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The Catholic Intellectual Tradition
Kelly, Michael J.
Kelly, Michael J.
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n2011-11.pdf
Adobe PDF, 220.25 KB
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"If the mission of a Jesuit law school is indeed the promotion of justice, attained not only through clinical programs but through an encounter with the Catholic intellectual tradition, then plainly the school must have faculty who are willing to take up this mission, embrace it, and carry it forward. Presumably, many of these faculty members will be Catholic due to their familiarity with the tradition and the likelihood that they will find the mission appealing. However, the faculty needed to advance the mission need not be Catholic, and indeed Jesuit law schools would be poorer institutions if people from other faith traditions were not welcomed and included as colleagues in the project of Jesuit legal education. Still, to be a true colleague requires genuine collaboration in support of the mission, not passive indifference, let alone veiled or open hostility (Breen: 412-14). This argument also appears to presuppose a rather rigid or correct form of Catholic Intellectual Tradition that should not be tampered with by faculty. Yet the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, both in the legal context and otherwise, is evolutionary in nature. This evolutionary nature is sometimes driven by necessity and can lead to unjust results judged by modern lights. [13] For example, faced with the problem of legally dispossessing native peoples of their land in the New World, European colonial powers drew upon much older legal theories of dispossession that were used against non-Christians in the Middle East during the Crusades. The central theory of this legal power is the Pope’s position as God’s designated shepherd with spiritual jurisdiction over all the souls on earth (Williams: 15-21). The Crusades to the Holy Lands of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries represented the first large scale effort by the Catholic Church and Christian European military leaders to implement the papacy’s theoretical universal authority over non-Christian peoples outside Europe. These papallyproclaimed and directed holy wars were fought under the legal justification that as usurpatious “heathens and infidels,” the non-Christian peoples who occupied and possessed Jerusalem and the Levant could be conquered and displaced by Christian European princes and their armies, acting on orders from the Pope in Rome (Getches: 43)."(pg 83)
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2011
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With permission of the license/copyright holder