, the “beyond-due” principles have a purpose of healing, or alleviating wounds. The chief of these principles of mercy, which is the will to alleviate distress. The most radical of them is forgiveness, which involves the very foregoing of what is due: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

In the book, I will argue that many of the “beyond due” principles have fallen by the wayside in modern Western history in that they are no longer viewed as public principles. Mercy, forgiveness, and hospitality are among them. What would it mean to incorporate them into modern politics? The book explores this blended justice in areas such as humanitarian aid, war, building a just peace after war and dictatorship, addressing the wounds of historical injustices within democracies, criminal justice, life, race, immigration, and other matters.

Third, it calls for a holistic politics.

Matching the width of the justice of right relationship in its principles is its holism in human affairs. It differs from ideologies, right and left, that truncate justice by confining it only to some issues. It promotes unborn life, marriage and family, and religious liberty as well as health care, the protection of the environment, the building of peace, the dignity of immigrants, and an end to the death penalty. This holism finds expression in the social teaching of the Catholic Church, in what is known as the “consistent life ethic,” and in the platform of the American Solidarity Party, for instance.

Fourth, it calls for a holism in particular matters.

The justice that blends due and beyond-due also beckons holism in particular matters.

It would join protection of the right to life of unborn persons with spiritual and material care for pregnant mothers, and with healing and forgiveness for woman who have had abortions, framed by an understand of the choice regarding life as taking place in a web of relationships involving mother, child, doctor, father of the child, family members, and the ambient culture.

It would understand criminal punishment as not only fulfilling the “due” of retribution, itself a restoration of the law that expresses right relationship among citizens, but also as seeking restoration between perpetrator, victim, and others affected by the crime – what is known as restorative justice.

To many other matters, this justice would bring its blend of principles.

Fifth, this justice addresses the past wounds of societies.

I discovered the justice of right relationship in studying countries addressing past injustice, of which there have been tens in recent decades: South Africa, Rwanda, Canada, Germany, Uganda, Australia, and many others. When justice addresses past wrongs, it is rectifying justice. The premise of rectifying justice is that injustice leaves wounds and that if wounds do not heal they will eventually cause further division and violence. Bright lines and amnesia do not work. Recent history has seen reparations, apologies, the building of memorials, and forgiveness as measures for addressing the wounds of war, dictatorship, genocide, slavery, the mistreatment of native peoples, and other large-scale human rights violations.

Sixth, this justice is meant to be “ground up,” carried out by citizens and laypeople.

In 1927, the French philosopher, Jacques Maritain, abandoned an “integralism” that sought to revive faith in France through an alliance between Church and state in a Catholic nation, and began to develop his ideas for a “new Christendom” based on democracy, equal citizenship, and human rights, including religious liberty. His ideas culminated in his book of 1936, Integral Humanism, where he charged “lay saints” with promoting the faith in society. I follow Maritain. Exemplifying Christian justice from the ground up have been abolitionists against slavery, the prolife movement, prison ministers, early feminists, the founders of European federalism in the late 1940s, marchers for civil rights in the American South, Pope John Paul II’s pilgrimages to Poland, and many others.

Seventh, this justice adds supernatural teachings to natural law.

Just as the justice of right relationship combines due and beyond-due principles, so too, it blends principles of the natural law with supernatural principles, meaning ones that reason alone does not know and that the teaching of Jesus makes binding. Most of the “beyond due” norms are supernatural in this sense: mercy, hospitality, forgiveness, and the like.

The justice of right relationship thus follows the “supernatural turn” in Catholic social thought following the Second Vatican Council. Previously, papal encyclicals were mostly based on the natural law. Catholic philosophers after World War II such as Maritain, Yves Simon, and Heinrich Rommen based their political thought on natural law.

Then, Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council’s main statement on the affairs of the “world,” including political ones, put forth a statement in paragraph 22 that popes have quoted again and again: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.”

Pope St. John Paul II then taught in his second encyclical, Dives in Misericordia, or “Rich in Mercy,” in 1980, that mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation were principles for political orders. Pope Benedict XVI taught that gratuitousness, a principle rooted in God’s salvific act, is a principle for the economy in Caritas in Veritate in 2009. And Pope Francis appealed to biblical principles in his social encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, of 2020.

Eighth, this justice is ecumenical, interreligious, and in dialogue with secular sources

The primary source of the justice of right relationship is the Bible, understood to be the Word of God. It looks to the magisterium of the Catholic Church for interpretation of the Bible and for teachings on political, economic, and social affairs. As a biblical approach, it learns much from Protestant thinkers and gains insights from Orthodox ones. As a religious approach, it overlaps with the teachings of Judaism, Islam, and other traditions, a shared ground I sought to carve out in Just and Unjust Peace. It draws from secular schools such as “care feminism.” Because the principles of this justice are intelligible, known by reason (alone or as determinations), they may be shared and debated across traditions.

Ninth, this justice heeds prudence and limitations on government

The secular voices that dominate the university and loom large in other elite sectors commonly view religion as prone to utopianism, excess, and domination. Religious politics contains instances of these maladies, but so does secular politics, whose annals include Robespierre, Kemal Ataturk, Mao, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein. More importantly, Christian principles of justice themselves prescribe limits on politics.

One is prudence, which commands actions that best realize principles of justice. Aquinas borrowed and developed the principle from Aristotle; and it resonates with “judgment” in the Bible (often derived from mishpat): “Justice and judgment are the foundation of your throne,” reads Psalm 89:14.

Beyond-due principles are especially subject to prudence. A humanitarian intervention ought to be foregone of it is likely to be disastrous. The provision of health care is subject to considerations of cost and effectiveness and is to be balanced by other principles. And so on.

Other principles that impose limits such as the rule of law, rights, liberties, the independence of religion and state authority, and the autonomy of spheres such the economy, the family, and civic associations are not only compatible with Christian principles but may have their best foundations in them. The obligatoriness of law, for instance, arguably has its best – some would say, its only – foundation in a law that is prior to and transcendent of the political order.

This argument, like all of the principles above, demands expansion, the task of Arc of the Universe in the time ahead.

The picture is of the parable of the Good Samaritan, one about mercy.

Ehnow expresses the Christian justice put forth in this blog in an interview with the prominent theologian and theorist of justice, Charlie Camosy:

During my time in prison, I read voraciously, and that reading led me to reflect deeply on issues that concerned me, particularly justice. I had broken the law and had to face the consequences of my actions. In my opinion, the process I went through within the system focused less on justice and more on punishment and retribution.

Through my own experience within the system and my research following my incarceration, I discovered that our justice system rarely aligns with our values as citizens and Christians. Jesus is perfect justice. God’s justice is not focused solely on punishment. Accountability and punishment are elements of justice, but they are meant to be sanctions that lead to restoration.

Divine justice focuses on restoring relationships and making amends for the harm caused. God perfects justice through love, mercy, and forgiveness. I believe we must strive to align our justice system with the divine model, where mercy and forgiveness provide the opportunity for true reconciliation and restoration.

Ehnow shares his devotion to St. Maximilian Kolbe, the priest imprisoned at Auschwitz who substituted his life for a sentenced prisoner, whose Feast Day is August 14th.

The webinar is sponsored by the Focolare Forum for Dialogue and Culture. Charlie Camosy will interview Ehnow. Ehnow is author of a forthcoming book, All Things New: A Journey From Brokenness to Restoration.

In what justice means, therefore, lies high stakes. How the world undertakes justice is how it will shape politics.

And what is justice? Over the course of many centuries, the concept of justice that has attained the world’s widest endorsement is the will to render each person his due. Originating in Greek and Roman thought, formulated most fully and enduringly by the Roman jurist Ulpian in the third century, the concept was enshrined in the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, articulated explicitly by modern thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, and is recognizable far more widely today in due’s synonymous guise, rights. Rights have an elephantine presence in Western political thought and discourse, in constitutions, which nearly every sovereign state in the world possesses, and in international law. Think only of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Rights provide definition to other mammoth concepts such as equality and liberty: equal rights and the right to freedoms.

This concept of justice as rendering due, or fulfilling rights, is so pervasive and enveloping that seeing justice differently requires climbing to an overlook where a wider landscape is observable. What we can see from there is that the justice streaming from the Greek and Roman traditions has overswept the justice that streams through and from another source, the Bible. This justice, the scriptures attest, God has established as the moral order of the universe, communicated progressively through prophets, manifested climactically in the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and given to humanity as commandments by which they may remain in friendship with God and attain happiness.

If we can retrieve and develop the Bible’s justice, our politics will look different.

And what is the meaning of the Bible’s justice? Nowhere does the Bible teach that justice is the will to render another his due. Rather, I argue, justice in the Bible is the totality of actions that bring about comprehensive right relationship – between God and humanity, between human beings, and within the human person. The Bible denotes this justice most prominently by the Hebrew word, tsedeq (or its feminine variant, tsedeqah), in the Old Testament, and the Greek word, dikaiosune, in the New Testament. The hundreds of appearances of these words in the Bible, their centrality to its message of salvation, and their potential expression of justice are obscured in English Bibles, most of whose translators splay these words as righteousness and justice. Translations also exist, though, that render close to all of these words as justice. The Latin Vulgate, history’s most influential Bible, renders them as justitia, the direct root of the English word, justice. In these translations, which I follow, justice carries the meaning, comprehensive right relationship.

How does the justice of right relationship differ from the justice of due? The justice of right relationship encompasses, and does not reject, obligations that render another her due, or fulfill her rights. It differs, though, in its inclusion of obligations that exceed what is due to others – for instance, mercy, gift, generosity, hospitality, and forgiveness. This synthesis of obligations that both render and exceed what is due makes the justice of right relationship holistic and distinct.

The synthesis is evident in the Bible’s account of both divine justice, that which God enacts, and human justice, the deeds that God commands humans to enact. God’s justice establishes right relationship, sustains it, restores it, and will eventually bring it to completion. These acts are gifts, which, by definition, are not due to their recipients. God’s creation of human beings for right relationship with himself, which the scriptures describe as justice, is a gift, as is his redemptive act in his Cross and Resurrection, which the Apostle Paul describes as dikaiosune, or justice, and as a “gracious gift.” Note this well: God’s climactic and decisive act of salvation is a form of justice that is not due. Yet, in certain other senses, God’s justice renders due. Both the Old and New Testament aver that God repays deeds, good and evil. Jesus paid the debt of humanity’s sin on the Cross. Due does not vanish from God’s justice.

The justice that God instructs humans to practice is also a synthesis of what renders and exceeds due. This justice, the entire set of commandments that God enjoins, includes duties that correspond to rights. The commandments not to murder, steal, lie, and commit adultery, and the principle of retribution, for instance, correspond to rights to life, to one’s possessions, and so on. Other commandments, though, exceed what is due, including ones that prescribe mercy, generosity, gift, care, hospitality, love for enemies, peacemaking, restorative punishment, reconciliation, and forgiveness. Most divergently, forgiveness means foregoing what is due while also willing restoration. The justice of right relationship, then, combines and integrates these two sorts of obligations. Human justice, which God commands, is patterned and propelled by divine justice, which God enacts. The beyond-due obligations reflect Jesus’s Cross and Resurrection especially brightly.

What does the justice of right relationship mean for our politics today? The book that I am writing, tentatively titled Resurrecting Justice, and future posts at Arc of the Universe, will aim to develop this question. A historical observation is that the beyond-due principles such as mercy, gift, hospitality, and forgiveness have been sidelined in the discourse of modern political thought and of the modern nation-state. Because they have not been considered justice, they have become personal, private – and irrelevant.

Biblical justice thinks otherwise.

The icon in the picture is St. Gregory of Nyssa, the Greek Father of the early Christian Church, perhaps the first theologian or philosopher to condemn slavery altogether, and champion of the rights of the poor.

It is new both because it challenges the world’s dominant view of justice and because it is the justice of the new covenant, a justice depicted in the Bible and brought to a climax in the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the justice of God’s reconciliation of the world to himself. I endeavor to retrieve and develop this justice in a book that I am writing, provisionally titled Resurrecting Justice. This justice holds promise for politics today.

I discovered this justice through many years of studying the efforts of countries such as South Africa, Rwanda, Germany, and Canada to address injustices in their past, ones that took place amidst war, dictatorship, or, as in many democracies today, the practice of slavery or the mistreatment of native peoples. I have been actively involved in Kashmir, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, and Ukraine, and in the Catholic Church in addressing clerical sex abuse.

What I discovered is that the people involved in these efforts offered two broad answers to the question of justice. One answer centers upon law and rights. It is voiced by the “international community” – lawyers, human rights activists, public officials, and scholars. They advocate the rule of law, democracy, and, most ardently, the judicial punishment of arch war criminals. If this view were a theology, its cathedral would be the twin glass towers of the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

A more surprising answer came from religious voices. Even their involvement in these efforts is surprising to Westerners, who have come to think of politics as secular and religion as private. In the places I studied, though, miters and prayers mingled with suits and speeches in the public square. I learned about Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; the pastors in Rwanda who prepared villagers to participate in gacaca courts after the country’s genocide of 1994; Joachim Gauck, the Lutheran pastor who led Germany’s investigation into East Germany’s past after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989; the Corrymeela Community, which, sought reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland; Archbishop John Baptiste Odama in Uganda, who became an apostle of forgiveness following the war in northern Uganda between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the government; and many other religious voices around the world. Their answer to injustice is different: healing, apologies, reparations, forgiveness, acknowledging the truth about suffering, restoring communities – in summary, reconciliation.

What I concluded is that reconciliation was the religious leaders’ answer to the question of justice. The response to wounds of injustice that they advocated for their countries followed what they believe to be God’s response to injustice in the Cross and Resurrection, which the Bible calls justice. It is the justice of restoring right relationship and is equivalent to the Apostle Paul’s concept of reconciliation in his descriptions of God’s saving action. Reconciliation pervaded the public speech of these religious leaders and influenced their countries’ actions – for instance, their Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. To them, this was justice.

Now I am working to expand and develop this concept of justice to all of politics, not just the contexts of transitional justice and peacebuilding. I am studying closely the justice of the Bible, which I call the justice of right relationship. This justice has been occluded, I argue, by the world’s dominant concept of justice, the will to render each person his due. Due is synonymous with rights. I do not reject rights and vigorously defend natural rights and human rights. The justice of right relationship, though, also includes obligations that extend beyond rights such as mercy, generosity, gift, hospitality, forgiveness, and reconciliation. The Bible’s justice entails all principles, and these include the sort that render to others their due as well as those that exceed due.

Developing the promise of this justice for contemporary politics is a prime goal of my work.

Future posts explore this new justice.

Here is from Dr. Ramos Reyes’s website: A compelling exploration of maritainismo  and the search for a harmonious relationship between faith and democracy in Latin America.

Did Latin America once dream of a society that embraced democratic ideals and Christian values? “The Nostalgia for a New Christendom”  delves into the fascinating concept of  maritainism ,  a 20th-century movement inspired by philosopher Jacques Maritain. Author  Dr. Mario Ramos-Reyes , a distinguished philosopher, professor, and diplomat, examines this historical project that aspired to bridge the “political schizophrenia,” a term used to describe the ideological conflict between liberalism and the Catholic tradition. 

The book explores:

• The rise and influence of maritainismo in Latin America, particularly following the 1947 conference of Christian social movements.

• The unique model of a “New Christendom” sought to be democratic, liberal, and grounded in Christian principles.

• The historical context of this movement and its relevance to Latin America’s political and social landscape.

• The challenges and potential benefits of reviving the Maritainista ideal in the face of contemporary secularism and populism.

• “The Nostalgia for a New Christendom” argues that Maritain’s proposal can be more than just a nostalgic echo. It offers a framework for building a future democracy that is both republican and humanist , drawing upon the wisdom of both faith and reason.

Dr. Ramos-Reyes brings a unique and authoritative perspective to this topic. With a Licentiate in philosophy and a JD from Paraguay’s Catholic University, he has dedicated his career to teaching and research. He holds advanced degrees in philosophy and theology from institutions in the US and Spain, and his doctorate specializes in Political Philosophy and the History of Ideas, with a focus on Latin America. He is a member of the American Maritain Association and a respected columnist for a major Paraguayan newspaper, ensuring the book’s credibility and depth of knowledge.

Follow Dr. Mario Ramos-Reyes on social media: https://bit.ly/mramosreyes !

The post New Book by Mario Ramos Reyes: The Nostalgia for a New Christendom first appeared on arcoftheuniverse.

“My anger is the effervescence of my pity.” So wrote the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French writer Léon Bloy in a letter to his most famous disciple, Jacques Maritain.^[i] Indeed, it was this anger that brought him both praise and repudiation throughout his career, which began in 1882, when he started writing for the journal of the notorious Le Chat Noir cabaret, and lasted until his death in 1917. Over the course of these thirty-five years, he wrote thirty books, both novels and works of nonfiction. He was also a dedicated correspondent and kept a private diary that was published posthumously. Though his output was prodigious, he is deemed by even his most devoted biographers and scholars to be rather unknown in his own time, especially in contrast to giants of the age such as Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, and Maurice Barrès. Despite being one of the more active Decadent writers, Bloy would almost certainly attribute this asymmetry in renown to injustice—the world of letters, in his mind, was corrupt. Taken over by the scourge of atheist humanism, French literature and culture were plummeting towards a pessimistic vision which Bloy considered antithetical to the Catholic belief in the transcendent origin, end, and value of the human person. This attitude led him to dedicate his life to writing what he believed to be “prophetic” works, suffused with vivid and vituperative language denouncing an ascendant secularism.^[ii]

Despite his famous inclination to explosive anger and fierce polemicism, Bloy succeeded in attracting a small community of great minds around him who were nothing less than his disciples. Their encounters with the man and his works even prompted many of them to convert to the Catholic faith. These devotees stayed in close contact with Bloy until the end of his life, and the circle created a fertile environment in which more than a few Bloyens became great writers and philosophers in their own right.

This essay focuses particularly on the relationship between Bloy’s work and the so-called Jewish question. Next to his novels, he considered his work Le Salut par les Juifs to be his magnum opus, and his most celebrated followers, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, converted largely because Bloy convinced them of the harmony between Christianity and Judaism.^[iii] The Maritains counted Bloy among their most profound influences, and Jacques Maritain broke his vow of silence in his old age to defend the kind of simple, uncompromising, and anti-modernist faith he first learned from Bloy^[iv] The legacy of Jacques Maritain, as well as his wife, who was always encouraging him, and a great inspiration to him, through her life and her outlook, is partly his commitment to religious pluralism.^[v]

Bloy considered Le Salut par les Juifs to be the only book he would feel comfortable presenting to Christ. He declared that, “when one loves Le Salut, one is not only my friend, one is, by force, something more… this book… represents years of work, prayer and pain that have been, I believe, beyond measure.”^[vi]

The title, Salux ex Judaeis est, is taken from the words of Jesus Christ in the fourth chapter of John’s gospel.^[vii] The work has a fairly disordered structure, and is almost aphoristic, like many of Bloy’s works. Bloy considers himself to be writing in the quaestio argumentative style of St. Thomas Aquinas, and ultimately in the dialectical spirit of Socrates, in which he establishes a position through a systematic engagement with powerful objections as opposed to mere straw men.

In the beginning, Bloy skewers Edward Drumont, saying that he was obsessed merely with money, and that he failed to understand that “our Lord himself was a Jew par excellence.”^[viii] Bloy then characterizes antisemitism as “blasphemy,” because of the common divine heritage between Christians and Jews, and he likens blaspheming Judaism to criticizing one’s parents with all their shortcomings. “Antisemitism is the most bloody and the most unforgivable,” he declares, which suggests that he certainly did not see himself as antisemitic.^[ix]

However, Bloy then appears to contradict his staunch opposition to antisemitism, writing, “I must be little suspected of tender love for present day descendants [of the Jewish people].”^[x] Bloy goes on to say, “Finding myself in Hamburg that year, I had.. the curiosity of visiting the Jewish market..the surprising abjection of that emporium of emphyleutic detritus is difficult to express..obsequious wails assaulted me..servile faces with the same redoubtable look.”^[xi] Bloy then tries to temper this, declaring that Jews must be respected as instruments of the Redemption: “They were forced..supernaturally forced, by God to perform abominable and disgusting acts, which they need to do in order to accredit their dishonor as instruments of the Redemption.”^[xii]Essentially, he writes Jews are flawed, but they have to be. Just like Pontius Pilate the Roman had to be wretched, and King Saul had to be weak, and the Virgin Mary had to be without sin. Love for the Jews, in other words, must be a matter of theologically grounded filial obligation, not a matter of empirically rooted sentiment.

Precisely because he believed he was prosecuting a theoretical line of argument, dialectically rather than sentimentally, Bloy believed he was simply putting forward the facts, without anger, and without rage: “Sympathy for the Jews is a sign of turpitude, that’s well understood. It is impossible to merit the esteem of a dog if one lacks the instinctive disgust of the Synagogue. That is expressed calmly, like an axiom of rectilinear geometry, without irony and without bitterness.”^[xiii] Raïssa Maritain was particularly aggrieved by this, and she writes in her work, Les Grandes Amitiés, that statements like these were “grosses taches noires,” though she believed Bloy to be writing “without bitterness,” employing invective as a rhetorical and pedagogical tool. She argues that Bloy did not intend to be contemptuous when he said that Jews were “destined to suffer,” as he was deeply marked by the Pauline view that suffering can not only redeem sin, but be a sign of “election.”^[xiv] In a French cultural climate that was increasingly and pervasively anti-Semitic, especially on the Right, perhaps Bloy was trying to go out of his way to emphasize that his view of the Jews was not based on emotional special pleading on their behalf. Like everything else for Bloy, his view of their status was strictly a function of their typological significance in his biblical conception of history.

Bloy ends with a paradox: “The Jews will not convert until Jesus descends from the cross, and Jesus cannot descend before the Jews convert,” suggesting the urgency of conversion, if one wanted to bring about the Second Coming.^[xv]

Bloy later asks Jewish friends of his mentor, Barbey D’Aurevilly, the Hayems, for money, as well as asking them if they could facilitate his sponsorship by the Rothschilds. Perhaps he wanted these Jews to contribute to the long, great project of conversion, which he viewed simply as their inevitable destiny. They were people whom, in his eyes, ought to be converted, and maybe he thought their involvement in his oeuvre would secure their redemption.

Despite these “grosses tâches noires” described by Raïssa Maritain, Bloy’s influence on Nostra Aetate, the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions of the Second Vatican Council,” is considered by some scholars to be significant.  Nostra Aetate was revolutionary because it was an official Church document that attempted to emphasize the relationship and “shared covenant” between Jews and Christians, and repudiates the problematic charge of “deicide” against Jews.^[xvi] Scholars John Connelly and Richard Francis Crane both assert that “the path to Vatican II” begins with Léon Bloy’s work Le Salut par les Juifs. Connelly’s  From Enemy to Brother, and Crane’s “The French Roots of Nostra Aetate,” both argue that the foundation for Nostra Aetate was built in Paris during the first two decades of the twentieth century with Le Salut par les Juifs, which they write was revolutionary in its assertion of a Judeo-Christian brotherhood, united in mystical suffering and a shared covenant, and that Jews paved the way for the redemption of mankind.^[xvii] Connelly discusses how John Osterreicher,  the man who drafted Nostra Aetate and a friend of Jacques Maritain’s, read and was inspired by Bloy’s Salut.^[xviii]

On the other hand, Salut par les Juifs was censored for antisemitism as recently as 2013 by a judiciary tribunal in France. How can a person who has been censored for antisemitism have had a salutary effect on religious pluralism, as manifested in Nostra Aetate?

Romain Vaisserman, in the preface to the essay collection, “Quatre écrivains Catholiques sur la Question Juive de Bloy à Maritain,” asserts that Bloy’s writings on the Jewish question were “either detestable or sublime” (“soit détestables, soit sublimes”),  and that ultimately his work was so full of contradictions it was impossible to truly uphold it as either anti- or philosemitic.^[xix]

Scholar Henri Quantin is somewhat sympathetic but more critical, in his essay “Du fumier sur le figuier: Léon Bloy et les Juifs, ” he quotes Chateaubriand, who he considers a forerunner to Bloy: “The Jewish people are a symbolic encapsulation of the human race.” (“Le peuple juif est un abregé symbolique de la race humaine).”^[xx] Même quand Bloy attaque la médiocrité ou la bêtise des Juifs, celle des Catholiques n’est jamais loin..”^[xxi] Quantin acknowledges Bloy’s status as a product of his time, though he also makes the compelling point that Bloy could not be classed in the same category as Drumont, as “Bloy’s perspective is never political; it is always religious or theological. Bloy speaks of the Jews only in relation to Jesus, he speaks of Israel only in the perspective of the Salvation offered by Christ.” ^[xxii]

He highlights that Bloy writes in 1911, almost twenty years after publishing Le Salut, that he felt that the caricatures of Jews in his novels, the character Nathan in Le Desespéré, and Katz in La Femme Pauvre, were ‘youthful errors’. He feels this way, perhaps because of the Maritains and their friendship, and his growing affection for Raïssa Maritain. Quantin also quotes Bernard Lazare, considered to be the first Dreyfusard, who actually considered Bloy a philosemite, because he recognized the Jews as fit for a great destiny, rather than unfit for any destiny.

However, scholar C.A. Tsakiridou points out that though Bloy was better than most, including Maritain’s friend Charles Péguy, he is certainly not immune to criticism. C.A. Tsarkiridou claims that Maritain was unable to “see Bloy’s spirituality for what it really was,” describing Bloy as a “narcissist.”^[xxiii] It is likely that many contemporary readers of Le Salut will share Tsakiridou’s dismissal of Bloy, as ultimately, Le Salut par les Juifs has not really stood the test of time, as the “grosses taches noires” make it difficult to appreciate Bloy’s finer and more insightful points, such as those that concern the shared Divine heritage of Christians and Jews. The unorthodoxy of Bloy’s education meant that he occasionally lacked the deftness and nuance of Sorbonne-trained Maritain, prone as he was, at times, to slip into the broad strokes and generalizations of a neophyte. Furthermore, excoriating, periphrastic pamphlets are not the best example of works where one can “take intention for fact,” without the extensive broader context of the author’s personality and confidence in their good will.

While there is evidence that Le Salut paved the way for more pluralist works like Nostra Aetate, its chief value now is its status as a milestone on the path to improving relations between Christians and Jews. One could argue that, in a flawed way, Bloy offered Maritain the idea that the Catholic mind saw Jews in a positive light, given that Jews and Christians both share in the covenant of God first given to the Jews. It is also important to recall that Maritain converted only after Bloy convinced him that Catholics viewed the Jews favorably. Maritain would go on to become ambassador to the Holy See, and appeal to the papal undersecretary Monsignor Montini, who re-convened Vatican II, to condemn antisemitism. ^[xxiv] Nearer to the end of his life, Maritain wrote, in a letter to French-Algerian-Israeli scholar André Chouraqui: “In waiting for [reconciliation] what is required above all is the development of an ever closer friendship. I do not mean true friendship, but truly fraternal and truly effective friendship.” ^[xxv]

Despite his paradoxical legacy, Bloy played a large role in the creation of a new spiritual community in the spirit of the Renewal through his reconciliation of the contemplative essence of the monastic ideal with the dialectical and argumentative nature of the Socratic forum. Many of those things are most repellent about Bloy, including his searing honesty, are the exact things that were crucial to his role as a prophet. His intensity of feeling, as well as his willingness to engage with both the sacred and profane, provided a solid foundation for an engaged Catholic tradition, attracting people who were actually interested in “being in the world,” and amending its social ills. Through utter devotion to his prophetic calling, he showed that belief in the need for solitude with God does not necessitate that one removes oneself from the world, rather, that the world is the very arena in which the struggles of the spirit must take place. In this way, he moved scholars such as Jacques Maritain to take on the mantle of a spiritually informed political involvement.

^[i] Jacques Maritain, Quelques Pages sur Léon Bloy (Paris, Rue de Fleurus: Cahiers de la Quinzaine, N.D.), p. 16. “Ma colère est l’effervescence de ma pitié” **Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.**

^[ii] Romain Deblue, “Léon Bloy ou L’Histoire au Miroir,” in Samuel Lair and Benoît Mérand, eds., Léon Bloy dans L’Histoire (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021), p. 52.

^[iii] Joseph Anthony Amato, A French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World (Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia Press, 2002).

^[iv] Jean-Luc Barré, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven, translated by Bernard E. Doering (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).

^[v] John Connelly. From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2012).

^[vi] Raïssa Maritain, Les Grandes Amitiés, p. 308: “Quand on aime Le Salut, on n’est pas seulement mon ami, on est, par force, quelque chose de plus.. ce livre.. représente des années de travaux, de prières et de douleurs qui ont été, je crois, hors de mesure.”

^[vii] John 4: 22.

^[viii] Léon Bloy, “Le Salut par les Juifs” in Maxence Caron, ed., Léon Bloy Essais et Pamphlets (Éditions Robert Laffont, 2017), p. 972: “Le Juif par excellence de nature”.

^[ix] Ibid, p. 987: “L’antisemitisme est le plus sanglant est le plus impardonnable.”

^[x] Ibid, p. 973: “Je dois être peu soupçonnable d’amour tendre pour les descendants actuels de cette race fameuse.”

^[xi] Ibid, p. 973; “Me trouvant à Hambourg, l’an passé, j’eus la curiosité de voir le Marché des Juifs. La surprenante abjection de cet emporium de détritus emphyteotiques est difficilement exprimable… les hurlements obséquieux m’accrochaient…toutes ces faces de lucre et de servitude avaient la même estampille redoutable”

^[xii] Ibid, p. 979: “Ils sont forcés par Dieu, invinciblement et surnaturellement forcés, d’accomplir les abominables cochonneries dont ils ont besoin pour accréditer leur déshonneur d’instruments de la Rédemption.”

^[xiii] Ibid, p. 980: “​​La sympathie pour les Juifs est un signe de turpitude, c’est bien entendu. Il est impossible de mériter l’estime d’un chien quand on n’a pas le dégoût instinctif de la Synagogue. Cela s’énonce tranquillement comme un axiome de géométrie rectiligne, sans ironie et sans amertume.”

^[xiv] Raïssa Maritain, Les Grandes Amitiés, p. 117.

^[xv] Léon Bloy, “Le Salut par les Juifs,” p. 995: “Les Juifs ne se convertiront que lorsque Jésus sera descendu de sa Croix, et précisément Jésus ne peut en descendre que lorsque les Juifs se seront convertis.”

^[xvi] “Cum igitur adeo magnum sit patrimonium spirituale Christianis et Iudaeis commune, Sacra haec Synodus mutuam utriusque cognitionem et aestimationem, quae praesertim studiis biblicis et theologicis atque fraternis colloquiis obtinetur, fovere vult et commendare”. Paul VI. “Nostra Aetate.” Vatican Archive, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html.

^[xvii] Connelly. From Enemy to Brother, p. 109; Crane, “Cracks in the Theology of Contempt: The French Roots of Nostra Aetate,” p. 11.

^[xviii] Connelly. From Enemy to Brother, p. 132. Yes, it is true that many people inspired Vatican II, but the combination of Osterreicher’s friendship with Maritain and inspiration from Bloy as expressed by Connelly strongly suggests that Bloy had a non-negligible effect.

^[xix]  Romain Vaissermann and Julianne Unterberger, Quatre écrivains Catholiques Sur La Question Juive De Bloy À Maritain (Reims: Collection Histoire des Religions, 2017),  p. 8.

^[xx] Henri Quantin, “Du Fumier sur le figuier: Léon Bloy et les Juifs” in Quatre écrivains Catholiques Sur La Question Juive De Bloy À Maritain (Reims: Collection Histoire des Religions, 2017), p. 11.

^[xxi] Ibid, p. 19.

^[xxii] “.. tout de suite que la perspective de Bloy n’est jamais politique; elle est toujours religieuse ou théologique. Bloy ne parle des Juifs que par rapport a Jésus, il ne parle d’Israel que dans la perspective du Salut offert par Christ.” Ibid, p. 21.

^[xxiii] Tsakiridou, p. 210.

^[xxiv] Crane, “Cracks in the Theology of Contempt: The French Roots of Nostra Aetate,” pp. 11-13.

^[xxv] Ibid, p. 20 “En attendant [reconciliation] ce qui est exigé de toute nécessité, c’est le développement d’une amitié de plus en plus étroit. Je ne dis pas amitié vraie, mais vraiment fraternelle et vraiment efficace.”

The post Prophecy, Polemic, and Pluralism: Léon Bloy and the Limits of Religious Tolerance first appeared on arcoftheuniverse.

Here are my remarks:

My enthusiasm for Melissa Moschella’s new book originates in common experience, as I learned from her introduction. She writes of being a freshman at Harvard University and taking Ethics and International Relations with Professors Stanley Hoffman and Bryan Hehir.

I know this well. Both of these fine professors – Hehir also a legendary priest in the Archdiocese of Boston – were my doctoral dissertation advisers when I was a graduate student in political science at Harvard from 1989 and 1996 (only slightly before Melissa arrived) and I served as a teaching fellow for Ethics and International Relations. I recall the enormously long reading list that Melissa mentions. Hoffmann sported a theory that students would complete only, say, 30% of the reading no matter how long the reading list – and so crafted very long syllabi.

I recall, too, what Melissa recounts, that the two leading approaches to ethics were deontological ethics, whose standard bearer was Immanuel Kant, and utilitarianism, the legacy of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The syllabus reflected the pages of philosophy journals, which were dominated then by these oscillating and dueling schools.

Melissa’s reaction to this vivifies her tenacity and intellectual integrity. She was unsatisfied with the going alternatives, knew enough to be unsatisfied, and would settle her quest on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, whom she studied at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. It was there that she came across the ideas of the New Natural Law Theory (NNL), an ethics that is rooted in Aristotle and Aquinas and builds on their insights in fresh ways, much like a tree growing new shoots that give it new form, a new look. Yet she accepted the views of NNL common among skeptical Catholic philosophers.

It was Professor Robert George, her doctoral adviser at Princeton, where she studied political philosophy, who invited her to annual small gatherings of the leading NNL scholars, where she posed her toughest questions – and received answers. Here again lies testimony to Melissa’s intellectual virtue – that she would open her mind and her heart to a view of which she had been dubious.

Here, our stories intersect again. I first came across NNL in graduate school when one of its leading scholars, Oxford professor John Finnis, visited Harvard, spoke, and met with a small group of graduate students. I began gradually to read the NNL scholars. I was not able then to confidently sort out their views from, say, those of Kant, or to answer the prominent challenging criticisms of NNL. But in recent years, I was also invited to the gatherings and so to read the writings of this school in much greater depth.

To study with the NNL scholars is to be received into a rare fellowship, where one may search for the truth in honesty and in friendship. The school was given its name – the new natural law theory – by political philosopher Russell Hittinger, one of their earliest critics, who graciously and wryly writes the introduction to Melissa’s book.

The NNL school is also rare in the world of moral philosophy for its degree of scholarly collaboration around a single theory. I know of nothing that resembles this focused intellectual teamwork except perhaps for that around the work of the liberal philosopher John Rawls. NNL is now in its third generation, its paterfamilias being the philosopher, Germain Grisez, whose launching of the theory we may place retrospectively in 1965, and is now carried on by several talented young scholars, including Melissa, Sherif Girgis, my colleague in Notre Dame’s Law School, and Ryan Anderson, now President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Manifesting the ability of this theory to deliver determinate ethical answers, as well as the integrity, sense of service, and commitment to the teaching of the Catholic Church of these scholars, is their constant efforts to speak publicly about the issues of the day, including the most controversial of them. Finnis, George, Anderson, Girgis, and Notre Dame Law Professor Gerard Bradley have defended marriage and traditional teachings on sexuality in a time of rapid and colossal revision; Finnis, Grisez, and philosopher Joseph Boyle have argued against the morality of nuclear deterrence; philosopher Christopher Tollefsen has written on lying, the atomic bomb, and many other issues; many other NNL scholars, (including, at greatest length, philosopher Christian Brugger), have opposed the death penalty; Melissa has written on parental rights; and others have written on many other issues.

Now, Melissa’s new book performs three major tasks that, when combined, make it a rarity in moral philosophy.

First, it is an introduction to a school of thought: NNL theory. Sixty years on, the school has lacked and badly needed this. Grisez’s core statement of the theory exists in three volumes that amount to over 2000 pages. Monographs and articles abound, which Melissa helpfully catalogues in the annotated bibliography at the end of the book. But hers is the first succinct exposition of the entire core of the theory, its chapters unfolding through the basic human goods, the moral principles, the theory’s account of community, its political thought and its manifestation of God, all in a form that is accessible to first-time students and readers. Like an astounding outfield catch, this feat looks easy when it is done well and disguises the virtuosity and training that made it possible.

Second, the book takes on controversies about NNL among scholars. There are many of these – itself a tribute to the influence and prominence of the theory. It is too much Kant. Not enough Aquinas. It is not grounded in human nature. Not grounded in metaphysics. It promotes goods that are free floating, abstract and not part and parcel of human flourishing. It is too rationalistic. It leaves out the virtues. It is too individualistic and gives short shrift to human ties and community. It does not make religion rightly superior. Its common good is too thin. It is opposed to what Alastair MacIntyre argues. Or what Servais Pinckaers argues. Melissa manages to engage virtually all of these controversies and to do so gently on the first-time reader through clear descriptions in the text and through sending the argument to footnotes when it gets technical. She also engages her critics charitably and carefully, always seeking common ground where it is to be found – as she does with MacIntyre’s thought, for instance. Balancing this second task with the first is an even rarer feat.

It is rarer still to accomplish a third dimension, which is to offer original philosophical arguments and interpretations – ever new shoots on the NNL tree. This is a go-to book but is not merely a briefer restatement (to borrow John Rawls’s title). In several ways, Melissa developed dimensions of NNL that made it all the more compelling to me.

In the first few pages, she brings forth and develops MacIntyre’s insight that a good ethical theory combines principles, goods, and virtues. These are three legs of a stool that collapses when one is absent. Melissa shows how each is important, how some philosophers stress one to the detriment of others, and how the NNL theory synthesizes the three. Here Melissa makes the simple but profound argument that the NNL theory is eudaimonistic, centered on an account of human happiness, flourishing and fulfillment – an insight that alone recasts the theory in light of common criticisms.

Melissa’s development of the Vocational Principle; her argument for the meaning of the common good; for the difference between the political common good and a society’s entire common good; for limited government; that political authority is mostly but not totally instrumental; her treatment of the virtues; her explanation that the good of religion is ultimate in one sense yet remains incommensurable with other goods; her account of the good of the family and other associations (drawing on her previous work); her argument for partial commitments – that is, of why we have greater obligations to those proximate to us while retaining some obligations to those far from us; and her treatment of other matters are all original and compelling.

On page three, Melissa makes a big statement, “I have slowly become convinced that the NNL theory provides the best account of ethics that has been developed up to this point, and that it offers a rigorous and satisfying alternative to deontology and consequentialism, largely resolving the question I have had since I first began studying moral philosophy during my freshman year of college.”

This piece was slightly updated on April 11, 2025.

The post Natural Law Defended Anew first appeared on arcoftheuniverse.

(See this earlier post with a video of the testimony of Paolo Carozza of Notre Dame Law School, whom the court called as an expert witness in the case.)

Why was Beatriz a victory for life?

Beatriz, an impoverished 22 year-old woman in El Salvador, gave birth in 2013 to a baby that had been diagnosed with anencephaly, a rare brain disorder, and the baby died not long after birth, as is sadly typical in such cases. Beatriz recovered from the birth without complications but was killed four years later in a motorcycle accident.

Abortion advocacy groups then decided to bring a suit against El Salvador’s government in hopes of eliciting a major ruling against the country’s laws prohibiting abortion. Beatriz’s death, they claimed, had resulted from her not enjoying a “human right to abortion.” After they lost their case before El Salvador’s Supreme Court, they brought the case before the IACHR, hoping further that this regional court would establish a right to abortion for all of Latin America.

Such a ruling – a Roe v. Wade for Latin America – would have defied some of the world’s strongest legal protections of the right to life. The American Convention on Human Rights – now ratified by 24 of the members of the Organization of American States – declares that the right to life shall be protected in law from the moment of conception, one of the strongest statements of the right to life in international law. El Salvador’s laws protecting life are some of the strongest such laws within states and are often the target of abortion rights advocates.

On December 20, 2024 the IACHR ruled in favor of the plaintiffs but in a highly narrow sense, requiring El Salvador to adopt more flexible medical protocols in high-risk pregnancies and to pay $40,000 to pro-abortion groups. Far more significant is what the court refrained from: declaring that abortion is a right. It did not even require exceptions for abortion or that abortion be decriminalized in any way in the laws of countries. It did not accept the plaintiffs’ argument that “obstetric violence” warrants abortion nor that Beatriz’s pregnancy and birth had contributed to her death. The ruling leaves intact the protection of the right to life in the American Convention and in El Salvador’s laws.

The decision merits far more notice. While in the United States attention focuses forcefully on domestic abortion politics, the contest is intense around the world. Much is at stake. The taking of unborn life is the largest global violation of human rights. Conservative estimates place numbers at around 12 million per year while other estimates claim 60 to 70 million per year. The advocacy of the right to abortion is aggressive in Latin America and Africa, where abortion is still widely prohibited, and finds its favorite forum in international law and international organizations. It has won major successes in Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia in recent years. In this global contest, the Beatriz decision is a major victory for the cause of life.

The post A Little Noticed Major Victory For Life first appeared on arcoftheuniverse.

Pope St. John Paul II became the first pope to call for the abolition of the death penalty in his encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, or The Gospel of Life, published on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1995. The practice was not compatible with human dignity, which not even a murderer loses, he taught. When I went to see John Paul II speak on his trip to St. Louis in 1999, I recall, he publicly called for the Governor of Missouri to commute the sentence of a prisoner about to be executed. The governor complied. Pope Francis has repeated the Church’s opposition to the death penalty and prayed publicly on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, that Biden commute the sentences of federal death row prisoners. Biden commuted 37 sentences on December 23.

John Paul II’s response to capital crime extended further after he became the victim of such a crime. After he recovered from being shot by Turkish assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, John Paul II visited Agca in prison and forgave him. This took place on December 27, 1983, just after Christmas. In 2014, Agca laid white roses on John Paul II’s tomb.

The central and founding event of Christianity is Jesus Christ’s forgiveness of humanity’s sins on the Cross and his meriting grace for humanity’s renewal in his Resurrection. Under the terms of the New Covenant, any person who accepts God’s forgiveness through repentance, baptism, and keeping the commandments may live in friendship with Christ eternally. Jesus’ love for the sinner does not exempt murderers but is rather especially intense for them. He has posted the message on his World Wide Web, “go to heaven.”

Jesus extends his love on the Cross equally in solidarity to families of murder victims. The brilliance of the 1995 film, Dead Man Walking, is that it challenges every viewer’s stance on the death penalty, deftly tugging our emotions towards everyone involved, not to leave us confused but rather to cultivate our hearts’ solidarity with victims, prisoner, and everyone involved. The lead role is that of Sister Helen Prejean, an activist against the death penalty who undertakes to accompany the prisoner, Matthew Poncelot, as he unsuccessfully appeals his sentence and then faces execution in a Louisiana prison. Her arduous task becomes ever more difficult when she encounters the parents of the victims, two high school students whom Poncelot murdered on their prom night, who angrily demand of Sister Helen, What about us? At the end of the film, following Poncelot’s execution, one of the victim’s fathers, Earl Delacroix, whose name means “of the Cross,” unexpectedly shows up at Poncelot’s funeral and tells Sr. Helen, “I don’t know why I am here. I got a lot of hate.” In the closing scene, he is shown praying in a chapel with Sr. Helen, which I think we are to interpret as his prayer for the strength to forgive.

About the Church’s teaching on the justice of the death penalty, much more must be said. If one accepts the New Covenant, though, ought not one to participate in this covenant and at least pray for the redemption of prisoners on death row? Our President-elect appears to think not.

The post On Donald Trump’s “Go to Hell” Theology first appeared on arcoftheuniverse.

I am grateful for the efforts of three colleagues in political science to organize the petition:

Ronald Krebs, Distinguished McKnight University Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota

Cary Nelson, Jubilee Professor of Arts & Sciences Emeritus, English Department, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Ron Hassner, Professor, Political Science, U.C. Berkeley

The text, authored by these colleagues, I reprint, beginning here:

Against Academic Boycotts

To sign the statement, click here.

On Friday, August 9, 2024, the American Association of University Professors, which has long eloquently defended the core principle of academic freedom, reversed course and declared academic boycotts legitimate.

We believe the AAUP’s new position is wrong-headed and dangerous. We cannot safeguard academic freedom by violating academic freedom. Normalizing academic boycotts poses a profound threat to academic freedom.

Academic freedom is always fragile. We do not defend the academic freedom only of those with whom we agree, but of those—and especially of those—whose views we find odious. The AAUP eloquently asserted the right to academic freedom in its 1915 founding document, and it eloquently asserted that right again in 1940, a moment in US history when US universities were hardly bastions of freedom and when the gates of free expression were, under the pressures of war, swinging shut. The AAUP’s clarion call did not immediately become the norm, and the right to academic freedom was, in the first two decades of the Cold War, observed more in the breach. Indeed, the AAUP itself failed the test of McCarthyism. It has now failed the test posed by the ongoing war in Gaza.

In 2005, the AAUP approved a statement condemning academic boycotts absolutely and unconditionally: “We reject proposals that curtail the freedom of teachers and researchers to engage in work with academic colleagues, and we reaffirm the paramount importance of the freest possible international movement of scholars and ideas.” A year later, a committee of distinguished scholars elaborated and defended the association’s stance. Despite significant debate in the two decades since then, the AAUP has maintained that position. The AAUP was right then—and it is wrong now.

Academic boycotts must be opposed, in principle, for two reasons.

1.         Academic boycotts are in deep tension with the basic animating spirit and values of the academy. Scholarly progress depends on the free exchange of ideas, and this in turn requires the free movement of people and cultivation of relationships among universities wherever they may be located. The only relevant measure of value lies in the substantive contribution of the scholarship itself—not the place where its authors reside or are employed. Scholarly knowledge cannot progress if scholars’ voices are silenced for reasons of politics, whether the political entanglements of their institutions or their national government or even the political views of the individuals themselves. The AAUP expert committee argued in 2006, “the search for truth and its free expression suffer if a boycott is in place… the need is always for more academic freedom, not less.” We cannot save academic freedom by endorsing and implementing boycotts that violate academic freedom.

2.         Academic boycotts punish individual scholars for the alleged misbehavior of their government and/or of their academic institutions. This is a material fact based on the structure of the modern university. They should not be judged complicit in policies which they had no role in formulating. To punish these scholars for the misdeeds of others is to engage in unwarranted collective punishment.

We are troubled by reports of violations of academic freedom on college and university campuses around the world. If individual scholars could lose their right to academic freedom because their institutions ran roughshod over others’ rights to the same, very few around the world would enjoy the right to academic freedom. Academics in China, Russia, Turkey, the Arab world, Singapore, and many other places should then be subject to boycott. And don’t forget the United States: academic freedom in the United States is under assault today from both the right and the left. If universities need to be free of sin for their scholars to deserve academic freedom, there would be no academic freedom at all.

Defenders of boycotts, including the AAUP in its latest statement, sometimes seek to distinguish between institutions and their members, asserting that they call for boycott only of the former. But this is a distinction without a difference. There is no way to boycott an institution without undermining scholarly exchange, joint research programs, and instructional collaborations and thereby violating individuals’ academic freedom. As the AAUP rightly observed nearly 20 years ago, “The form that noncooperation with an academic institution takes inevitably involves a refusal to engage in academic discourse with teachers and researchers, not all of whom are complicit in the policies that are being protested”—and the vast majority of whom are certainly not responsible for those policies.

Academic freedom is an inviolable right to which all scholars must be entitled regardless of whether they perfectly uphold that right for others. That extends as well to our colleagues who, in a sincere commitment to use whatever tools are at their disposal to effect political change, endorse academic boycotts and thereby violate academic freedom. Faculty members and students should not face institutional or governmental censorship or discipline for endorsing academic boycotts, though participating in boycotts should be seen as a violation of professional norms.

The only circumstance under which we might (and, even then, only might) see a boycott as justifiable is if academic freedom were so restricted that the academy had become simply, and nothing more than, a mouthpiece of government. In such a circumstance, academics have lost their right to freedom because they have become mere apparatchiks. However, if academic freedom were that severely compromised in a country, then a comprehensive economic boycott would be in order, not a targeted boycott of universities.

The AAUP does not speak for us. We call on our fellow scholars to join us in opposing boycotts of fellow scholars wherever they might reside and be employed.

To sign the statement, click here.

The post Sign Statement Against Academic Boycotts! first appeared on arcoftheuniverse.

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 . . .

The post What Are We Teaching Our Students? first appeared on arcoftheuniverse.

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 12^th and the 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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.

The post Human Rights Need Religion first appeared on arcoftheuniverse.

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 8^th, 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.

The post Natural Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Natural Rights first appeared on arcoftheuniverse.

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.

The post A New Defense of the Human Right of Religious Freedom first appeared on arcoftheuniverse.

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.

The post Israel, Gaza and the Just War Ethic first appeared on arcoftheuniverse.

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.

The post Healing the Wounds of Clergy Sex Abuse Through Priests first appeared on arcoftheuniverse.

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.

The post Exchange on Reparations for Racism in the United States first appeared on arcoftheuniverse.

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.)

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.

The post Speaking Against Latin America’s Roe V. Wade first appeared on arcoftheuniverse.