So as a layman who openly admits he's not the theologian too many people think he thinks he is, I have concerns about the idea of canonical penalties for the enforcement cogs of our immigration system.
But maybe not the concerns one would think.
But maybe not the concerns one would think.
As I mentioned yesterday, informal praxis in this country -- which started out overwhelmingly anti-Catholic Protestant and is trending to a new species of anti-Catholic -- has been to treat Catholics enforcing validly-enacted laws as agents of the sovereign, not themselves.
A sheriff's deputy executing on a foreclosure on an orphanage, for example, is not committing a sin, he is enforcing a generally-applicable law the enforcement of which in that instance will have some pretty awful consequences.
A police officer accompanying the underwater basketweaving majors we employ as child protective service workers, separating families who may (and often are) innocent of any wrongdoing is not denied the sacraments.
There are a thousand prudential and theological issues here I'm not fully competent to address, but this is historically how the Church has survived in a country with a long history of at-best mild antipathy toward Her.
Keeping in mind the usual caveats that ideologically-driven journalists are likely displaying only a fraction of the story of the separation of children from parents at the border as part of a larger policy decision, let's stipulate it's completely true.
The proposal by at least one Catholic bishop is to attach canonical penalties to the agents in border dioceses who enforce this policy. Let's peel that apart.
What he's saying is this: Catholics may not enforce a legally-enacted policy entered by the sovereign if it violates Teaching X, as directly written or as applied, of the Church. Let us stipulate that the policy does indeed violate that Teaching.
By itself, this is not facially bad. A bishop's first duty is to the souls over which he has plenary guardianship; if he believes that something they are doing puts them in danger of Hell, it is his duty to say so, and loudly.
I see two somewhat dangerous vectors here.
First, this overlooks the root of the problem. The agents enforcing the law are not making or interpreting the law. This [I use the next word advisedly] alters the means by which the policy or law is carried out.
And of course that's the facial point! We don't want people carrying out a law that violates Teaching X such that they face Hell.
But it's kind of stupid, too.
But it's kind of stupid, too.
The real problem is the policy or law itself. If the agents put their souls in danger of Hell by enforcing the law, it rather suggests that the makers of the law are no less in danger of Hell.
Canonical penalties show very little sign of attaching to them.
There is virtually no sin-that-cries-out-to-Heaven-for-vengeance that, let us be frank, the powerful can either commit, order, or allow that actually yields canonical penalties.
Justices Kennedy and Sotomayor are, at least by all reports, Catholic. Both have spent large parts of their careers on the bench making sure that infanticide-in-utero for any damned reason at all remains a viable option in this country.
In the case of our immigration law, assuming arguendo that the USCCB's general take on immigration law -- that it's a bad thing except maybe for some sort of registration for free health care for life -- is correct, field agents aren't making that law.
Catholic Congressmen and Senators -- Republican and Democrat, well, mostly Republican, the Democrats who did this are mostly forcibly retired -- have spent decades (same arguendo) unjustly allowing a legal regime that violates Catholic teaching to stay in place.
Catholic Cabinet appointees and high-ranking bureaucrats have made or passed on the policies that are so vexatious today.
Neither group is in significant danger of anathema or anything close.
This is not a plea for equal treatment before the law; it is rather a note that this selective application of the law is not very likely to do more than save a few hundred souls while tens of thousands of others speed on to Hell.
(Also if, God forfend, the real goal is to alter American legal policy and praxis, this is one Hell of a missed shot. But I'd have to assume that this is just a strongarm, dishonest, roundabout effort to do what Their Eminences say they are not.)
My second concern is ties into my historical note.
Antonin Scalia (PBUH), voicing the logic to which most relatively-or-greater faithful American Catholics subscribe, opined that a Catholic judge who passes on a law of general applicability, duly enacted in the republic, does not bear moral weight for his decision.
I'm giving a fairly complex argument short shrift because this is Twitter and I'm hungry and tired, but that's the gist of it: A judge may pass on the law and if he feels his soul is in danger as a result, he may leave his office; those are the choices.
But, he said, as a general proposition, this was not a day-to-day concern for most judges.
But Justice Scalia hit on a critical point he didn't examine but which I do not doubt he contemplated: Every, single government official is a government official, a judge no less than a cop no less than a bureaucrat no less than an elected politician.
And there's more! A lot of people don't understand what the phrase "officer of the court" means for an attorney; it doesn't mean we work for free every client I've ever had, it means we are an integral part of the court system.
Does a lawyer at Main Justice who helps write a brief in support of the immigration policy at issue here, or the Free Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or the equivalent, put her soul in danger of Hell?
There are a lot of hands on the stirrer of each and every policy decision in our system. Attaching canonical penalties to the spear-tip missed the fact that there's a lot of metal and wood behind it.
Early in my career, I did divorce work. Granted, all of my clients were low church Protestants (they were, but I kid), I still felt pretty scuzzy about it and my concerns about aiding a system I saw as objectively bad sealed that door tight.
Do I need to confess that? If not, why not?
This view of American law and Holy Mother Church completely inverts how we have dealt with this strange land for nearly four hundred years.
Does a police officer who escorts abortionists into clinics put his soul in danger of Hell?
It may be that this is the better understanding: That enforcing or aiding or creating or defending an unjust law should have canonical penalties.
But to embark on this -- presumably reaching to policymakers too, obviously we care about their souls as well -- will shatter the peace, such as it is, between the American State and the Church as it has existed for years.
