Catholic Social Thought and the HHS Mandate

By Francis J. Beckwith

FRIDAY, 17 FEBRUARY 2012

As almost everyone on earth now knows, Professor Obama has offered his “compromise” to the HHS regulations that require that all employers, including most religious employers, that provide health insurance to their employees must include coverage of contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients free of charge.  It was a faux compromise. The insurance company, not the employer, must inform the employee that these options exist, while the insurance company is required to provide these services “free of charge.” But, as one group of scholars stated, “it does not matter who explains the terms of the policy purchased by the religiously affiliated or observant employer. What matters is what services the policy covers.” And because there’s no free lunch, the insurance company’s cost undoubtedly will be passed on to the employer. Nothing of substance has changed. The religious employer whose conscience forbids him to materially cooperate with acts he believes are intrinsically evil must purchase employees health insurance that includes services it believes are intrinsically evil. Nevertheless, several individuals and groups have applauded this “compromise.” Washington Post writer E. J. Dionne, for instance, wrote a thoughtful column in support of the president. The Catholic Health Associationinitially praised the President, but now seems to be backpedaling a bit, whileCatholics United offers unwavering support. Although each claims to be committed to Catholic Social Thought (CST), when one reads the relevant encyclicals, what emerges is not a theological brief for the HHS mandate and its faux compromise, but rather, something quite hostile to it.          Pope Paul VI In Humanae Vitae (1968), for instance, Pope Paul VI asks the “rulers of nations” not to “tolerate any legislation which would introduce into the family those practices which are opposed to the natural law of God.” Consequently, if the Church teaches that the state ought not to voluntarily introduce these practices to the wider public, it stands to reason that it is far worse for the state to coerce a Catholic employer or Church organization to introduce these practices to its employees. If, however, a Catholic or Catholic organization were to acquiesce in this state coercion, it would not only be materially cooperating with evil, but it would cause scandal, for it would by its actions be teaching that it rejects Humanae Vitae’s command that “careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law.” Catholics United is correct that Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum (1891), is “generally regarded as the inaugural document of the Catholic social tradition.” But the HHS mandate that Catholics United supports is inconsistent with the principles found in that encyclical. In order to appreciate this, consider this question: Do religious-based organizations, such as Catholic hospitals and universities, and Catholic-owned businesses, have the right under the HHS mandate either to sign an agreement with an insurance company or self-insure so that the policies they offer to their employees do not include contraception, abortion, sterilization, etc.? The answer is “no” (except for narrowly defined “houses of worship”). HHS is in effect coercing the Church and some of its members to use their assets for the purpose of introducing into the lives of their employees and their families “those practices which are opposed to the natural law of God,” as Humanae Vitaeputs it.             Pope Leo XIII On the matter of the state conscripting the assets of the Church and its members for such purposes, Rerum Novarum lays down clear principles: [E]very precaution should be taken not to violate the rights of individuals and not to impose unreasonable regulations under pretense of public benefit. For laws only bind when they are in accordance with right reason, and, hence, with the eternal law of God. . . .And here we are reminded of the confraternities, societies, and religious orders which have arisen by the Church's authority and the piety of Christian men. . . .In their religious aspect they claim rightly to be responsible to the Church alone. The rulers of the State accordingly have no rights over them, nor can they claim any share in their control; on the contrary, it is the duty of the State to respect and cherish them, and, if need be, to defend them from attack. Pope Leo laments that in his own time “a very different course has been followed”:  In many places, the State authorities have laid violent hands on these communities, and committed manifold injustice against them; it has placed them under control of the civil law, taken away their rights as corporate bodies, and despoiled them of their property, in such property the Church had her rights, each member of the body had his or her rights, and there were also the rights of those who had founded or endowed these communities for a definite purpose, and, furthermore, of those for whose benefit and assistance they had their being. Thus, Leo asserts that the Church “cannot refrain from complaining of such spoliation as unjust and fraught with evil results; and with all the more reason do We complain because, at the very time when the law proclaims that association is free to all, We see that Catholic societies, however peaceful and useful, are hampered in every way, whereas the utmost liberty is conceded to individuals whose purposes are at once hurtful to religion and dangerous to the commonwealth.” Catholic Social Thought, it seems, is as much about speaking truth to power as it is about not letting those in and close to power speak for truth. Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies at Baylor University. Among his many books is Politics for Christians: Statecraft as Soulcraft (InterVarsity Press, 2010) © 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org Retrieved February 17, 2012 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/

Liberalism, Marriage, and the New Intolerance

Taking Rites Seriously: Political Liberalism and the Problem of Marriage By Francis J. Beckwith    FRIDAY, 06 JANUARY 2012 Political Liberalism, as we know it today, is not even three decades old. It began to develop in the early 1980s in the writings of several well-known philosophers that included Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, and John Rawls. The purpose of their project was to offer the political culture an intellectually respectable way to sequester the policy goals of the fledgling movement of religious conservatives while at the same time claiming that their project is consistent with an older liberalism that allows for full political participation by all citizens. The Political Liberal correctly observes that the differences between citizens on the culture-owar issues – e.g., abortion, marriage, euthanasia – stem from their contrary, though reasonable, worldviews or comprehensive doctrines (as Rawls would put it). Rawls concedes that his understanding of “reasonable” is “deliberately loose.” “We avoid excluding doctrines as unreasonable,” writes Rawls, “without strong grounds based on clear aspects of the reasonable itself. Otherwise our account runs the danger of being arbitrary and exclusive.Political liberalism counts many familiar and traditional doctrines – religious, philosophical, and moral – as reasonable, even though we could not seriously entertain them for ourselves. . . .” (Emphasis added) So, for example, the prolifer opposes abortion because he believes that all human beings, including the unborn, are by nature persons and thus have intrinsic dignity regardless of their size, level of development, environment, or degree of dependency.  The typical prochoicer, on the other hand, maintains that not all human beings are persons, because a person is a being who has the present capacity to exercise certain person-making functions like self-consciousness, rationality, the ability to communicate and have desires, and so forth. Because the fetus for most of its gestation lacks these functions, it is not a person and thus it is permissible to abort it.  Both positions, according to the Political Liberal, are reasonable, for they are derived from reasonable comprehensive doctrines and neither is unassailable. Thus, it would be as equally unjust for the government to coerce a prochoice citizen to carry a pregnancy to term as it would be for it to coerce a prolife citizen to procure an abortion. This is because a citizen cannot be coerced on a matter of fundamental rights based on reasons he is reasonable to reject. Political Liberalism’s sole purpose, we are told, is to accommodate citizen diversity on these contested questions while nurturing a political culture of respect and tolerance, the latter of which would be reflected in the government’s restraint in coercing and marginalizing citizens based on where they stand on these contested questions. The question lurking in the debate over whether or not marriage law should recognize same-sex couples seems almost like a paradigm case of the sort of dispute for which Political Liberalism was invented: what is the proper function of our sexual powers and its relationship to the nature of marriage?  How one answers this question is inexorably tied to what one understands to be true about the nature of men and women, the conjugal act, and the permanence of the marital bond. Such understandings, to conscript Rawls, are informed by those “many familiar and traditional doctrines – religious, philosophical, and moral” that Political Liberalism counts “as reasonable.”  Thus, it would seem to be inconsistent with Political Liberalism to allow any government coercion and marginalization of citizens who, as a matter of conscience (often grounded in religious conviction), cannot acquiesce to the legitimacy of same-sex marriage.  Consider just one example. In Massachusetts, soon after the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in 2003 required that the state issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Catholic Charities, which was at the time in the child adoption business, was told by the state that it could no longer exclude same-sex couples as adoptive parents, even though the Catholic Church maintains that same-sex unions are deeply disordered and sinful. Because it could not as a matter of conscience compromise its moral theology, Catholic Charities ceased putting children up for adoption. Catholic Charities believes that its mission is to find for each child under its care an adequate replacement for her mother and father. This is grounded in the belief that a human child is the sort of being that has by nature a mother and a father, just as it is the sort of being that has the essential property to exercise rational thought (even if it never acquires the ability to exercise it).  Thus, if we have an obligation not to interrupt a child’s ability to exercise rational thought, we also have an obligation not to deny unjustly a child her mother and father. Because Catholic Charities believes it is morally required to treat all children with equal dignity and respect, this means that no child should be denied a mother and a father or a replacement for each if it is in fact possible to do so.  Including same-sex couples as adoptive parents, according to Catholic Charities, violates the equal dignity and respect of the children who have been placed in its care. Although everyone does not share this perspective, it is certainly just the sort of reasonable comprehensive doctrine that Political Liberalism is supposed to protect. But as we have seen since 2003, everything from public education, to rental law, to employment law, to family law, to government funding and to the tax-exempt status of religious academic institutions falls within the orbit of a state’s interest in making sure that same-sex marriage dissenters are coerced, punished, or marginalized if they refuse to treat same-sex marriage as licit as male-female marriage.  Thus, the Political Liberal, if he wants to remain consistent, should stand in solidarity with those who dissent from same-sex marriage.  Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies at Baylor University. He is one of four primary contributors to the forthcoming Journeys of Faith: Evangelicalism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Anglicanism (Zondervan, 2012).  © 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org

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Reformation Day - and the Incoherence of Sola Scriptura

Reformation Day – and What Led Me To Back to Catholicism

Francis Beckwith

[For Protestants, October 31st] is Reformation Day, the date in 1517 on which Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to that famous door in Wittenberg, Germany. Since I returned to the Catholic Church in April 2007, each year the commemoration has become a time of reflection about my own journey and the puzzles that led me back to the Church of my youth. 

One of those puzzles was the relationship between the Church, Tradition, and the canon of Scripture. As a Protestant, I claimed to reject the normative role that Tradition plays in the development of Christian doctrine. But at times I seemed to rely on it. For example, on the content of the biblical canon – whether the Old Testament includes the deuterocanonical books (or “Apocrypha”), as the Catholic Church holds and Protestantism rejects. I would appeal to the exclusion of these books as canonical by the Jewish Council of Jamnia (A.D. 90-100) as well as doubts about those books raised by St. Jerome, translator of the Latin Vulgate, and a few other Church Fathers.

My reasoning, however, was extra-biblical. For it appealed to an authoritative leadership that has the power to recognize and certify books as canonical that were subsequently recognized as such by certain Fathers embedded in a tradition that, as a Protestant, I thought more authoritative than the tradition that certified what has come to be known as the Catholic canon. This latter tradition, rejected by Protestants, includes St. Augustine as well as the Council of Hippo (A.D. 393), the Third Council of Carthage (A.D. 397), the Fourth Council of Carthage (A.D. 419), and the Council of Florence (A.D. 1441).

But if, according to my Protestant self, a Jewish council and a few Church Fathers are the grounds on which I am justified in saying what is the proper scope of the Old Testament canon, then what of New Testament canonicity? So, ironically, given my Protestant understanding of ecclesiology, then the sort of authority and tradition that apparently provided me warrant to exclude the deuterocanonical books from Scripture – binding magisterial authority with historical continuity – is missing from the Church during the development of New Testament canonicity.

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, maintains that this magisterial authority was in fact present in the early Church and thus gave its leadership the power to recognize and fix the New Testament canon. So, ironically, the Protestant case for a deuterocanonical-absent Old Testament canon depends on Catholic intuitions about a tradition of magisterial authority.

       This led to two other tensions. First, in defense of the Protestant Old Testament canon, I argued, as noted above, that although some of the Church’s leading theologians and several regional councils accepted what is known today as the Catholic canon, others disagreed and embraced what is known today as the Protestant canon. It soon became clear to me that this did not help my case, since by employing this argumentative strategy, I conceded the central point of Catholicism: the Church is logically prior to the Scriptures. That is, if the Church, until the Council of Florence’s ecumenical declaration in 1441, can live with a certain degree of ambiguity about the content of the Old Testament canon, that means that sola scriptura was never a fundamental principle of authentic Christianity.

After all, if Scripture alone applies to the Bible as a whole, then we cannot know to which particular collection of books this principle applies until the Bible’s content is settled. Thus, to concede an officially unsettled canon for Christianity’s first fifteen centuries seems to make the Catholic argument that sola scriptura was a sixteenth-century invention and, therefore, not an essential Christian doctrine.

Second, because the list of canonical books is itself not found in Scripture – as one can find the Ten Commandments or the names of Christ’s apostles – any such list, whether Protestant or Catholic, would be an item of extra-biblical theological knowledge. Take, for example, a portion of the revised and expanded Evangelical Theological Society statement of faith suggested (and eventually rejected by the membership) by two ETS members following my return to the Catholic Church. It states that, “this written word of God consists of the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments and is the supreme authority in all matters of belief and behavior.”

But the belief that the Bible consists only of sixty-six books is not a claim of Scripture, since one cannot find the list in it, but a claim about Scripture as a whole. That is, the whole has a property – i.e., “consisting of sixty-six books,” – that is not found in any of the parts. In other words, if the sixty-six books are the supreme authority on matters of belief, and the number of books is a belief, and one cannot find that belief in any of the books, then the belief that Scripture consists of sixty-six particular books is an extra-biblical belief, an item of theological knowledge that is prima facie non-biblical.

For the Catholic, this is not a problem, since the Bible is the book of the Church, and thus there is an organic unity between the fixing of the canon and the development of doctrine and Christian practice.

Although I am forever indebted to my Evangelical brethren for instilling and nurturing in me a deep love of Scripture, it was that love that eventually led me to the Church that had the authority to distinguish Scripture from other things. 

Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies at Baylor University. He was the fifty-eighth President of the Evangelical Theological Society and is the author of Return to Rome: Confessions of An Evangelical Catholic (Brazos Press, 2009) and one of the four primary contributors to the forthcoming Journeys of Faith: Evangelicalism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Anglicanism(Zondervan, 2012).

© 2011 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org

The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.


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