Balkinization  

Thursday, April 28, 2005

Preaching Civil Disobedience by Civil Servants

JB

Here's a puzzle: Pope Benedict's chief official in charge of family matters, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, has stated that Catholic officials in the Spanish government should refuse to officiate at same-sex weddings if the Spanish same-sex marriage law passes.

Before condemning the Pope's directive to Catholic government officials (as announced through his spokesman) as a meddlesome interference in politics, consider whether you would feel differently if the Pope ordered American Catholics in positions of power to refuse to participate in executions of death row inmates.

Should it make any difference that the underlying substantive claim is same-sex marriage as opposed to the application of the death penalty? Should it matter that the Pope is ordering government officials as opposed to private citizens to refuse to cooperate with laws the Pope believes are unjust?


Comments:

I'm not a Catholic. As such, the notion that someone would tell me what my conscience requires is a bit alien to me, and would be whether the topic were gay marriage or capital punishment.

My wife (who is Catholic) would probably take a different view. She would be used to being told what her conscience requires, but would be comfortable listening to what it actually says. She would probably be uncomfortable with either pronouncement because of its echoes of the kinds of dual-loyalty questions that dogged Catholics for centuries.

As for the particular issues, the fact that the pope chose to instruct civil disobedience wrt gay marriage but not wrt capital punishment says a great deal about the pope himself and what he considers important. It would have been illuminating had the views not been clear from his career prior to becoming pope.
 

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