Suffering for the truth (Updated)

As many readers will have heard by now, last week Detroit’s new archbishop Edward Weisenburger suddenly fired three well-known professors at Sacred Heart Major Seminary: theologians Ralph Martin and Eduardo Echeverria and canon lawyer Edward Peters.  No official explanation has been given.  Martin has said that he was told only and vaguely that it had to do with “concerns about [his] theological perspectives.”  Echeverria has declined comment because of a non-disclosure agreement.  Peters says that he has “retained counsel.”

A postliberal middle ground on trade

In my latest article at Postliberal Order, I defend a postliberal middle ground position between free trade dogmatism and rigid protectionism, and argue that sound trade policy depends more on circumstances and prudential judgment than appeal to abstract principle.

Heeding Anscombe on just war doctrine

Elizabeth Anscombe’s “War and Murder” is a magnificent essay, an intellectually rigorous and morally serious defense of traditional Christian and natural law teaching against pacifists on the one side and, on the other, those who attempt to rationalize the unjust killing of civilians.  As she argues, both errors feed off of one another.  The essay is perhaps even more relevant today than it was at the time she wrote it.

Here is a summary of her position.  The pacifist holds that all killing is immoral, even when necessary to protect citizens against criminal evildoers within a nation, or foreign adversaries without.  This position is contrary to the basic precondition of any social order, which is the right to protect itself against attempts to destroy it.  It also has no warrant in the orthodox Christian tradition.  A less extreme but related error is the thesis that violence can never justly be initiated, but at most can only ever be justified in response to those who have initiated it.  In fact, Anscombe argues, what matters is not who strikes the first blow, but who is in the right.  For example, it was in her judgment right for the British to initiate violence in order to suppress chattel slavery.

A second Honorius?

Like his predecessor Honorius, Pope Francis failed clearly to uphold traditional teaching at a time the Church was sick from heresy.  So I argue in my contribution to a symposium on Francis in the latest issue of The Lamp.

Aquinas and prudential judgment

In contemporary debates in Catholic moral theology, a distinction is often drawn between actions that are flatly ruled out in principle and those whose permissibility or impermissibility is a matter of prudential judgment.  For example, it is often noted that abortion is wrong always and in principle, whereas how many immigrants a country ought to allow in and under what conditions are matters of prudential judgment.  But exactly what does this mean, and how do we tell the difference between the cases?