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Subsidiarity In The Tradition Of Catholic Social Doctrine, Patrick Brennan
Subsidiarity In The Tradition Of Catholic Social Doctrine, Patrick Brennan
Patrick McKinley Brennan
This chapter is an invited contribution to the first English-language comparative study of subsidiarity, M. Evans and A. Zimmerman (eds.), Subsidiarity in Comparative Perspective (forthcoming Springer, 2013). The concept of subsidiarity does work in many and varied legal contexts today, but the concept originated in Catholic social doctrine. The Catholic understanding of subsidiarity (or subsidiary function) is the subject of this chapter. Subsidiarity is often described as a norm calling for the devolution of power or for performing social functions at the lowest possible level. In Catholic social doctrine, it is neither. Subsidiarity is the fixed and immovable ontological principle …
The Liberty Of The Church: Source, Scope And Scandal, Patrick Brennan
The Liberty Of The Church: Source, Scope And Scandal, Patrick Brennan
Patrick McKinley Brennan
This article was presented at a conference, and is part of a symposium, on "The Freedom of the Church in the Modern Era." The article argues that the liberty of the Church, libertas Ecclesiae, is not a mere metaphor, pace the views of some other contributions to the conference and symposium and of the mentality mostly prevailing over the last five hundred years. The argument is that the Church and her directly God-given rights are ontologically irreducible in a way that the rights of, say, the state of California or even of the United States are not. Based on a …
Resisting The Grand Coalition In Favor Of The Status Quo By Giving Full Scope To The Libertas Ecclesiae, Patrick Brennan
Resisting The Grand Coalition In Favor Of The Status Quo By Giving Full Scope To The Libertas Ecclesiae, Patrick Brennan
Patrick McKinley Brennan
This paper argues that questions about "religious freedom" must be subordinated to the fundamental principle of the liberty of the Church, libertas Ecclesiae. The First Amendment's agnosticism with respect to the liberty of the Church is not ultimately normative. Catholics and others who merely seek religious "accommodation," as with the HHS mandate, for example, are agents of a status quo that illegitimately has comfortable self-preservation as its highest value. It is Catholic doctrine that "creation was for the sake of the Church," not for the sake of, say, religious freedom. The paper argues that the contingent constitution of …