THE SOCIETY OF CATHOLIC SOCIAL SCIENTISTS
Friday and Saturday, October 26-27, 2007
The St. John’s University School of Law
Prof. John Breen
John Paul II, the Structures of Sin and the Limits of Law
A little over two years ago, Pope John Paul II passed away. Regardless of one’s religious background –indeed, regardless of whether one is counted among his many admirers or his many critics— the late pope must be regarded as one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century. As the supreme head of the Catholic Church for over twenty-six years, John Paul left behind an enormous record of teaching covering a vast array of subjects.
One of the topics addressed in the late pope’s many magisterial texts is the relationship between law and culture. I take up this topic in the enclosed article entitled John Paul II, the Structures of Sin and the Limits of Law.
As someone who saw his own native Poland ravaged first by Nazism and then by totalitarian socialism, John Paul was keenly aware of the need for a legal system dedicated to justice and the rule of law. Thus, whether the issue was racism or the inequalities of the marketplace, John Paul supported the use of legal mechanisms to address unjust attitudes and patterns of behavior that assume institutional form – what he called “structures of sin.” At the same time, John Paul knew that law is subordinate to culture. Indeed, culture enjoys a kind of priority with respect to law insofar as every particular law and legal system is the product of a given cultural setting. Thus, although important, law suffers from serious limitations whenever it is employed to bring about significant social change. In the article I use a remarkable passage from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as a means of introducing the pope’s teaching with respect to these matters.
Furthermore, in a recent article entitled Christianity and the (Modest) Rule of Law, University of Pennsylvania law professor David Skeel and Harvard Law School professor William Stuntz argue that law should be modest in its ambitions. Thus, they contend that law may not be an appropriate response to many kinds of social problems. Indeed, they argue that the rule of law suffers when law attempts to regulate that which it cannot change – a vice they refer to as “legal moralism.” Moreover, Skeel and Stuntz make these arguments from an explicitly Evangelical Christian perspective. See David A. Skeel & William J. Stuntz, Christianity and the (Modest) Rule of Law, 8 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 809 (2006).
Although Skeel and Stuntz agree with Pope John Paul in many respects, in the enclosed article I argue that their analysis could have greatly benefited from a broader engagement with the Christian intellectual tradition. Specifically, they fail to appreciate the way in which law helps to form cultural norms and practices by serving a teaching function within society. I also argue that Skeel and Stuntz are mistaken in identifying the legal regulation of abortion as an example of “legal moralism.”