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Roma Locuta Est, Causa Finita Non Est

February 16, 2012   ·   2 Comments

Source: NYTX

By Marie Burns:

Gary Gutting holds a distinguished chair in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He also writes many of the posts in a New York Times opinion blog called “The Stone.” His post in today’s Times begins with the topical – the contraceptive coverage controversy – but he approaches the issue in a way that would have made the young Martin Luther happy (forget the older Martin Luther – he was a bum). Luther, also a professor of philosophy, challenged the authority of the Pope and asserted that all baptized Christians were members of a holy priesthood.

Gutting takes a similar approach and applies it collectively:

In our democratic society the ultimate arbiter of religious authority is the conscience of the individual believer. It follows that there is no alternative to accepting the members of a religious group as themselves the only legitimate source of the decision to accept their leaders as authorized by God….

There was, perhaps, a time when the vast majority of Catholics accepted the bishops as having an absolute right to define theological and ethical doctrines. Those days, if they ever existed, are long gone. Most Catholics … now reserve the right to reject doctrines insisted on by their bishops and to interpret in their own way the doctrines that they do accept. This is above all true in matters of sexual morality, especially birth control, where the majority of Catholics have concluded that the teachings of the bishops do not apply to them. Such “reservations” are an essential constraint on the authority of the bishops….

The mistake of the Obama administration – and of almost everyone debating its decision – was to accept the bishops’ claim that their position on birth control expresses an authoritative ‘teaching of the church.’ … The immorality of birth control is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church. Pope Paul VI meant his 1968 encyclical, ‘Humanae Vitae,’ to settle the issue in the manner of the famous tag, ‘Roma locuta est, causa finita est.’ [Trans. “Rome has spoken; the case is closed.”] In fact the issue has been settled by the voice of the Catholic people.

Gutting does note, parenthetically, that “… the administration may be right in thinking that the bishops need placating because they can cause them considerable political trouble.” That seems to be exactly the course the Obama administration has taken. Still, they’re betting that most Catholics, who don’t obey the Pope on matters of sexuality, will be consistent; that is, they will not follow the bishops’ dictum that providing birth control insurance is a violation of their First Amendment rights. The rights that would be violated if the bishops had their way would be the rights of women who work for large, secular institutions run by the Church. Of course it would be madness, not to mention an actual violation of the First Amendment, for the administration to openly challenge the leadership of the Church, as Gutting does.

Theologically, Gutting’s argument is interesting. But in the end, I don’t think the beliefs of either the Catholic bishops or parishioners are germane. The true underlying principle is not who determines Church doctrine, but who gets to enjoy “the free exercise of religion.” There are two groups whose First Amendment rights are in tension here. The bishops – and their opportunistic Republican enablers – think their own rights take precedence. They never consider the rights of their employees to fully exercise their own religious beliefs. The bishops don’t mind if their nurses go to synagogue on Saturday or the Methodist Church on Sunday, but they do oppose these women’s fundamental right to practice their own religion on a Saturday night date.

For Christians, the notion of separation of church and state goes back to the gospels. In the Gospel of Mark, the first gospel written, Mark tells the story of a scribe who asks Jesus, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” Jesus answered, “The most important one is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:28-31) The first of these two commandments, commonly called the Love Commandments, addresses the church and the second is analogous to the state.

Young Martin Luther got this: In his book On Secular Authority, he described the “two kingdoms”: “God has ordained the two governments: the spiritual, which by the Holy Spirit under Christ makes Christians and pious people; and the secular, which restrains the unchristian and wicked so that they are obliged to keep the peace outwardly.”

Fast-forward a century, and we find American colonist Roger Williams expressing the same sentiment. Williams was trained as an Anglican, but his attraction to Puritanism brought him to America in 1631. He had an independent mind and was soon expelled from the Puritan church – and therefore the Puritan colony – precisely because of his belief in separation of church and state. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony only members of the church could vote, and the church elders made members only of men whom they deemed had given “evidence” they had been saved. Williams believed that only a Christian knew when he was saved. No one else was capable of judging whether or not a person had established what we today would call “a personal relationship with Christ.” Since the relationship was between God and the individual, Williams reasoned, there was no way for other people to establish a person’s “worthiness” to join the Colony. Therefore, there could be no religious test for voting rights.

In his writings, Williams described “a hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” This phrase, which Williams borrowed from Luther, may have been the basis for Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

James Madison, a principal author of the Constitution wrote, “I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.” He wrote in the Federalist Papers (a series of propaganda essays written to sway the states to adopt the Constitution) that religious zeal was a “latent cause of faction” that made men “vex and oppress each other.”

Madison was half-right. He failed to mention that some men use their religious zealotry to “vex and oppress” women. Whatever the religious beliefs of today’s Catholic laity, it is time for their bishops to stop vexing and oppressing the women who serve them and the public.

Marie Burns blogs at RealityChex.com

By marieburns

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