{"id":25,"date":"2010-06-30T13:30:54","date_gmt":"2010-06-30T13:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/suing-the-vatican.html"},"modified":"2010-06-30T13:30:54","modified_gmt":"2010-06-30T13:30:54","slug":"suing-the-vatican","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/suing-the-vatican.html","title":{"rendered":"Suing the Vatican"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"chicken.jpg\"It’s true enough, as Vatican lawyer Jeffrey
\nLena points out<\/a>,
\nthat when the Supreme Court declines to hear a case, that cannot be
\ntaken as a pronouncement on the merits. Still, it’s interesting that the
\ncourt lacked four votes to take up Doe <\/i>v. Holy See<\/i>, the
\nOregon lawsuit in which an anonymous plaintiff is seeking to get the
\nVatican to pay damages for his having been abused years ago by a now
\ndeceased priest. The case involves a threshold issue over whether such a
\nsuit is allowable under the 1976 Foreign Sovereign
\nImmunities Act, and you’d think that if the justices considered it a
\nslam dunk for the defense, they would have granted certiorari <\/i>rather
\nthan let the trial go forward.<\/p>\n

Be that as it may, the question of whether priests are employees of the
\nHoly See seems a bit more complicated than recognizing (as <\/span>Lena
\nwould have it) that the
\nHoly See does not pay their salary and benefits or exercise day-to-day
\ncontrol over their work. The person who does those things is the bishop,
\nand these days Catholic bishops themselves look increasingly like
\nVatican employees.<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n


\nAdmittedly, Catholic ecclesiology does not neatly track U.S. employment
\nlaw, but if the pope hires and fires bishops, and can create commissions
\nof bishops to put a national church in order, and <\/span>can order cardinals
\nnot to criticize each other,<\/span> then it sure looks as though they
\nare wholly subject to papal authority. So why exactly should the sins of
\nthese sons not be visited upon the Holy Father?<\/p>\n

Coincidentally, the Supreme Court’s decision to let Holy See <\/i>proceed
\noccurred the same week that the Vatican announced<\/a>
\na replacement for Cardinal Walter Kaspar, President of the Pontifical
\nCouncil for Promoting Christian Unity and
\nthe Commission for Religious Relations with Jews. When Pope Benedict was
\ncardinal in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
\nthe two got into a spirited public
\ndebate<\/a> over Kaspar’s charge that the Vatican was arrogating
\ninappropriate centralized power to itself over the authority of the
\nbishops. Ratzinger vigorously denied it, of course, but one might see Doe<\/i>
\nv. Holy See<\/i> as a Kasparian chicken coming home to roost.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b> Interesting reflection<\/a>
\non the issue by Anthony Ruff O.S.B. over on Pray Tell.

\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s true enough, as Vatican lawyer Jeffrey Lena points out, that when the Supreme Court declines to hear a case, that cannot be taken as a pronouncement on the merits. Still, it’s interesting that the court lacked four votes to take up Doe v. Holy See, the Oregon lawsuit in which an anonymous plaintiff is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nSuing the Vatican - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/suing-the-vatican.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Suing the Vatican - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It’s true enough, as Vatican lawyer Jeffrey Lena points out, that when the Supreme Court declines to hear a case, that cannot be taken as a pronouncement on the merits. Still, it’s interesting that the court lacked four votes to take up Doe v. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}