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A Quandary In Law? A (Qualified) Catholic Denial, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
A Quandary In Law? A (Qualified) Catholic Denial, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
Patrick McKinley Brennan
A contribution to the second law review symposium dedicated to Steven Smith’s Law’s Quandary (Harvard 2004), this paper asks whether the “quandary” in which Smith finds modern law and jurisprudence is not, at least in part, the consequence of misunderstanding the classical natural law jurisprudence. The paper advances an interpretation of natural law according to which the natural law is the human person’s “participation” in the eternal law itself, with literally cosmic consequences for how we understand the ends and measures of human lawmaking. Mounting an argument against Justice Scalia’s thesis that “God applies the natural law,” the paper goes …
The Decreasing Ontological Density Of The State In Catholic Social Doctrine, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
The Decreasing Ontological Density Of The State In Catholic Social Doctrine, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
Patrick McKinley Brennan
Over the last century-plus, Catholic social thought has gradually reduced the ontological density of the state, to the point that the state now appears to have only a tentative grasp on the natural law basis of its legitimacy. During the first part of the twentieth century, Catholic social doctrine tended to view the legitimate state as a participant in the divine rule; although draped in a sacred mantle, the state was subject to the limits imposed by the divine and natural law. In response to the totalitarian states’ transgressing of those limits at mid-century, Catholic thinkers reduced the scope and …
Harmonizing Plural Societies: The Case Of Lasallians, Families, Schools – And The Poor, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
Harmonizing Plural Societies: The Case Of Lasallians, Families, Schools – And The Poor, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
Patrick McKinley Brennan
The modern state characteristically assumes or asserts a monopoly over “group persons” and their right to exist; group persons are said to exist at the pleasure or concession of the state. According to Catholic social teaching, by contrast, these unities of order -- such as church and family, as well as corporations and schools and the like -- are, at least in potency, ontologically prior to the state. Such group persons both constitute conditions of the possibility of human flourishing and, correlatively, impose limitations on the “sovereign” state. Such group persons are not mere concessions of an unbounded state: They …