During Parliamentary debates concerning artificial insemination two years ago, the Speaker of the Italian Low Chamber, Gianfranco Fini declared that “the Parliament should not pass laws that are inspired by religious precepts,” to which Elio Sgreccia replied:
“The issues on which Catholics intend to be active in politics are not definable as ‘religious precepts’ because they pertain to fundamental rights that are written in human nature, demonstrable by reason, and endorsed by the Italian constitution. Catholics are in the right position for actively participating in the public and parliamentary debate against abortion and euthanasia and to protect family.”
Nadia Urbinati at The Immanent Frame comments:
“In his answer to the Speaker of the House, Monsignor Sgreccia adopted a style of reasoning that John Rawls’ revisited public reason and Jürgen Habermas’ post-secular democracy would consider legitimate. Indeed, while publicly proclaiming principles that he derived from his comprehensive doctrine, Monsignor Sgreccia made an effort to reach out to non-religious citizens by arguing that those principles can also be accepted by them because they are in agreement with the principles of public reason contained in the Italian constitution although expressed not in the form of public reason (like constitutional rights) but in the philosophical language of natural rights, according to the Thomistic tradition. Endorsing this discursive style would seem to be a secure passport for citizens with comprehensive doctrines to actively participate in the public sphere of deliberation.”
Robert P. George, for example, adopts this style in his important article “What Is Marriage?”, co-authored by Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis, in which he appeals not to religious precepts or sensibilities, but to reason.
January 27th, 2012 | 1:02 am
[...] Natural Law in Italy – Mark Misulia, First Things/First Thoughts [...]
January 27th, 2012 | 4:24 am
There is a danger inherent in the idea of the sufficiency of Natural Law to establish a just society.
There was a lively debate about this in France, about a century ago, with the Neo-Thomists, like Descoqs, allowing the “political sphere” a wide degree of autonomy from the “religious sphere.” Laberthonnière famously accused Descoqs of being influenced by “a false theological notion of some state of pure nature and therefore imagined the state could be self-sufficient in the sense that it could be properly independent of any specifically Christian sense of justice,” or as Maurice Blondel put it, “one cannot think or act anywhere as if we do not all have a supernatural destiny. Because, since it concerns the human being, such as he is, in concreto, in his living and total reality, not in a simple state of hypothetical nature, nothing is truly complete (boucle), even in the sheerly natural order
Christians, by their calling, are to be an evangelical presence, a “leaven,” that nurtures efforts in society ordered to the coming of God’s Kingdom. Their efforts to establish a just society should lead persons of good will to respect Christianity and, in Blondel’s words, “to find only in the spirit of the gospel the supreme and decisive guarantee of justice and of the moral conditions of peace, stability, and social prosperity.”
To accept the sufficiency of Natural Law is, in the final analysis, to justify the Liberal notion of the privatisation of Christian Faith. It is to acquiesce in the claim that religion is not comprehensively, inclusively pertinent to the human condition.
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