Catholic Truthiness

[rug]

Move over, Antonin Scalia. Stephen Colbert is now America’s Catholic.



The two heads of today's Catholic Church. (Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Reuters.)

By Jessica Winter | Posted Friday, Sept. 20, 2013, at 4:42 PM

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has always reminded me of the robed men of the Catholic Church in which I grew up: well-fed and saturnine, burbling with derisive erudition, jolly one moment and imperious the next, a weary disgust often flickering at the edges of the brow and lips. These men only really engaged with the boys; the girls always seemed to them to have wandered into the room by mistake. I’ll never forget the look of vague revulsion on the face of the vast monsignor who served Holy Communion at my confirmation, the corners of his mouth pulling down to contain his nausea at the riffraff they let into the church these days. It’s the shape of a mouth reading an acrid Scalia dissent.

For a lot of reasons—because he is the longest-serving and most boisterous member of America’s own Ecumenical Council, because he frequently addresses Catholic groups, because Andy Borowitz says as much—we think of Justice Scalia as “America’s Catholic,” as my Slate colleague Dahlia Lithwick put it in an email. In fact, you could easily imagine him as America’s first Bishop of Rome, or at least his duly appointed representative. Pope Benedict XVI was a fun cartoon villain because of the fumes of nefarious conspiracy wafting off his haute couture threads—he was Mugatu in a chasuble. Scalia wouldn’t have gone shopping with him, but otherwise they were two hearts beating as one: They’re both deeply conservative, nostalgic for “tradition,” rigid in their interpretations of doctrine, belittling of women and gays, and forever erring on the side of consolidating more power—be it political, social, or religious—in the hands of the already powerful.

What Scalia and Benedict also have in common is that, for all their institutional authority, they represent a last stand against the prevailing, decades-long trend toward a more inclusive, liberal Catholic Church. For proof, of course, just look to Pope Francis, the selfie-taking, Twitter-using, biker gang-blessing, money-hating, atheist-redeeming, female-prisoner’s-foot-kissing Jesuit who made liberal Catholics everywhere gnaw ecstatically on their rosaries with an interview in the Jesuit weekly America magazine (excerpts of which were republished in the New York Times). In the interview, he makes it clear that, in contrast to his glamorous predecessor, Francis wants to frame the church as an institution by and for the poor. He’s sharply critical of “authoritarian” decision-making (specifically from his own past), “closed and rigid thought,” and “censorship.” He addresses the church’s views on homosexuality by posing a question that answers itself: “Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?” He doesn’t condemn birth control, but he does criticize the church’s obsession with it. Most intriguingly, Francis says, “We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman,” and while I have no idea what that means, I guarantee that this thought never crossed the mind of Antonin Scalia, or of any man who ever dropped a wafer in my mouth at Mass.

In other words, Francis is shaping up to be the kind of pope that any lapsed Catholic lightly schooled in liberation theology and Madonna videos can embrace. But even a People’s Pope can seem a remote and shimmering figure—when I was a kid, John Paul II was never much more than a kind-looking grandpa in a plastic picture frame. For a lay Catholic, the literal embodiments of the church are always going to be its local priests and its most prominent cultural figures. So as the title has passed from Benedict to Francis, it follows that U.S. Catholics should have a new pope of their own.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/faithbased/2013/09/pope_francis_catholic_church_stephen_colbert_is_replacing_antonin_scalia.html

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

1. Scalia has shown that he is not always so Catholic

Last edited Mon Sep 23, 2013, 07:48 AM - Edit history (1)

I should start by citing Pope John Paul II's teaching on capital punishment in his encyclical, Evangelium Vitae -- "The Gospel of Life", section 56. After a discussion of self defense, he says

This is the context in which to place the problem of the death penalty. On this matter there is a growing tendency, both in the Church and in civil society, to demand that it be applied in a very limited way or even that it be abolished completely. The problem must be viewed in the context of a system of penal justice ever more in line with human dignity and thus, in the end, with God's plan for man and society. The primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is "to redress the disorder caused by the offence." Public authority must redress the violation of personal and social rights by imposing on the offender an adequate punishment for the crime, as a condition for the offender to regain the exercise of his or her freedom. In this way authority also fulfills the purpose of defending public order and ensuring people's safety, while at the same time offering the offender an incentive and help to change his or her behaviour and be rehabilitated.

It is clear that, for these purposes to be achieved, the nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.

In any event, the principle set forth in the new Catechism of the Catholic Church remains valid: 'If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority must limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.'

To sum this up, capital punishment is not intrinsically immoral, but there are essentially no situations in which it is morally acceptable.

Scalia disagrees. In 2002, he gave a talk at the University of Chicago, in which he said that government “derives its moral authority from God ... to execute wrath, including even wrath by the sword, which is unmistakably a reference to the death penalty.” He then made the following remarkable declaration:

Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is, the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe and has least support in the church-going United States. I attribute that to the fact that for the believing Christian, death is no big deal.

Scalia not only reiterated his support for the death penalty, but called on any judge who found the practice immoral to resign. “In my view,” he said, “the choice for the judge who believes the death penalty to be immoral is resignation rather than simply ignoring duly enacted constitutional laws and sabotaging the death penalty.”

Incidentally, Scalia is generally seen as supporting "original intent" as a theory of constitutional interpretation. However, I direct you to the case of Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005). Angel Raich was growing marijuana for her own medicinal use -- which was legal under California law. The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, held this to be illegal under Federal law. A concurring opinion was written by Scalia, who based the decision ultimately under the Interstate Commerce clause of the Constitution and the Necessary and Proper Clause, saying

Unlike the power to regulate activities that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce, the power to enact laws enabling effective regulation of interstate commerce can only be exercised in conjunction with congressional regulation of an interstate market, and it extends only to those measures necessary to make the interstate regulation effective. As US v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995) itself states, and the Court affirms today, Congress may regulate noneconomic intrastate activities only where the failure to do so “could ... undercut” its regulation of interstate commerce. ... This is not a power that threatens to obliterate the line between “what is truly national and what is truly local.

Interestingly enough, Justice O'Connor based her dissent on exactly the same case Scalia based his concurrance, Lopez. She said that Lopez placed limits on Federal use of the Interstate Commerce clause and Raich's use of marijuana came under those limits.

Clarence Thomas, of all people, said that the majority was wrong, saying that Raich grew and used

marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything--and the Federal government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers. ... By holding that Congress may regulate activity that is neither interstate nor commerce under the Interstate Commerce Clause, the Court abandons any attempt to enforce the Constitution's limits on federal power.

Thomas wrote: "The Necessary and Proper Clause is not a warrant to Congress to enact any law that bears some conceivable connection to the exercise of an enumerated power". He went on to say "Congress presented no evidence in support of its conclusions, which are not so much findings of fact as assertions of power," and concluded: "Congress cannot define the scope of its own power merely by declaring the necessity of its enactments".

The gist of Thomas' dissent comes straight out of original intent:

Respondent's local cultivation and consumption of marijuana is not "Commerce ... among the several States". Certainly no evidence from the founding suggests that "commerce" included the mere possession of a good or some personal activity that did not involve trade or exchange for value. In the early days of the Republic, it would have been unthinkable that Congress could prohibit the local cultivation, possession, and consumption of marijuana.

I believe that here, Thomas is quite right, and Scalia only really supports "original intent" when he agrees with it.

[rug]

2. That's fascinating digging.

Scalia et al. consider the intent of the law to originate with them.

[No Vested Interest]

3. I never considered Justice Scalia "America's Catholic"

He's just one of too many who speak out in ways that are often disturbing to those Catholics following their conscience and what they have been taught by selfless and committed religious over the years.

Maybe the author is so young that she didn't have schooling by priests and nuns. Lord knows, there haven't been many in schools at any grade level for what's become generations now.

I do applaud Stephen Colbert for speaking up in defense of his Church, even though it's usually in a humorous fashion. The audience gets his point. From what I've read of Stephen, he walks the walk as well as talking the talk.

[rug]

4. Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito remind me of Catholic prep kids who make fun of the homeless.

[No Vested Interest]

5. I'm sure there are many like that.

Most I know, including my own who were "prep school kids", get it that it's not socially correct to make fun of those with less.
Mine run the gamut of political direction; even the one who is RW doesn't comment that way, at least in my hearing range.
Scalia is the worst in that regard; I think Roberts has enough sense to not broadcast all that he thinks and believes.