Catholic Natural Law Research Articles

“The Limits of Human Jurisdiction”: Protestantism, War Crimes Trials, and Human Rights in Occupied Germany

In the years after 1945, German Protestant church leaders and lay intellectuals emerged as ubiquitous critics of the war crimes trials conducted by the Allied occupation governments. Marshaling the financial resources and international connections of the newly formed Protestant Church in Germany, a network of church administrators, theologians, and jurists petitioned occupation authorities for the release of hundreds of convicted Nazi perpetrators. While a generation of critical scholarship has linked the campaign against war crimes trials to the persistence of Protestant nationalism in Allied-occupied Germany, this article argues that the campaign also marked an inflection point in postwar German politics. Protestant church leaders and jurists not only echoed popular attacks on Allied “victors’ justice” but also developed a novel language of human rights that would shape their later interventions in West German politics. Rejecting the dominant contemporary discourses of human rights, rooted in Catholic natural law or American exceptionalism, Protestant trial opponents recentered human rights around a theology of human fallibility in order to criticize the alleged excesses of political justice. Yet even as they promoted tendentious accounts of the Nazi past, Protestant leaders contributed to institutionalizing human rights in West German politics. By the 1950s, veterans of the postwar amnesty campaigns would defend the rights of conscientious objectors and recognition of Germany’s territorial losses. The Protestant campaign against war crimes trials demonstrates how human rights gained power in postwar Germany as a political language that bridged nationalist and internationalist commitments, with ambiguous consequences for the consolidation of democracy.

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition. Edited by JohnBerkman and William C.MattisonIII. Pp. xi, 327. Grand Rapids/Cambridge, Eerdmans, 2014, £23.99/$35.00.

The Heythrop JournalVolume 62, Issue 3 p. 605-607 Book Review Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition. Edited by John Berkman and William C. Mattison. Pp. xi, 327. Grand Rapids/Cambridge, Eerdmans, 2014, £23.99/$35.00. Patrick Riordan, Patrick Riordan Campion Hall, OxfordSearch for more papers by this author Patrick Riordan, Patrick Riordan Campion Hall, OxfordSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 May 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.13922Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume62, Issue3Special Issue: Virtue EthicsMay 2021Pages 605-607 RelatedInformation

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition. Edited by JohnBerkman and William C.MattisonIII. Pp. xi, 327. Grand Rapids/Cambridge, Eerdmans, 2014, £23.99/$35.00.

The Heythrop JournalVolume 61, Issue 2 p. 362-364 Book Review Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition. Edited by John Berkman and William C. Mattison. Pp. xi, 327. Grand Rapids/Cambridge, Eerdmans, 2014, £23.99/$35.00. Patrick Riordan, Patrick Riordan Campion Hall, OxfordSearch for more papers by this author Patrick Riordan, Patrick Riordan Campion Hall, OxfordSearch for more papers by this author First published: 21 February 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.13496Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume61, Issue2Special Issue: Moral TheoryMarch 2020Pages 362-364 RelatedInformation

III

III John S. Grabowski Mark S. Massa utilizes Thomas Kuhn's model of paradigm revolution and replacement in the history of modern science to offer a novel reading of modern Catholic natural law theory. The various paradigms of natural law do not betray linear, organic development as much as wholesale replacement of competing accounts as each sought [End Page 70] to explain better the anomalies of the reigning paradigm and the "data" of lived moral experience, the complexity of which always exceeds the ability of any one model to capture. Certainly, this Kuhnian lens yields insights into the inadequacy of what Massa calls the Neo-scholastic paradigm in the face of the twentieth century crisis of Catholic moral reasoning before and after Humanae Vitae. Yet one cannot help but wish that the landscape was surveyed more widely both historically and analytically. The use of Lonergan's account of "historical consciousness" to outline the overturning of the "classicism" of modern Catholic moral theology can have an ahistorical ring insofar as this language fails to acknowledge its own embeddedness in a historical tradition with its roots in Hegel, Vico, and others. It also tends to create an unfortunate binary in regard to method—either one is classicist or "historically conscious"—as if there were no other alternatives. Something like Alasdair MacIntyre's account of dialogue within and among rival historical traditions seems to offer a more sophisticated approach to this history without smoothing away Massa's sharp Kuhnian edges of disagreement. Another set of problems is posed by Massa's decision to focus on what he calls the "micro-tradition" of natural law. This can create the impression that natural law is a sufficient or stand-alone methodology for Christian moral reasoning and the language of virtue or scripture is an afterthought or add on. In regard to some of the thinkers he engages (e.g., the proportionalism of Richard McCormick or the new natural law of Germain Grisez), this might be fair. But certainly, Jean Porter gives significant weight to the language of virtue in her "robust realist" recovery of Thomas and Lisa Sowle Cahill spends a significant amount of time wrestling with the biblical witness in constructing her pragmatic, cross-culturally capable, feminist ethic. And beyond these figures, much of the work of post-conciliar renewal has been precisely in a deeper engagement with biblical theology and virtue theory. When it comes to the Angelic Doctor himself whom Massa sees as the font of the many paradigms he surveys, the problem is even more pronounced. It is worth considering that while the Summa Theologiae devotes a mere question to natural law (I–II, q. 94), the language of virtue (and opposing vices) occupies much more space within the prima secundae and virtually all of the secunda secundae. Further, Aquinas's entire account of virtue is situated within a deeply biblical account of creation and salvation history. The effort to construct an entire moral system on the basis of natural law is simply foreign to Thomas. In the end Massa's reading is interesting, but the lens too narrow. Catholic moral theology—medieval or modern—cannot be reduced to a [End Page 71] dispute over the most adequate accounts of natural law without significant distortion. John S. Grabowski The Catholic University of America Copyright © 2020 American Catholic Historical Society

Az ember jogalanyiságának, életéhez és méltóságához való joga a kortárs katolikus természetjogi alapú jogfilozófiai megközelítésben

Az Emberi jogok egyetemes nyilatkozata megfogalmazása időszakában nem tűnt lehetségesnek, de szükségesnek sem azon emberi személy filozófiai antropológiai meghatározása, akinek jogait a dokumentum kinyilvánította. Manapság azonban ez elkerülhetetlen, mert sem az emberi jogalanyiság, sem a legalapvetőbb valódi emberi jogok nem jelenthetők ki, nem alapozhatók meg és nem is védhetők anélkül. Manapság ugyanis e jogokat sokszor, az uralkodó libertariánus és értékrelativista szellemi közegben, éppen a fogalmi megalapozás hiányában maga az ember ellen, annak jogalanyiságához, élethez és méltóságához való joga ellen fordítják. A katolikus természetjogi hagyomány nagy segítséget nyújtott mindig is e megalapozásban, miközben már újabb és újabb bioetikai helyzetekben kell védeni az emberi személyt legalapvetőbb jogain keresztül.

Black Natural Law by Vincent W. Lloyd

Reviewed by: Black Natural Law by Vincent W. Lloyd Ronald B. Neal Vincent W. Lloyd. Black Natural Law. New York: Oxford UP, 2016. 180 pp. $55.00. [Erratum] Vincent W. Lloyd's Black Natural Law is concerned with the state of black politics in contemporary America. In Black Natural Law, Lloyd argues that contemporary black politics suffers from a loss of purpose and direction in relation to the condition of the black majority in the United States. He contends that the black political class has gotten lost in the machinations of current electoral politics and the race-neutral ideological agendas of liberals and leftists, multiculturalism, and secularism. In a word, present-day black politics has no depth or foundation, and worse, no future to propose to many black Americans in the United States. In Lloyd's account, so dire is the state of black politics, that even the two-term electoral achievement of the first black President of the United States, Barack Obama (a risk-averse president along the line of race), was reflective of the impoverished state of black political life in America. If there is a single social phenomenon that points to this crisis, it is mass incarceration. Unlike the institutions of slavery and [End Page 212] de jure and de facto Jim Crow, legal segregation, the problem of mass incarceration has not yielded a robust movement of dissent on the part of the black political class. In Lloyd's account, where the black political class is concerned, there is no consensus on the gravity of mass incarceration as an urgent political interest. More profoundly, beyond mass incarceration, there is no agreement on what counts as the shared condition among black Americans. What Lloyd calls "black natural law" attempts to overcome this dilemma. According to Lloyd, black natural law is a tradition of natural law with a unique outlook on human nature, which was employed by black political elites from the antebellum period to the civil rights era. Through a close reading of the lives and legacies of Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Lloyd identifies a tradition of natural law, represented by these figures, in addressing the condition of the black majority during their lifetimes. In each chapter, Lloyd outlines the distinct manner in which each figure employed black natural law. Lloyd delineates black natural law in terms of three distinct themes: reason, imagination, and emotion. These themes, which are also universal human faculties, were integral to a metaphysical, legal, and existential attack on the culture and institutions of segregation. Being denied legal recognition as citizens of the United States and recognition as human beings, Jim Crow-era elites had to appeal to a higher law—the law of God—to champion the cause of black freedom. The appeal to the law of God was inseparable from the creative use of reason, imagination, and emotion. Lloyd contends that black natural law is an unacknowledged tradition that is related to yet distinct from the mainstream traditions of Catholic natural law. Although related to Catholic natural law writ large, black natural law, in its engagement with race, goes beyond the Catholic theological mainstream. As Lloyd argues, "black natural law offers the best way to approach politics, not just for blacks but for everyone. It is the approach that ought to be taken. The black natural law tradition addresses the same problems addressed by other natural law traditions, but it offers more coherent and compelling responses" (ix). For Lloyd, this tradition warrants serious consideration in the resuscitation of black politics in the United States. Black Natural Law offers an incisive critique of the current political mood of the United States and more significantly, that of the black political class. Its invocation of higher law (God's law) and the primacy of reason, emotion, and imagination in political discernment, is a direct challenge to a political class that is fragmented in terms of identity and ideology. It is a rebuke of political relativism in light of the persistence of antiblackness and racism in the United States, mass incarceration being one of its most visible outcomes. Overall, Lloyd attributes the weakness of black...

Black Natural Law by Vincent W. Lloyd

Reviewed by: Black Natural Law by Vincent W. Lloyd Ronald B. Neal Vincent W. Lloyd. Black Natural Law. New York: Oxford UP, 2016. 180 pp. $55.00. Vincent W. Lloyd's Black Natural Law is concerned with the state of black politics in contemporary America. In Black Natural Law, Lloyd argues that contemporary black politics suffers from a loss of purpose and direction in relation to the condition of the black majority in the United States. He contends that the black political class has gotten lost in the machinations of current electoral politics and the race-neutral ideological agendas of liberals and leftists, multiculturalism, and secularism. In a word, present-day black politics has no depth or foundation, and worse, no future to propose to many black Americans in the United States. In Lloyd's account, so dire is the state of black politics, that even the two-term electoral achievement of the first black President of the United States, Barack Obama (a risk-averse president along the line of race), was reflective of the impoverished state of black political life in America. If there is a single social phenomenon that points to this crisis, it is mass incarceration. Unlike the institutions of slavery and de jure and de facto Jim Crow, legal segregation, the problem of mass incarceration has not yielded a robust movement of dissent on the part of the black political class. In Lloyd's account, where the black political class is concerned, there is no consensus on the gravity of mass incarceration as an urgent political interest. More profoundly, beyond mass incarceration, there is no agreement on what counts as the shared condition among black Americans. What Lloyd calls "black natural law" attempts to overcome this dilemma. According to Lloyd, black natural law is a tradition of natural law with a unique outlook on human nature, which was employed by black political elites from the antebellum period to the civil rights era. Through a close reading of the lives and legacies of Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Lloyd identifies a tradition of natural law, represented by these figures, in addressing the condition of the black majority during their lifetimes. In each chapter, Lloyd outlines the distinct manner in which each figure employed black natural law. Lloyd delineates black natural law in terms of three distinct themes: reason, imagination, and emotion. These themes, which are also universal human faculties, were integral to a metaphysical, legal, and existential attack on the culture and institutions of segregation. Being denied legal recognition as citizens of the United States and recognition as human beings, Jim Crow-era elites had to appeal to a higher law—the law of God—to champion the cause of black freedom. The appeal to the law of God was inseparable from the creative use of reason, imagination, and emotion. Lloyd contends that black natural law is an unacknowledged tradition that is related to yet distinct from the mainstream traditions of Catholic natural law. Although related to Catholic natural law writ large, black natural law, in its engagement with race, goes beyond the Catholic theological mainstream. As Lloyd argues, "black natural law offers the best way to approach politics, not just for blacks but for everyone. It is the approach that ought to be taken. The black natural law tradition addresses the same problems addressed by other natural law traditions, but it offers [End Page 307] more coherent and compelling responses" (ix). For Lloyd, this tradition warrants serious consideration in the resuscitation of black politics in the United States. Black Natural Law offers an incisive critique of the current political mood of the United States and more significantly, that of the black political class. Its invocation of higher law (God's law) and the primacy of reason, emotion, and imagination in political discernment, is a direct challenge to a political class that is fragmented in terms of identity and ideology. It is a rebuke of political relativism in light of the persistence of antiblackness and racism in the United States, mass incarceration being one of its most visible outcomes. Overall, Lloyd attributes the weakness of black politics...

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition ed. by John Berkman and William C. Mattison III

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition ed. by John Berkman and William C. Mattison III

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to Catholic Natural Law Tradition

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to Catholic Natural Law Tradition

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition. Edited by John Berkman and William C. Mattison III

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition. <i>Edited by John Berkman and William C. Mattison III</i>

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition. Edited by JohnBarkman and William C.MattisonIII. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans., 2014. Pp. xi + 327. $35.00.

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition. Edited by JohnBarkman and William C.MattisonIII. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans., 2014. Pp. xi + 327. $35.00.

Searching For a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition edited by John Berkman and William C. MattisonIII, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2014, pp. xi + 327, £23.99, pbk

Searching For a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition edited by John Berkman and William C. MattisonIII, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2014, pp. xi + 327, £23.99, pbk

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition, edited by JohnBerkman and William C.MattisonIII (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), x + 314 pp.

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition, edited by JohnBerkman and William C.MattisonIII (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), x + 314 pp.

III. Verwicklungen und Entflechtungen

Entanglements and disentanglements. Differentiating and dedifferentiating law and religion, statute and legal reason in early modern natural law debates. The article reconstructs the connections between modern (17th and 18th century) natural law and the 15th and 16th century catholic natural law discourse. It is shown that the modern natural law was based on the work of catholic theologians who treated questions of conscience as legal issues. The natural law was then cut out of theology by Grotius and by later natural lawyers, who reformulated within the law what they perceived as the universal elements of catholic natural law. In those debates the natural lawyers established the - since then evident - differences between positive law and natural law on the one hand and between legal and religous natural law on the other. Yet, those debates did not concern a ‘secularization’ of natural law. Much more specifically, the natural lawyers disentangled the universal logic of law and those religious elements that could, in the confessional age, no longer be regarded as universal.

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition, edited by John Berkman and William C. Mattison iii

Searching for a Universal Ethic: Multidisciplinary, Ecumenical, and Interfaith Responses to the Catholic Natural Law Tradition, edited by John Berkman and William C. Mattison <scp>iii</scp>

Catholic Thomistic Natural Law and Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature: A Match Made in Heaven?

Catholic Thomistic natural law is Aristotelian and pre-scientific, and this has made it somewhat difficult to reconcile with contemporary science. Thomistic natural law needs an updated philosophy of nature in order to engage contemporary science. Terrence Deacon's emergent dynamics theory may serve this function; it is both neo-Aristotelian and well integrated with contemporary science. This paper will investigate some points of concordance and discordance between Catholic Thomistic natural law theory and emergent dynamics theory. If these two theories are reconcilable, then Thomistic natural law may have found a philosophy of nature that permits it to productively engage contemporary science.

Morning-After Decisions: Legal Mobilization Against Emergency Contraception in Chile

In Chile, the Criminal Code bans all forms of abortion. Furthermore, the Constitution—drafted and enacted by the Military Junta led by General Augusto Pinochet—was inspired by a conservative version of Catholic natural law championed by prominent Chilean constitutional law scholars. This Article traces the emergence, development, and ultimately the defeat of a persistent legal mobilization driven by natural law-inspired litigants, politicians, and scholars against levonorgestrel-based emergency contraception, also known as the morning-after pill. In their decade-long efforts at legal mobilization, these natural law litigants used every tool of the Chilean legal system to challenge the legality and the constitutionality of the morning-after pill. This case of legal mobilization demonstrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of conservative political and religious networks in Latin America, and it demonstrates both the potential and limitations of litigation-led policymaking in civil law countries.

Faith and law: how religious traditions from Calvinism to Islam view American law

Acknowledgments Introduction Robert F. Cochran, Jr.Part I The Augustinian Framework: The City of God and the City of Man 1 Augustine Part II Reformation Faiths 2 Calvinists 3 Lutherans 4 Anabaptists 5 Baptists 6 Evangelicals Part III Home-Grown American Faiths 7 African-American Churches 8 Churches of Christ 9 Latter-Day Saints Part IV Catholicism 10 Catholic Natural Law 11 Catholic Social Thought Part V Judaism12 Orthodox Jews 13 Reform Jews Part VI New Immigrant Faiths 14 Hindus 15 Buddhists 16 Muslims Contributors Index

Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez o el católico total: apuntes para una biografía política e intelectual hasta 1963

The biography of Joaquin Ruiz-Gimenez is a virtual paradigm of two historical phenomena which distinguished the last two decades of the Franco regime and, to a large extent, paved the way for the future democracy: on the one hand, the rift between Catholic and Falangist intellectuals and the regime which they had enthusiastically helped to establish after the civil war; and on the other, the secularization of its political thinking and practice. Ruiz-Gimenez, ambassador and minister under Franco, was an exception among the Catholic laity that collaborated with the dictatorship, in that he held high government positions and, despite all the reservations concerning his personal development, for many of his peers as well as many aspiring figures of the coming generations, he symbolized the definitive renunciation of all legitimacy of power based on victory in battle or on Catholic natural law, and the definitive adoption of the language of human rights and democracy.