 It's my distinct pleasure to introduce the Lou Church Memorial Lecturer. I just now met him. He has a very firm handshake. There's a lot more to say, though. Francis J. Beckwith is a professor of philosophy, affiliate professor of political science and associate director of the graduate program in philosophy at Baylor University, where he also serves as resident scholar in Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion. With his appointment in the Department of Philosophy, he also teaches in several other academic units of the university, including political science, religion, and medical humanities. He's the author of over 100 academic articles, book chapters, reference entries, and reviews. Among his over 20 books are Never Doubt Thomas, the Catholic Aquinas as Evangelical and Protestant, published in 2019 by Baylor University Press, as well as Defending Life, a Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice, and Taking Rights Seriously, Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith, both published by Cambridge University Press. The latter book won the American Academy of Religions prestigious 2016 Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in Constructive Reflective Studies. A graduate of the Washington University of Law in St. Louis and Fordham University, where he earned his MA and PhD in philosophy, he has held visiting faculty appointments at the University of Colorado, at Boulder, the University of Notre Dame, and Princeton University. The topic he'll address us on today is Taking Rights Seriously, Neither Theocracy Nor Liberal Hegemony. May I introduce Frank Beckworth. Thank you, Joe. It's a delight to be here. I have never been to a Mises conference before, although I began my career at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 1989, and it was at that time that I became very close friends with both Murray Rothbard and Hans Hoppe, and have over the years obviously kept in contact with what you all are doing here and have just over the past hour or so have been reintroduced to several of my former students who are also students of Murray and Hans. So it's a delight to be here. And when Joe asked me to give this lecture, I told him that I was just a philosopher with a law degree and not an economist, but I said that I'd been giving some thought about issues concerning the state and religious liberty and questions about religious practices and the sorts of questions that have been raised over the past decade or so about religious liberty, especially in American law. I also am going to, in this lecture, so I told Joe, and he said that's fine, deal with that. So I'm going to be talking about some of those issues. But something else that has struck me over the past couple of years and that has to do with what I see is the rise of something called Catholic integralism and I'm going to bring up in my lecture what I think Catholic integralism has in common with a kind of hegemonic liberalism. And to bring to bear on this question are going to be some things that I've read in Thomas Aquinas. And so I was delighted earlier in the conference to see that Doug Rasmussen injected into this conference St. Thomas Aquinas. And I was thinking when preparing my lecture, this is going to seem really different, but I guess it's not going to be all that different given that Aquinas has already been talked about. And I guess it was also another lecture as well. Let me explain the title, Taking Right Seriously. I got the title from an article authored by Paul Whiteman at the University of Notre Dame. He published an article in the late 90s called Taking Right Seriously, RITS. And it's a play on the book by Ronald Dworkin, Taking Right Seriously, R-I-G-H-T-S. And you can take titles without violating copyright. So I did take the title and I gave Paul credit in the acknowledgments to my book with the same title. One of the good things about the title is that when you type in Dworkin's title in Google, mine comes up once in a while as a correction. So I had an inadvertent marketing, which I did not intend. So when I talk about RITS, I'm referring to those religious practices that a religious believer typically believes are connected to in some way or another with something transcendent and cannot be fully accounted for or fully understood by our ordinary descriptions. So for example, baptism is not merely another word for physically encountering H2O, but an act by which one participates in the divine life. But what happens, though, when the state in the name of equality eliminates that understanding from consideration when assessing whether a citizen has a right not to participate in such an activity? But suppose the state were a theocratic one, a state that resists the citizen's right by appealing to its divine mission rather than to some liberal understanding of equality. What got me thinking about these questions were three incidents. One, really not so much an incident, but a cluster of cases that many of you are probably familiar with. The most famous is the Masterpiece Cake Shop case. There are several of these cases that found themselves in lower courts, state courts, and state appellate courts throughout the United States. They involve several family-owned, closely held businesses that refuse to cooperate with the celebration of same-sex wedding ceremonies in apparent violation of their state's public accommodations, anti-discrimination laws. And in all the cases, the parties argued based on their religious liberties. And in every single case, they lost, with the exception of Masterpiece Cake Shop, which did win in the Supreme Court, but based largely on the fact that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission that assessed the case had said disparaging things about Jack Phillips the Baker, not based on any sort of, you know, that he sort of had a right to reject the business. So that was the first thing that sort of made me think about those questions. The second incident was an article that appeared in the Journal First Things in 2018. It was authored by Father Romano Cesario, a Dominican priest, and in his article he argues that Pope Pius IX in the 1850s was justified in kidnapping a Jewish child from his parents because the child had been baptized a Catholic. The third incident was Dr. Mary McElise's 2019 Edmund Burke lecture at Trinity College Dublin, in which she argues from the perspective of a Catholic progressive that Catholic parents who baptize their children violate the religious liberty rights of those children as defined by the United Nations. So in this talk, what I'm going to argue is that none of these three takes rights seriously. In the case of the American courts, they don't take rights seriously because they completely eliminate from our view or their view how religious citizens think of their own beliefs and practices. In the case of Cesario and McElise, they don't take rights seriously because they both reject the demands of natural justice, which ironically is taught by the very church whose teachings they both claim to follow. So first, I want to just talk about these accommodation cases. So let's consider a story. Let's consider the story a fictional case of somebody I call Joel Goldberg, owner of Goldberg's photography, whose employees consist of Goldberg, his wife and two children, all of whom are Orthodox Jews. Located in Denver, Colorado, the business has never run afoul of any of the region's anti-discrimination laws, and he has earned a reputation of not turning away any customers because of their religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, or nationality. Imagine that Goldberg, as approached by a local Christian minister, will call him Mr. Convert to take photographs at the church's upcoming biennial baptismal ceremony. The minister informs Goldberg that the church plans to post the photographs on its website as a way to publicly welcome the baptized into the community. Goldberg then asks, by the way, what is the name of your church? Mr. Convert answers, Rocky Mountain, Jews for Jesus. He goes on to tell Goldberg that it is a Christian congregation consisting exclusively of Convert and Judaism, including several people that were members of Mr. Goldberg's synagogue. Goldberg is not pleased by this, so he tells Mr. Convert, I'm sorry, but I will not cooperate with the celebration of a liturgical event that I believe is apostasy. He goes on to explain to Mr. Convert that he would have no problem photographing the same individuals near in or anybody of water, including being playfully dunked by any Christian minister or layman. But baptisms, he argues, because they are liturgical are different, and most especially so when they involve the public renunciation by others of one's own faith. This activity Goldberg emphatically tells Mr. Convert is one in which I cannot participate. Not pleased with this news, Mr. Convert files a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, arguing that Goldberg's refusal constitutes unlawful discrimination based on religion. At trial, Goldberg insists that it is not Mr. Convert's religion that is the issue, but rather the activity for which Mr. Convert is asking Goldberg to employ his artistic gifts to assist in celebrating. This activity argues Goldberg has deep liturgical significance for both himself and Mr. Convert. For Mr. Convert, it's done in obedience to his faith. For Goldberg, it is a public act of apostasy and disobedience of the Torah. And yet the Colorado Civil Rights Commission rules against Goldberg, stating, quote, the Supreme Court has recognized that in some cases conduct cannot be divorced from status. This is so when the conduct is so closely correlated with the static that is engaged in exclusively or predominantly by persons who have that particular status. We conclude that the act of baptism constitutes such conduct because it is engaged in exclusively or predominantly by Christians. Therefore, Goldberg's distinction between not serving Christians and not cooperating with the celebration of a baptism is one without a difference. But for his religion, Mr. Convert would not have sought to baptize his congregants, and but for his intent to do so, Goldberg would not have denied Mr. Convert his services, unquote. By ignoring the liturgical significance of baptism to both those who believe in it and those who don't, that is, by treating it as just another activity closely correlated with a citizen's protected status under the law, our fictional commission is not only not taking right seriously, it is effectively redescribing a liturgical practice in terms alien to the citizens, both believers and non-believers, who indeed do take the practice seriously. Under the dominant progressive understanding of equality, the state is obligated under its anti-discrimination laws to punish Goldberg for his refusal of service, even though the only way for him to avoid punishment in the words of John Locke is to, quote, join in the worship and ceremonies of another church, unquote. But this seems to be the platonic ideal of a violation of religious liberty that writers like Locke, John Milton, Roger Williams, Madison and Jefferson had in mind. I should note at this point that the imagined holding of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission is taken nearly word for word with just minor adjustments to fit the fictional case from the very real Colorado Court of Appeals ruling in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. Ultimately decided in favor of the vendor by the U.S. Supreme Court in June of 2018. In that case, the baker, Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece, refused to make a custom wedding cake for a same-sex couple who had planned to use the cake for a reception celebrating the wedding that had occurred in Massachusetts. As in the fictional baptism case, the Colorado Court rejected the defendant's argument that his refusal of service was not based on the status of the customers, but rather on the nature of the ceremony, that he was asked to employ his talents to help celebrate. It seems to me that the ruling of the Colorado Court does indeed make sense, but only if one re-describes weddings in a way that eliminates their religious dimension that is integral to the observant citizen's worldview. For someone like Jack Phillips that devout Christian weddings, even when they are conducted under the auspices of institutions, either governmental or religious, that are outside of his own faith tradition have in fact liturgical significance. When he reads his own Bible, he is told that Christ's relationship to the church is analogous to the marriage between a man and a woman, adultery is prohibited by the Ten Commandments, and so forth. If he were to read the catechism of the Catholic Church, which he probably doesn't because he's an evangelical Protestant, he would find that the church teaches that marriage has a special place in the created order that cannot be fully grasped by natural reason. If he were to examine the histories of not only his own faith, but other religious groups, he would discover how many of them have developed over the centuries, sophisticated and complex rules by which to determine whether a marriage entered into by any of its followers under civil law or the authority of another religious group counts as a real marriage in the eyes of God. Thus for religious believers like Phillips, weddings are more like baptisms, bar mitzvahs and burials than they are like birthday parties, baby showers or barbecues. It took me a while to come up with. It kind of rolls off the tongue. This type of analysis is relatively easy to formulate if one makes an effort to understand how most religious believers see their own faith. They typically do not see it as just another exercise of individual autonomy consonant with their own vision of the good life as the sort of description that you hear in sort of contemporary political liberal thinkers like John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin and so forth. They see it as a discrete category of living that places them under the authority of a sovereign that may at times demand obedience contrary to the mandates of their culture. Although claiming to treat everyone with equal dignity and respect, the political liberal engages in a kind of a limited strategy that is one of the essential features of sort of the kind of the liberal project is to eliminate at least in terms of what I mean by liberalism is this sort of this recent project coming out of the 60s and 70s by some of the thinkers that I've already mentioned. What they are attempting to do is to try and kind of easy way to account for religion under some other general category. And so you'll typically find attempts to treat the exercise of a religious practice in some way analogous to a secular practice. The difficulty as I'm arguing here is that there just seems to be some religious practices that don't can't be sort of placed in a category like that. So for example, if you were to supposing you wanted to account for something like the College of Cardinals, you could say oh the College of Cardinals are an all male group like the New York Yankees. But that really wouldn't capture what exactly how they understand themselves. So there's actually a Supreme Court case came out, it was about six or seven years ago, maybe 2015, 2014. It was a case involving a young woman that was applying for a job at Abercrombie and Fitch. She was a Muslim woman and she refused, she was going to get hired but Abercrombie and Fitch had a certain look and so they said that she couldn't wear her headscarf. She sued under the Civil Rights Act of 64 and the court winds up ruling in her favor. Now of course we can debate questions about whether these sorts of laws are a good thing but what's really interesting though is that if you asked this woman about the nature of her headscarf she wouldn't say that it's a kind of appeal to her right to wardrobe. So I had a professor at University of Miami Law School in a debate I had about religious liberty actually used that as an analogy. She said oh in that case you don't need a sort of separate religious liberty, all you need is a right to wardrobe. And I just said I don't think that truly captures what that woman's objection, her objection was that she believed that God told her and it's not like a question of oh should I choose Sacksworth Avenue or the Gap? It's not that kind of question, right? But there's this tendency at least in contemporary liberal thinking and here I'm talking of people like Dworkin and Rawls to try to find some sort of general category to sort of make kind of domesticate religion to treat it in a way that can be accounted for in something that's manageable. This sort of egalitarian impulse to sort of level everything. And I call it an eliminative strategy because it eliminates from our vision those aspects of religion that actually are doing the work I think, at least in terms of people that are devout. So for one example, so Rawls at one point in his book Political Liberalism, Rawls refers to that faith can be sort of put underneath the category of that citizens regard themselves as self-originating sources of valid claims. And it's a weird way to put it for religious citizen because a person that claims that something's a matter of conscience, they don't think of those claims that are originating with them, right? It's something that is a demand placed on them. All right, I want to move on now. That's a very quick overview of why I think that at least the way in which contemporary political liberals think of religion is problematic when it comes to rights. I want to move on now to from weddings to baptisms and the Catholic integralism of Father Cesario and the Catholic progressivism of Dr. Macalese. So Romano Cesario and Dr. Macalese seem to hold at least superficially contrary positions on the rights and obligations of the Catholic church in relation to baptized children. Father Cesario, in defense of Pope Pius IX's abduction of Edgardo Matara, argues that the Catholic church has the right to exercise by means of political power its obligations to educate and cataclyse baptized children of non-Catholic parents even if the children's parents wish otherwise. On the other hand, Dr. Macalese argues that the Catholic church does not have the right to exercise its obligations to educate and cataclyse baptized children insofar as those obligations are contrary to the United Nations' conventions on the rights of the child. At first glance it may appear that Father Cesario and Dr. Macalese are in disagreement. However, upon further reflection or so I will argue, one discovers at their views sheer foundational premise. They both maintain that considerations of natural justice may not trump whatever a governing authority. For Father Cesario it's the Papal States and for Dr. Macalese it's the United Nations. Whatever that authority declares is in the best religious interest of the child. To show why this is so, I will first explain what I mean by natural justice as it pertains to parents, children, and religious formation. And here I will rely on the writings of Thomas Aquinas whose work in this area both summarizes and expands on the church's most ancient teachings on that matter even though the church itself and its theologians from time to time have not lived up to those teachings. I then move on to present and critically assess what Cesario and Macalese say. And I use several counter examples and illustrations to do so. So although the term natural justice has a variety of meanings, as I talk, I'm using it as a kind of shorthand way for what is often called the natural law. Those moral principles derived from the human goods to which we are ordered by nature and in which our moral judgments rest, or at least that's the way in which Macalese and Cesario think of the natural law. Now, I'm going to argue that they're getting it wrong, but that's the way in which they would typically understand it. Natural justice in this sense is pre-conventional, meaning that it is the philosophical basis and not the deliverance of the positive law. In his presentation of the natural law, Thomas Aquinas provides a brief account of what he calls the precepts of the natural law. Because we are rational animals and not creatures directed by mere instinct, we have intellects that apprehend these goods to which human beings are naturally ordered, that our wills ought to choose. The first precept of the natural law is that good is to be done in pursuit and evil is to be avoided. This Aquinas argues from the first principle of practical reason that good is that which all things seek after. He goes on to say that all our precepts of the natural law are based upon the first precept and that whatever practical reason naturally apprehends as one's good belongs to the precepts of the natural law as something to be done and or avoided. Among these precepts are those that pertain to, quote, sexual intercourse, education of offspring, and so forth, unquote. Aquinas maintains that practical reason naturally apprehends the moral truth that parents have an obligation to advance the well-being of their children, including their education and religious practice. This follows Aquinas explains elsewhere from the causal and protective roles that father and mother play in the origin and early development of their child. Just as our inclination to know tells us that we are ordered toward the good of knowledge and this ignorance is to be avoided, our inclination toward the conjugal act tells us that it and its procreative end are good, that the authority and responsibility of parents is also good, and that any acts contrary to those goods ought to be avoided. As should be evident, Aquinas' understanding of inclination depends on a teleological view of nature. That's contested. A lot of people reject that. According to Aquinas, this rightness or wrongness of certain acts are judged by the end to which the agent is ordered by nature. So even though you find a lot of folks rejecting this, it kind of comes out in different ways, right? So I had a student actually at UNLV back in the 90s who once asked me whether the truth was important and I asked if she wanted the true answer or the false one. So when Aquinas is talking about inclination, he's not talking about instinct or sort of visceral, he's talking about a kind of sense of what we know about the flourishing and perfection of our powers, right? All right, so if, let's say, for example, concerning parents, someone like Aquinas would say it would be morally wrong for parents to neglect their children's physical and mental health by allowing them to indulge without limit, let's say, on Pepsi-Cola, M&Ms, and online video games, or to enroll them into Mr. Fagan's School of Pickpocketry in lieu of ordinary education. It is in the second part of the second part of the summa in which Aquinas addresses in greater detail the authority and responsibility of parents when he answers the question, quote, whether the children of Jews and other unbelievers ought to be baptized against their parents' will. Aquinas in his response, he gives a five-pronged response, actually the way it worked in the summa, he begins with a question and then has certain objections and then has this thing called the said contra on the contrary and then responds to each one of the objections. And usually his responses to the respondeo and his responses to the objections are what Aquinas actually thinks, the said contra most of the time. But he's got five different responses, but I'm going to focus on one in particular and just talk a little bit about the other. So Aquinas points out, as one of the two answers, he says, quote, it was never the custom of the church to baptize the children of the Jews against the will of their parents. And as I said, he gives two reasons for this, or these two reasons I'm going to cover. First, he says it poses a danger to the faith. He says, quote, for children baptized before coming to the use of reason, afterwards when they come to perfect age might easily be persuaded by their parents to renounce what they had no unknowingly embraced and this would be detrimental to the faith. Unquote. It's important to note here that Aquinas is assuming that the natural parents and not the church or a Catholic family are raising the children baptized against the will of the parents. In other words, it does not seem to occur to Aquinas as it did to Pius IX in the Matorra case and numerous other proletes and scholars in church history that the baptized children of non-Catholics should be forcibly removed from their non-Catholic parents and brought up by and as Catholics. Elsewhere in the Summa, when dealing with the faith of unbelieving parents whose children have been baptized, Aquinas assumes that the unbelieving parents will be raising and caring for their baptized children. Aquinas never suggests that the church ought to take custody of such baptized children and find for them Catholic homes in which they may be properly catechized. The second reason for the church's custom of not baptizing children is that it would be, according to Aquinas, contrary to natural justice. It is on this point that Aquinas offers his natural law account of parental autonomy and responsibility. And this is what he says. I'm going to quote here from a paragraph in the Summa. Quote, For a child is by nature part of its father. Thus at first it is not distinct from its parents as to its body so long as it is enfolded within its mother's womb and later on after birth and before it has the use of its free will. It is enfolded in the care of its parents which is like a spiritual womb for so long as man has not the use of reason he differs not from an irrational animal so that even as an ox or a horse belongs to someone who according to the civil law can use them when he likes so according to the natural law a son before coming to the use of reason is under his father's care. Hence it would be contrary to natural justice if a child before coming to the use of reason were to be taken away from its parents custody or anything done to it against its parents wishes. As soon however as it begins to have the use of its free will it begins to belong to itself and is able to look after itself in matters concerning the divine or the natural law and then it should be induced not by compulsion but by persuasion to embrace the faith. It can then consent to the faith and be baptized even after its parents wish but not before it comes to the use of reason. So there are several points that stand out in this passage. First a child belongs to its parents as a matter of nature a claim that Aquinas no doubt derives from the primary precepts of the natural law. Secondly parents have the right and responsibility to act on behalf of their pre-rational children so we would probably use language say like the age of reason or the age of accountability. Given what Aquinas says in the articulation of his first reason that baptism against parental consent poses a danger to the faith this parental right and responsibility is not superseded by the church if a child is in fact baptized against the parents wishes. And third after a child reaches the age of accountability they can of course make their own decision. So let's move on now to Father Caesario. So I'm going to talk about Father Caesario's argument in first things and then move to very quickly to Mary Macaulay's argument and then open up the floor for some questions. So in February 2018 Father Caesario published a piece in first things called it was actually a book review of a book called Kidnap by the Vatican question mark the unpublished memoirs of Agardo Matera. Matera was born in 1851 into a Jewish family in Bologna which was at the time a city in the Papal States. In 1858 he was forcibly taken from his parents to be brought up in the Vatican after it was discovered by the authorities that he had been secretly baptized five years earlier by the family's domestic Anna Maurisi. By the way Steven Spielburger is actually making a movie on this and I don't know if you know it. I'm sure Pius IX will not look good I suspect as probably he shouldn't. So under canon law child baptisms against parents' wishes are ordinarily illicit though valid. Illicit though valid means you shouldn't do it but if you do it it's got to count. That's what it means. So however if Maurisi it was right about Matera's imminent demise that he was near death under canon law the baptism was both illicit and valid. Canon law does say a child can be baptized against the parents' wishes if death is imminent. Because Caesarean reasons the sacrament of baptism reconfigures the baptized to Christ by an indelible mark, an indelible character. Little Edgardo in the eyes of the church became a Catholic the moment he was baptized. Canon law also teaches that parents of Catholic children have an obligation to raise them in the Catholic faith and that the duty and right of educating belongs in a special way to the church to which has been divinely entrusted the mission of assisting persons so that they are able to reach the fullness of the Christian faith. So based on these premises Father Caesarean comes to Pionono's defense arguing that Pius IX really had no choice for given the nature of the Catholic sacramental world view and that Matera is entitled to Catholic upbringing that his parents refused to provide. The papal states were justified under its civil law in kidnapping the young child, relocating him and placing him under the guardianship of Pius IX. And Matera by the way actually became a Catholic priest and in his autobiography defended Pius IX. Well by the way it's not entirely clear though whether listedness is actually relevant to Father Caesarean's case. So I mean if in fact there's an obligation for the parents to raise the child in the Catholic faith if they're baptized it seems to me that the listedness or the listedness of it wouldn't matter. But does it follow from the validity of his sacrament and the principles of canon law that the papal states were morally required to abduct Matera from his family and permanently keep him in custody at the Vatican? By not addressing the natural law grounding of parental authority and responsibility which is the focus of Aquinas' argument and the basis of the church's own teachings on the matter Father Caesarean leaves this question unanswered. He relies exclusively on canon law and the civil law of the papal states as if they could never be contrary to natural justice. For this reason it leaves one to wonder the extent to which Father Caesarean would think it permissible for the church to cooperate with the state to achieve the church's ends when the state is not under the authority of the Holy Father as it was in the papal states. Suppose for example a group of US Catholic hospital chaplains overly zealous about their faith make a pact with each other to baptize children against the parent's wishes whenever possible terminal newborns a tiny percentage of whom eventually recover. Under canon law these baptisms are both listed and valid. But given Father Caesarean's understanding of the correct application of the church's divinely entrusted mission the local bishops should instruct their diocese general counsel to petition the family courts to issue injunctions in order the children's parents either to raise them or to transfer custody to the bishop. If a secular court in the United States were to grant such an injunction I'm not even suggesting that's even remotely plausible but I mean imagine this is the logic of his position that's the point we would clearly see it as an infringement of the parent's rights and thus a violation of natural justice. Making this point in response to the objection that quote every man belongs more to God from whom he has his soul than to his carnal father from whom he has his body this was an objection raised to Aquinas' claim that it would be wrong to baptize the children Aquinas writes quote a child before it has the use of reason it was ordained by God by a natural order through the reason of its parents under whose care it naturally lies and it is according to their ordering that things pertaining to God are to be done in respect of the child unquote. In response to another objection that asserts that the government may without committing an injustice force the baptism of Jewish children against their parents' wishes Aquinas writes that whatever civil obligations Christian monarchs may place on their Jewish subjects they cannot quote exclude the order of natural or divine law unquote. Consequently the fact that baptized Catholic children are entitled to a certain kind of spiritual formation and Catholic upbringing and the fact that the church has a responsibility to educate all its baptized members does not entail that the civil government even when the government happens to be the Holy See may do anything in its power to achieve that end that the civil law cannot and must not in such cases be employed to achieve what every Catholic would see as an important aspect of a child's development is in line with Aquinas' point elsewhere in the Summa that the human law cannot repress every act of vice or command all the acts of every virtue and human law and human law must answer to the natural law pious denies kidnapping of Matura and the Pontus refusal to return the young man to his parents though permitted by the civil law of the papal states was in the words of St. Augustine no law at all even if the baptism was both licit and valid Dr. Macalese Dr. Macalese, Mary Macalese is the former president of Ireland she was president from 1997 to 2011 and about three years ago, four years ago earned a doctoral degree in canon law from the Pontifical University the Gregorian University Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and her dissertation dealt with this very issue she subsequently gave a lecture in the Edmund Burke lecture of all names in November of 2019 at Trinity College Dublin in which she made this argument and it became a point of controversy at least for a couple of days in certain circles on the internet so according to Dr. Macalese in canon law the right of baptism has both a spiritual and juridical component the former has the effect of eliminating original sin while the latter has the effect of imposing on the child lifelong church membership which can never be rescinded becoming subject to church laws from the age of seven on reaching the use of reason and being deemed by baptism to have made personal promises to fulfill the many onerous obligations canon law imposes on church members this juridical component argues Dr. Macalese is a clear violation of article 14 of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child that the Holy See was one of the first state parties to sign up to the convention which you probably should read before you sign it's like when you get those things do you agree, can you get an app you say no, that's it you can't negotiate so article 14 this is what article 14 states states parties shall respect the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion state parties shall respect the rights and duties of the parents and when applicable legal guardians to provide direction to the child in the exercise of his or her rights in a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety order health and morals of the fundamental rights and freedoms of others now it would seem at first glance that there is nothing about article 14 that is inconsistent with what Aquinas maintains of the parents' rights under natural justice to direct the religious beliefs and practices of their children prior to the age of accountability thus it would seem that the Catholic baptism of infants does not run afoul of article 14 I mean I suspect when the church leaders sign that they probably thought that as well what they underestimated is the power of regulatory bureaucracies from reinterpreting legal instruments and that's precisely what Macaulay's and others I think are trying to do she argues that because baptism's juridic component which she attributes to man-made canon laws realized by promises made by godparents and parents the right does not in the words of article 14 respect the right of the child for freedom of thought, conscience, and religion according to Dr. Macaulay's the Holy See has never considered the ethical, legal, and moral implications of imposing lifelong membership of the church and a body of obligations on a baby who is not in a position to weigh the implications what are we to make of Dr. Macaulay's argument? first, her distinction between the spiritual juridic elements of baptism the fact that you can distinguish them in your mind doesn't mean they can actually be distinguished in reality think for example of national citizenship one can distinguish in one's mind between the act of becoming a citizen and the consequences of that citizenship like permanent residency status and so forth think about something like a triangle you can distinguish the sides from the angles but that doesn't mean they can actually exist apart from each other in much the same way in Catholic doctrine and most Christian churches teach this as well baptism places you within the body of Christ and it's something that is by its very nature happens and so the sort of yes you can distinguish them but that doesn't mean they can be separated from themselves ontologically now I want to raise some questions about the way in which I suspect what's really going on in Macaulay's mind here I think what she's really saying is something like this because the church has refused to embrace a sort of modern liberal view of the human person that true human freedom is the exercise of the individual will unencumbered by inherited and or unchosen traditions and forms of life the church's doctrine of baptism fails to measure up to the ethical legal and moral standards of the modern world that the church on occasion is championed her point is not without merit since as she correctly notes the church did indeed sign the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child but as I've already noted it's not at all obvious that one must read the document as contrary to Aquinas' account of natural justice but why think that Macaulay's interpretation of the conventions article 14 is a sufficient reason for the church or any other religious body for that matter that holds to a similar view abandon its understanding of the sacrament of baptism she actually never tells us she just assumes as normative the modern liberal view in her interpretation of international human rights law why should the church suppose that the modern world has better insights into philosophical anthropology than its own traditions and theology after all it is not as if the modern liberal view of the person is not without its own problems and puzzles it does not seem possible for example for flesh and blood human beings to seriously think that what is constitutive of their lives those enduring loyalties and attachments to family, nation, faith and tradition that they do not explicitly choose somehow diminishes rather than informs how they ought to exercise their liberty think of the millions of unsuspecting infants who every year are born into families that speak a language live under a constitution and body of laws participate in formal education with uniform curriculum and engage in cultural practices they inherited from their predecessors all of which provide order, purpose and meaning so that the child may exercise her will freely and not capriciously once she reaches the age of reason are we to actually believe that the rights of those of these infants are violated because these attributes and practices some indelible or nearly so are foisted upon them without their explicit consent Dr. McElise herself seems to tacitly and thus ironically accept this reality when she presents the deliverances of international human rights conventions as normative for all the world's citizens even though virtually none of those citizens has explicitly consented to the true human freedom that she believes these conventions teach these citizens are born into and brought up in a world already configured with authoritative commissions, conventions, governments, constitutions, statutes, etc which no doubt under Dr. McElise's understanding instruct these citizens as to what counts as true human freedom take for example the Catholic adult whose parents live under a government that has placed in its laws Dr. McElise's understanding of international human rights and thus prohibits Catholic baptisms imagine this adult now wishes that her parents had baptized her as an infant an inculcated in her the lessons of faith that Dr. McElise maintains are deleterious to true human freedom this adult was not nor could ever be the original legislative agreement that banned her parents from asking the church on her behalf to give her the sacrament yet that child as with all children and Dr. McElise's ideal state must live under its rules rules to which they did not explicitly consent not surprisingly when she discusses the motura case Dr. McElise does not describe it as a violation of natural justice but rather as the church through its political power imposing itself on little Edgardo and his parents and inflicting on them deep emotional pain completely absent from her analysis is recognition of the right of Edgardo's parents under natural justice to inculcate in their child their religious faith which includes in Judaism circumcision a right that most certainly left indelible mark on their son for if she had brought that insight to the reader's attention one could raise the following questions about her case against Catholic infant baptism why is it permissible as Dr. McElise argues for the modern liberal state with its assorted human rights instruments to impose on Catholic parents an understanding of the sacramental life that forces them to cease baptizing their children until their church officially detaches the juridical effects of baptism from its spiritual effects which as I've already noted is ontologically impossible if it was an injustice for the papal state to kidnap little Edgardo unless his parents agreed to the conditions why is it not an injustice for the modern liberal state as Dr. McElise suggests to tell Catholic parents they have a right to baptize their children only under the condition that their church abandon its sacramental theology if it is wrong as Dr. McElise claims for the Catholic church to teach as it did in the 19th century that it is the world's soul, spiritual and temple source of governance then why is it right in the 21st century for international human rights conventions and commissions to be posited for spiritual practices it does not take much imagination to conclude from Dr. McElise's reasoning that if the eradicating of unchosen Catholic baptisms is a matter of vindicating human rights then stands to reason that government should legally proscribe Catholic infant baptisms in order to protect the victimized children from this terrible injustice the main problem with Dr. McElise's view is that it is indistinguishable for Dr. Cesario both defend policies that offend natural justice for Father Cesario because a young boy's right to salvation hangs in the balance the state under the direction of the Holy See may separate a child from the religious direction of his parents until he reaches the age of reason for Dr. McElise because a child's right to true human freedom hangs in the balance the state under the guidance of the United Nations which is the age of reason now a critic of this paper could raise the objection why should one accept that there is such a thing as natural justice perhaps the only law that exists is the positive law that's certainly a good question but one relevant not relevant to at least the part of the paper in which I dealt with this issue my point is simply to show how the reasoning of both Father Cesario and Dr. McElise those seemingly worlds apart ideologically parallel insofar as they both reject natural justice so you can say then that the views of Father Cesario and Dr. McElise are twins separated at baptism thank you thank you thank you