A controversial abortion case reaches the Supreme Court, and men in black robes impose their religious views on the country. Counter to the justices’ expectation, a diverse movement rises up in protest. Civil disobedience leads to tens of ­thousands of arrests. It may take many years, but the decision will be reversed.

This is a description not of some future American Gilead but of the past. Daniel K. Williams’s important history of abortion politics explains how Roe v. Wade enshrined liberal Protestant assumptions in American law. Far from being a bulwark of secularism (as many on the right and the left have supposed), Roe v. Wade was the expression of a religious establishment that overestimated its legitimacy and staying power.

Religious divides over abortion emerged in the first part of the twentieth century. Up to that point there had been a broad consensus in favor of American laws, which banned abortion except when it was necessary to save the life of the mother. But under the influence of the Social Gospel, which stressed societal reform over individual salvation, many mainline leaders came to see contraception and abortion not as individual vices but as potential solutions to overpopulation and poverty. Liberal Protestants also placed a high priority on individual freedom, which they sought to respect by loosening abortion laws.

At the same time, liberal Protestants continued to believe that the unborn child possessed moral worth, which had to be balanced against the value of individual choice. In 1961, the Christian Century called for the repeal of laws that compelled “women to bear ­unwanted children forced upon them in criminal acts.” But it also warned that complete ­liberalization “leaves to the unborn no rights at all.”

This attempt to balance individual freedom, social reform, and the rights of the unborn was distinct from the Catholic position, which prioritized unborn life while drawing on natural law. It also differed from the approach of conservative Protestants. Williams puts to rest the frequently repeated claim that evangelicals did not oppose abortion until they were led to do so by the post-Roe culture wars. In fact, conservative Protestants were generally opposed to abortion—and for distinctively evangelical reasons.

Whereas liberal Protestants stressed individual freedom, conservative Protestants exalted family life. Their belief in the importance of childbearing reinforced their moral objections to the taking of unborn life. The same was true of their focus on individual sin and salvation, which made them comfortable with calling the choice to abort a sin and a crime rather than a social problem for which no one in particular could be blamed. It is true, Williams notes, that ­evangelicals were willing to support the availability of abortion “for a few carefully defined medical reasons.” But they rejected elective abortion outright.

In 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, it was still possible to imagine that liberal Protestant views could govern the country. Twenty-eight percent of Americans were members of mainline churches, the institutional home of liberal Protestantism. So were sixty-­five of the Senate’s one hundred members and eight of the nine justices on the Supreme Court. Today, by contrast, only 11 percent of Americans, twenty-seven members of the U.S. Senate, and one Supreme Court justice are mainline Protestants.

Only in retrospect is it ­possible to see how distinctive—and ­fragile—the liberal Protestant approach to abortion was. The court’s decision in Roe was drafted by Harry Blackmun, a liberal Methodist who regularly attended church and occasionally preached. During the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, he wrote, abortion could be undertaken at the discretion of the mother. In the next twelve weeks, the state could regulate the procedure in ways consistent with maternal health. In the last trimester, the state could prohibit abortion outright, except where it was necessary to protect the life of the mother. This framework sought to balance individual choice with the value of unborn life. But by stressing the medical reasons for abortion, it also assumed the authority of doctors—92 percent of whom were male.

This balancing act reflected liberal Protestant concerns and tracked with specific policies proposed by liberal Protestant bodies. In June 1968, the American Baptist Convention proposed a trimester framework that sought to honor “the freedom of persons and the sanctity of life.” The woman would be free to choose in the first trimester, but after that she could procure an abortion only with the approval of a medical professional. A similar approach was proposed by the United Church of Christ in 1971. The parallels were clear enough that in 1973, after Roe was decided, the writers Mary Ellen Haines and Helen Weber noted that the UCC’s statement was “virtually identical with the Supreme Court ruling.”

Because of the decision’s soft paternalism and qualified concern for unborn life, feminists had reservations about Roe. They preferred the approach championed by Congresswoman Bella Abzug, who proposed a law to repeal all restrictions on abortion nationwide. Feminists rallied to Roe, though, when they realized that a determined movement was seeking to undo it. Blackmun was surprised by the intensity of the response. “The mail has been voluminous and much of it critical and some of it abusive,” he told a friend. “I suspect, however, that the furor will die down before too long. At least I hope so.”

It was not to be. Catholics, joined by evangelicals, led the resistance to Roe. They were joined by a formidable body of dissenters within the Protestant mainline. Charismatic Christianity also played an important role. In 1986, Randall Terry, a Pentecostal minister, founded Operation Rescue. The group adopted sit-in tactics from the Civil Rights movements to dissuade women from seeking abortions and obstruct the operations of clinics. By 1992, 40,000 volunteers had been arrested in one of the greatest waves of civil disobedience in American history.

Far from settling the ­abortion question on liberal ­Protestant grounds, as Blackmun hoped, Roe  contributed to the decline of liberal Protestant hegemony. As Williams notes, it “set in motion a process that would polarize both national politics and Christianity in the United States.” Debates over abortion contributed to splits within mainline churches and powered the emergence of the religious right. It also led to the rise of a feminist movement that would, in time, win over the Democratic Party to an unambiguous defense of abortion as an act that should be not questioned but praised.

By tracing this history, Williams answers a question that has often troubled people with moderate instincts: Whatever happened to the idea that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare? The important thing to realize is that this formulation was not a compromise between the antithetical positions of pro-lifers and feminists. It was an expression of a distinctive viewpoint that enjoyed demographic and institutional backing within the Protestant mainline. As the mainline declined, so did this distinctive form of moderation—to be replaced by pro-abortion secularism on the one hand and a religiously conservative pro-life movement on the other.

Though the pro-life movement has succeeded in reversing Roe v. Wade, it has failed to achieve a new settlement that protects unborn life. Many abortion opponents, notably including the Catholic bishops of the United States, have sought to present opposition to abortion as part of a broader “ethic of life” or “seamless garment.” Their proposals seek to build a new center that protects the unborn by appealing to the political intuitions of the left as well as the right. They aspire to be nonpartisan, just as the drafters of Roe imagined they were being. But their success has not matched their ambition.

Indeed, over time, some of the most important advocates of the seamless garment have abandoned the cause. The evangelical Jim Wallis and his magazine, ­Sojourners, were important progressive voices for life. They cast the protection of the unborn as part of a broader liberal defense of the downtrodden. But sometime during ­Donald Trump’s first term in office, Williams notes, Sojourners began to defend abortion as a human right—succumbing to the process of polarization that had been working itself out since Roe v. Wade.

Williams’s history has implications beyond Roe v. Wade. If religious views inevitably inform court decisions in such sensitive cases, what views informed Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court ruling recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex ­marriage? A clue can be found in ­another recent book, ­Anthony ­Kennedy’s memoir, Life, Law & ­Liberty. Kennedy describes how his upbringing in the ­American West imparted to him a notion that each person is ­entitled to “basic dignity.” Dignity was to become the crucial concept in his jurisprudence. As Kennedy puts it, “Constant study . . . led me to a greater appreciation of the primacy of human dignity in constitutional analysis.”

Kennedy’s insistence on dignity marks him as part of a distinctively Catholic tradition of political reasoning. As the legal scholar ­Samuel Moyn argues in Christian Human Rights, the notion of individual dignity was first taken up in the early twentieth century by Catholics who sought a middle course between the secularist legacy of the French Revolution and anti-democratic forms of Christian politics. Recognizing individual dignity often meant placing limits on the state’s ability to coerce. As Moyn observes, the term’s eventual popularity was “essentially due” to Pope Pius XI’s employment of it in the anti-­communist encyclical Divini Redemptoris.

Catholics on the Supreme Court adopted this language. As Adeno Addis has noted, “Justices ­Kennedy, Brennan, and Frank Murphy, the three Justices for whom dignity has played an important role in understanding humanness and its vulnerability to debasement and humiliation, all adhered to the Catholic faith.” Kennedy used the notion of dignity to fashion a liberal Catholic jurisprudence that reached its culmination in ­Obergefell. Not unlike Harry Blackmun’s opinion in Roe v. Wade, Kennedy’s opinion in Obergefell advanced a progressive change while retaining certain conservative instincts—notably, a belief that recognition of the dignity of same-sex couples must be ­balanced against respect for religious liberty.

Today Catholics are as dominant on the Supreme Court as mainline Protestants once were. But most of these Catholics are political conservatives and textual originalists who have little use for the language of dignity. Kennedy’s liberal Catholic jurisprudence is likely to be subjected to the same crosscutting pressures that Blackmun’s liberal Protestant jurisprudence once was. If the fate of Roe is any indication, the compromise Kennedy struck in Obergefell will be looked back on as a temporary settlement. Either Obergefell will be reversed, or religious liberty for objectors will be stripped away.

The reversal of Obergefell would be an undoubted conservative victory. But its effect would be limited unless conservatives can articulate a religiously informed jurisprudence that commands broad assent. Anyone hoping to do this has much to learn from the liberal Protestant and Catholic attempts to shape our nation’s laws.

Image by Ted Eytan, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

The post The Theology of <em>Roe</em> appeared first on First Things.

If Paul VI was right about witnesses being evangelists, then Jimmy Lai—the Hong Kong entrepreneur, newspaperman, and human rights advocate who has now spent more than 1,800 days in solitary confinement in Stanley Prison, and who was recently “convicted” in a sham “trial” of being a threat to Hong Kong’s “national security”—is one of Catholicism’s most compelling evangelists. For like other modern Catholic heroes such as Fr. Alfred Delp, Bl. Omelyan Kovch, Bishop Francis Ford, Sr. Nijolė Sadūnaitė, and Cardinal George Pell, Jimmy Lai has turned his imprisonment into a spiritual retreat. And he has shared what the Spirit has taught him in those cruel circumstances through works of religious art sketched in colored pencil on ruled paper, as well as through his letters to his family.

One of those sketches—a portrait of Our Lady at the Annunciation bearing the simple inscription “Yes!”—was the Lai family’s 2025 Christmas card. The card also included one of Jimmy’s most moving confessions of faith. After asking himself in a letter to his wife and children, “Why is my mood not down at all, sometimes even light-hearted?” and then answering his own question—“I guess because so many people whom I have even never met are praying for me is the main reason”—this twenty-first-century martyr-confessor gave thanks for what his conversion to Catholicism and his current ordeal had taught him, in words reproduced on that Christmas card:

I am always in God’s presence because of [those] prayers. I am so thankful the Lord gave me a new life, a life I was [previously] blind to—a life of true peace, joy, spiritual concreteness and meaning—as opposed to my muddling in life in pursuit of purposes bound into the narrowness of my ego before. Now I am free because I can see.

Jimmy Lai would never claim to be a theologian, but he displayed here a profound grasp of what we mean by professing our belief in the “Communion of Saints” when we pray the Apostles’ Creed. Just as the human eye cannot see itself, human beings can be blinded to the truth about ourselves, our obligations, and our eternal destiny when we’re caught in the trap of our egos. To be liberated into human and spiritual maturity, we need others—others who can help us see ourselves clearly, thereby giving us the capacity to see the world truly.

That is what happens in the Communion of Saints. Others introduce us to Christ. Others help us to see ourselves as forgiven and redeemed, thereby helping cure us of the myopia caused by egotism. Others sustain us and help us grow by their prayers, for no authentic prayer ever goes unheard. Jimmy Lai knows that and lives it. Through the prayers that sustain him, he can “see” his suffering during almost five years of an otherwise wretched imprisonment as an occasion of grace, in which he participates in Christ’s continuing redemption of the world.

The policies of Xi Jinping, the absolute ruler of China, aim to make China the world’s preeminent power, in payback for what Mao Zedong called its “century of humiliation” at the hands of exploitative foreign powers. Greatness as measured in the immediate moment can be illusory, however. In the first half of the sixteenth century, King Henry VIII bestrode England like a colossus. Yet today, it’s Thomas More—the man Henry Tudor unjustly imprisoned for refusing to bend his conscience to the autocrat’s will—who is remembered as the “man for all seasons”: the man whose example has drawn others into the Communion of Saints for over four centuries.  

Those who find an analogy here with twenty-first-century Catholicism’s most famous political prisoner, Jimmy Lai, will understand what Pope St. Paul VI said about witnesses being evangelists, and what that means for living the Great Commission (Matt. 28:19) today.

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.

The post The Evangelist in Stanley Prison appeared first on First Things.

This last seals the boy’s fate. There will be no lifesaving operation. The crying baby with chubby legs and wide-open blue eyes, facing the flashbulbs of the press, is instead to be starved and dehydrated to death. It is an act of the “kindest mercy” for the child to be “put out of its misery,” the physician has told the parents. For the next decade, in newspaper columns, in public speeches, and even in a feature film that he will write and star in, the physician will present his patient as an exhibit in his argument that compassion and the scientific method compel American medicine to bring about rational ends to “lives of no value.” The editorial board of the New Republic, Helen Keller, and many leading physicians will agree with him.

The Bollinger baby—christened by his relatives Allen after his father, yet unnamed in the press and even in modern accounts of the tragedy—became the first publicized case of a newborn in America forced to die because of his disabilities. The year was 1915. The physician became a celebrity. Decades before Jack Kevorkian, decades before either abortion or assisted suicide was legalized anywhere in the United States, there was Harry Haiselden, the surgeon and showman at the head of the ­German-American Hospital in Chicago.

No jury would convict Haiselden. He insisted that he treated his “defective” infant patients as he did “because he love[d] them.” He loved them to death. Sometimes he actively accelerated their deaths: He removed the umbilical ligature of one patient, leaving him to bleed to death, and prescribed another potentially lethal doses of opiates. It was an ambivalent love. “Horrid semihumans drag themselves along all of our streets,” Haiselden warned at the end of his autobiography. “What are you going to do about it?”

It is tempting to dismiss Haiselden’s odious question, precisely because it is odious. That would be a mistake. Today Haiselden is achieving a posthumous conquest of the medical field. His victories are not just in Canada, where the Quebec College of Physicians and many clinical ethicists have urged Parliament to legalize the euthanasia of disabled newborns, or in the Netherlands, which under the infamous Groningen Protocol has been euthanizing “neonates” with terminal illnesses for two decades.

It is in less likely places that Haiselden’s victory is taking shape, pitting parents against the physicians of their disabled children—parents like Krystal VanderBrugghen, who alleges that her child with Down syndrome received inadequate, discriminatory, even life-threatening medical care, in “the best children’s hospital in the world.” Stories like hers have been a century in the making.

The best children’s hospital in the world for 2026, according to Newsweek and Statista, is the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto. I walked into SickKids in the summer of 2025 to see Krystal, a “mama bear” according to one of her friends, and Mo, who asked me not to use his ­real name because one of his children is receiving treatment at the hospital, and he fears retaliation. Krystal befriended Mo’s wife in the coffee lounge over the summer, and soon Mo was friends with Krystal, too.

We decided it would be best to speak in the wing of the pediatric unit, whispering whenever a nurse walked past. Mo and Krystal both credit religious faith—Mo is Muslim, while Krystal and her husband Jeremy are Canadian Reformed Christians—with fortifying them to bring children with Down syndrome into this world. Mo said his wife felt guilt-tripped by their healthcare team, who asked her immediately what quality of life she, Mo, and their three other children would have if she gave birth to a child with Down syndrome. “At the end of the day,” Mo told me, “I am not God. I cannot decide who lives, who doesn’t live.” Now, with his child with Down syndrome already five years old, the experience of raising him is “probably . . . the best thing in my life.” Krystal experienced the same pressure and reward. She was advised three times by clinicians that she could “terminate at any point and start again.” She didn’t want to start again. She wanted her child to be born.

On December 4, 2023, eighteen months before I met Krystal and Mo, Veya was born at McMaster University Medical Centre in Hamilton, Ontario. Like many children with Down syndrome, she had a cardiac defect, which in her case meant that she was in active heart failure for the first four months of her life. She needed cardiac surgery, which required her to be transferred to SickKids Hospital in Toronto. It is an hour-plus commute for Krystal on “a good day,” especially since the AC in her car stopped working. It was worth it; the surgery worked. “It’s funny,” said Krystal. “They try so hard to end this life, but the second she’s born, they do everything they absolutely, possibly, humanly can do to preserve her life and get her here to get her heart repaired. But once we started getting involved with GI [the gastro­intestinal team] and she started having more problems, that’s when it was like they drew the line.”

A month after her heart was repaired, Veya developed an undiagnosed liver disease, causing her bile to be thick. She underwent liver surgery. This time, the surgery didn’t work. Veya desperately needed a liver transplant, and although the rest of her individualized specialty care team approved her for a liver transplant, the trans­fer team ­denied her this lifesaving treatment. ­Krystal still doesn’t know the reason. Veya needed to stay in the ICU.

Without a liver transplant, Veya’s immune system was vulnerable. I asked how Mo was ­recruited to help with Veya’s medical journey. “I invited him into my meetings,” Krystal said. Mo continues for her: “Yeah. I hear stories. Krystal tells me what’s happening. She’s gone through a lot, like, mentally. I’ve lived here almost a year. That’s hard. So God knows what she’s going through, right?” Mo’s child was being treated for leukemia in the hospital, and he had no complaints against SickKids. “It’s interesting because I’m seeing two sides, right?” said Mo. “I’m seeing my side and then I’m seeing her side. Two different teams, but from her side, ­Krystal’s team, and I’ve used this word a lot, I’ve been baffled on what’s happening.”

The quality of care for Veya dropped precipitously, Krystal and Mo believe. Shortly after Veya was denied her liver transplant, while she was unattended, she received a potentially lethal amount of potassium, ten times her usual dosage. Her heartbeat exceeded 350 beats per minute. The hospital told her that the overdose “passed through four pharmacists and two nurses,” Krystal said on a recent podcast. “We’re really sorry but it was around Christmas time,” was the only excuse she received from the hospital about the incident that nearly killed her daughter.

SickKids declined to answer my questions about the incident and about whether any steps were taken to prevent a similar incident in the future. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson commented: “We cannot comment on individual cases due to patient privacy. . . . Decisions about care for each child’s unique case are guided by clinical expertise, ethical standards, multidisciplinary collaboration, and partnership with families.”

At first, Krystal believed the potassium overdose had been an innocent mistake. Now she is not so sure. At several points, the physicians in the ICU have seemed to “[want] to free up a bed spot and rush her out because she’s been here for too long.” Three days into her care, a doctor said that if Veya needed a ventilator, she would not receive one, despite being on full code, because “it would do more harm than good.” (Due to a 2019 court decision in Ontario, physicians need not seek consent for a Do Not Resuscitate order, or even inform patients that one has been placed against them, if their care is deemed “medically futile.”) Krystal had to enlist the patient relations department in order to get her daughter’s DNR lifted.

She felt coerced into giving up. “SickKids is very ableist,” Krystal told me. Another ICU physician put his hand on her shoulder and said, “You know, Mom, it’s been such a long road for you guys. You can admit when enough is enough, and you can let someone die with dignity.” Was the overdose intentional? An effect of neglect? Or a simple accident? Whatever the case, it happened, Krystal and Mo believe, only because Veya is disabled. At one point, when she asked whether Veya was being denied a transplant because of her Down syndrome, a transplant physician answered, “Mom, I think you know the answer to that deep down in your heart.” She heard similar comments from the physicians. “[Another] ICU doctor said, ‘We look at Veya, all that she is and all that she was born with,’” Krystal said. “And I said, ‘What, a head, two arms, two legs?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, she came with a cardiac defect. That’s fixed. That’s not causing the problem. Or are you isolating her extra chromosome here?’”

The accidents—if accidents they were—continued, always occurring when Veya was by herself. “Every time I step away, something happens,” Krystal said. Mo interrupts: “Twenty-minute lunch break.” Krystal continues: She went on a “twenty-minute lunch break, and they shut off a medication that they knew from a couple days ago she had withdrawal symptoms from.” Another incident occurred when Veya was struggling to breathe. It was a code blue, but the crash team, instead of rushing to help Veya, was slowly walking to her. Krystal had to raise the alarm herself.

Krystal and her husband Jeremy felt that Veya was unsafe at SickKids. The Delta Hospice Society and the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition organized a round-the-clock daily watch over Veya. But SickKids began to clamp down on the visits. It also banned Veya’s general pediatrics team from visiting unless they first asked for permission. When I spoke with Krystal, she was in the last steps of organizing an ambulance to move Veya to another hospital.

At the same time, Veya was meeting her development milestones. She liked geese and her bravery beads; she played with her brothers and sisters. “That’s the thing,” Krystal told me. “This ICU admission, she’s actually met three milestones, or two—I guess popping [your teeth] is not really a milestone. Maybe it is, but I’m like, you learn to smile. You learn how to coo. You just can’t make noise because she’s got the [respiratory] tube. But then, you popped your first tooth. I’m like, look at this! This isn’t a kid on death’s door. But they’ve been treating her like she’s on her way out and ­palliative.” When SickKids was handing Veya over to another hospital—at the time, Krystal was considering either McMaster or a hospital in the United States—SickKids said that she was not on ­palliative care.

As is the case throughout Canada’s healthcare system, it is difficult to find conclusive evidence of neglect or wrongdoing when medical care is subpar. But SickKids Hospital is no stranger to euthanasia. Just two years after Canada legalized medical assistance in dying (MAID)—a euphemism for euthanasia—a panel inside SickKids Hospital, co-chaired by the director of its department of bioethics, envisioned MAID for minors without the need for parental consent, a practice unheard of even in the Netherlands, which permits euthanasia for “mature minors.” (Currently, MAID in Canada is legal only for those over the age of eighteen.) The policy was written to address the need for “MAID-providing institutions to reduce social stigma surrounding this practice.” SickKids declined to answer my questions about this policy, including whether it is in force today.

SickKids has historically been at the forefront of letting children die of their disabilities, especially children with Down syndrome. A study found that between 1952 and 1971, of fifty children with Down syndrome and blocked food passages, twenty-­seven were left to die of their obstructions instead of receiving routine medical treatment. In 1979, the institution was lambasted by the Canadian Psychiatric Association, which warned that “this increasingly common act in medical practice is being vigorously promoted by able and influential advocates within our profession and within our society at large,” despite the fact that it was likely illegal without a court order.

Between June 1980 and March 1981, a spree of murders struck SickKids hospital. Over the course of several nights, thirty-six babies and infants died, many of them due to an overdose of digoxin, a drug used to control heartbeats and often used for assisted suicide in the United States. A judge confirmed that at least five of those deaths were murders (though the defense believed the number was closer to seventeen), and yet the judge at the preliminary hearings absolved the only suspect, a pediatric nurse. No one else was ever charged, despite statistical evidence from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control that tied another nurse to the deaths.

Two years later, with the scandal refusing to die down, a Royal Commission of Inquiry investigated the deaths. ­Richard Rowe, the chief cardiologist at the hospital, was asked by the commission whether he disapproved of so-called mercy killing. His response: “almost.”  He explained that since the thirty-six babies had a “minimal chance of surviving,” the motive behind their deaths might “perhaps be that of ­mercy-killing.” It was not true: Many of the children had been likely to survive. Some were barely sick. Adrian Hines described his son Jordan: “He entered the hospital a healthy baby with a touch of pneumonia. He didn’t even have a heart ­condition.” An autopsy revealed that Jordan had died of digoxin overdose, a medication he was never prescribed.  

The main medical associations in Canada declined to condemn the homicides at SickKids. The president of the Ontario Medical Association claimed, “I don’t know if withholding surgery is legal,” while a spokesman for the Canadian Medical Association emphasized that the CMA had revised its ethics code “to allow patients to die in dignity.” When asked by investigators whether the dramatic increase in the number of deaths in the hospital’s cardiac ward could have been caused by euthanasia, the chief cardiologist was vague. “[Euthanasia] may have come into those discussions. We talked of many things and we didn’t keep notes.”

SickKids declined to answer my questions about its history concerning infanticide and discriminatory treatments, the institutional norms that might have enabled them, and what steps, if any, were taken to prevent similar incidents going forward: “At SickKids, we are deeply committed to upholding our core values of compassion, dignity, respect, and equity in every aspect of patient care. Our staff bring extraordinary skill, judgement, and dedication to their work to ensure that every child and family receives the highest standard of care, regardless of diagnosis or ability.”

SickKids Hospital is not the only institution that has allowed children with disabilities to die of treatable illnesses. It accords with the direction of the field of medicine over the past century. The preventable deaths of children with disabilities occur, for the most part, without media interest. To understand why the law and societal outrage have failed to stop this practice, we must trace the history of child murder in North America since 1915.

And we must discard a fiction: that infanticide, being illegal, was not historically practiced by physicians in North America. As the medical historian Martin Pernick stresses, “the history of infanticide by lay people—parents, midwives, and governments, dating back to ancient Greece—was widely discussed in these debates [over selective non-­treatment of disabled children]. But the role played by past American physicians in such decisions is now virtually unknown.”“Therapeutic homicide”—a term used in an editorial of the Canadian Medical Association Journal a decade ago, before Canada legalized euthanasia—is, as a rule, practiced by physicians before receiving legal sanction. Under these conditions, it is uncommon but not rare. Its fatal logic is the starting point for the devaluation and killing of people with disabilities.

Even as Roe v. Wade was being argued before the Supreme Court in 1971, Who Should Survive?, a film produced by the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, dramatized the decision to let a baby with Down syndrome die of a treatable intestinal blockage. The film was based on real deaths at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. Over the course of fifteen days, as the medical team and parents wait, the child dies of starvation.

Near the end of the film, a litany of questions is posed to the audience. “Do all children have a right to life? Who should protect the child’s rights? Do physicians have a duty to preserve life? Does mental retardation diminish the right to life?” The film is quick to note how the excruciatingly slow death of the child affects the nurses and the physician. The child’s interests are not considered. The film merely asks questions, as if doing so were nonpolitical: “The film you are about to see has a beginning and an end—but no conclusion, because it provides no answer to the questions it poses.”

Left unsaid is that a child without Down syndrome, presenting the same physical defects, would never be left to die. A non-disabled baby with a treatable life-threatening illness would receive treatment, even if the parents and medical team disagreed. Anything else would be medical malpractice or child abuse. By contrast, those deemed “profoundly disabled,” whose lives have “no value,” receive no protection.

The slippery slope that Roe’s critics warned of in fact happened in reverse: first infanticide, then mercy killing, and finally eugenic abortion on demand. Legalization followed clinical practice, not the other way around. The logic continues to prevail in the courts, whether in America, Canada, Colombia, or the Netherlands: If passive euthanasia is valid, why not active euthanasia? If prenatal abortion, why not “post-natal abortion”? If disability is a qualifying condition for assisted death, based on the empirical determination of medical experts in view of “medical futility,” then to what extent is consent necessary or even desirable?

Yet the justification for these acts is offered ­only after the fact. Ronald Regan’s 1983 “Evil Empire” speech is more often invoked than read, and most people would be surprised to learn that its early paragraphs are not about the USSR, or even ­communism: They are about evil at home. Every year, publications such as the Washington Post and the New York Times were reporting that thousands of babies were being left to die from hunger or treatable medical conditions—for the sole reason that these babies had disabilities, whether terminal or not, and were deemed “defective.” This reporting sparked the Baby Doe laws after Ronald Reagan’s surgeon general, the pediatric surgeon C. Everett Koop, denounced the nontreatment of viable babies as contrary to medical ethics. In March 1983, the Department of Health and Human Services, under the auspices of a federal law that protected people with disabilities from discrimination—a precursor to the Americans with Disabilities Act—passed an executive action to stop selective nontreatment and starvation. Yet the courts overturned the action, as Congress had not passed the requisite legal protections. In response, Congress passed a weakened amendment to the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act—which the American Academy of Pediatrics continues to claim is irrelevant to physician or institutional standards. So the legal protections enacted by Reagan lapsed.

The practice of selective nontreatment based on disabilities has continued. Though as a medical option this practice is presented as rational, the people it kills are often those with conditions that are at the same time being fear-mongered in the media—whether trisomy 13 and 18, HIV, or Thalidomide poisoning. One senior medical director at a faith-based perinatal center in New York told me, “Back in the early nineties when I started on the faculty, the chairman [of pediatrics] at the time said that although other hospitals were starting to withhold nutrition and hydration from children with terminal illness, that’s something that would never, ever happen at this facility. But you know ten years later, into the early 2000s, it was something that when the parents asked, the ethics committee would often approve it.”

Today, in most facilities across the United States, the ethics committee would not need to be involved. Though neonatologists are split on the ethics of withdrawing food and water for ­newborns—surprisingly, more so for the terminally ill than for the disabled—a recent survey of neonatal intensive care units (NICU) published in the Journal of Perinatology found that a majority of NICU units in North America now practice “withdrawal of artificial nutrition and hydration” for newborns. Of those facilities, more than 80 percent reported not requiring an ethics consultation before ceasing all food and water; virtually none had a policy on which diagnoses would qualify a patient for withdrawal of nutrition and hydration. The American Academy of Pediatrics now classifies feeding children as morally optional.

Since this is how disabled children are treated, it is no wonder that the medical field is nonchalant about the fates of children born alive after botched abortions. In January 2019, Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist and then-governor of Virginia, caused a furor by describing what happens when infants survive third-trimester abortions:

When we talk about third trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of, obviously the mother, [and] with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician, by the way, and it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that’s non-viable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered; the infant would be kept comfortable; the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.

To ask whether this is legal is beside the point. It does not need to be legal to be practiced, since any law is in force only to the extent that it is followed.

There is an irony to the story: In its final summer, the Biden administration, hardly a pro-life administration, quietly reintroduced some of the Reagan administration’s protections. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 now explicitly prohibits healthcare discrimination based on disability. Thus a newborn with Down syndrome and a heart problem must, by law, receive whatever “medical treatment is provided to other similarly situated children.” But this legal requirement is not enforced. Most hospitals, despite the fears of ethicists, made no changes to their policies, and the media failed to report on the regulation. So the regulation became moot. Last year, a study reported that between 2019 to 2022, adults with both Down syndrome and Covid were more than six times more likely than patients with similar comorbidities to have had a DNR placed on them—a rate far higher than any other illness or disability, including any terminal illness. Yet there was no reckoning among healthcare clinicians or institutions. The soul of medicine does not easily change after a century of practice.

It is impossible not to wonder what would have happened to medicine if the Bollinger ­baby—Allen—had not been killed by his primary physician. After all, Allen was nearly saved. The Chicago Tribune reported on the figure whom Harry Haiselden called a “wild eyed, interfering, hysterical woman,” a certain Catherine Walsh of 4345 West End Avenue, who attempted to convince either the mother of the baby or the physician to spare the boy after the medical commissioner of Chicago had failed to do so.

It is an astonishing piece of journalism, made even more so by the fact that Walsh’s voice was ­uncommon in contemporary debates over the Bollinger baby. Though opposition to Haiselden’s actions was voiced, mostly by Catholics quoted in the press (with opinion more divided among secular, Jewish, and Protestant experts), prominent figures who might have advocated for the child instead ­condemned him. Helen Keller, otherwise an ­advocate for the disabled, endorsed Haiselden’s work as a “­service to society,” since “no one cares about that pitiful, useless lump of flesh.” The Baltimore Catholic Review, published under James Cardinal ­Gibbons, claimed that “no one could be blamed if the child was let die according to nature” and supported Haiselden’s actions.

Yet Catherine Walsh, by her own account, nearly succeeded. She sought and received permission to baptize the child, although the child, unbeknownst to her, had already been christened. All we know is that Catherine belonged to a local Catholic Church; she likely was the mother’s friend. Her comments to the Tribune were quoted in full: 

I went to the hospital to beg that the child be taken to its mother. It was condemned to death, and I knew its mother would be its most merciful judge. I found the baby alone in a bare room, absolutely nude, its cheek numb from lying in one position, not paralyzed. I sent for Dr. Haiselden and pleaded with him not to take the infant’s bloom on his head.

It was not a monster—that child. It was a beautiful baby. I saw no deformities. I patted him. Both his eyes were open, he waved his little fists and cried lustily. I kissed his forehead. I knew if its mother got her eyes on it she would love it and never permit it to be left to die.

“If the poor little darling has one chance in 1,000,” I said to Dr. Haiselden, “won’t you operate and save it?” The doctor laughed. “I’m afraid it might get well,” he replied.

As I left the hospital a man said to me. “I guess the doctor is right from a scientific standpoint. But humanly he is wrong.” “Thank God,” I answered, “we are all human.”

It took five days for Allen to die. Anna Bollinger, the boy’s mother, never recovered from the death of her fourth child. She never saw the child; the medical staff would not permit it. Even amid the savagery of the First World War, Anna’s death almost two years later was front-page news across the country. Her husband, Allen Bollinger, told the Associated Press: “After the baby’s death, my wife fell into a settled melancholy and wasted away. If ever a woman died of a broken heart she did.”

It is callous to claim that a moral lesson can be gleaned from this level of suffering. Yet in 2025, in the lobby of SickKids, the best children’s hospital in the world, I found myself walking away from Mo and Krystal repeating Catherine’s words from 1915: “Thank God, we are all human.”

On August 1, five weeks after the last time I spoke with Krystal, Veya, whose middle name was Hope, died after a nineteen-month fight. Just like Allen, Veya was the fourth child. Her parents managed to move her to another hospital, the same hospital in which she was born. “Through the incredible team at McMaster [Hospital], God brought deep healing to our hearts from the trauma we left Sick Kids with,” Krystal wrote on her Instagram account. “Her last days were tender, peaceful, and full of love.”

Image by Lyfhospital, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

The post Practitioners of Infanticide appeared first on First Things.

Hunter argues that America’s “we-ness” and our common affirmations and shared loves have diverse sources. He allows that John Locke and other figures from the British Enlightenment influenced the Founders in decisive ways. But he also notes the enduring role of Protestant Christianity, especially dissenting forms such as Puritanism and Methodism, as well as revivalist and populist Christianity. By his reading, these forms of Protestantism lent themselves to political syncretism, which he calls America’s “hybrid-Enlightenment.” Liberal rights were advanced to protect individual freedoms, but their formulation was not accompanied by a rationalist assault on religious faith and traditional ­mores. Hunter cites Revolution-era luminaries who firmly believed that America would be a vehicle for God’s consummation of his millennial plans for ­humanity—and “the home of free government, reason, progress, and the ‘rights of man.’”

In Hunter’s telling, America’s hybrid-Enlightenment underwrote an ongoing expansion of solidarity. What began as rights accorded only to property-holding white men came to encompass wage-earners, blacks, and women. An American “we-ness” that was originally limited to Protestants was expanded to include ­Catholics, Jews, and religious outsiders such as Mormons. These developments were contested. But the rationales for reform came from within the American tradition, which is why we can tell a story of development, not ­discontinuity.

Democracy and Solidarity offers an American history in which solidarity is expanded and those once excluded are included. But this is only the liberal half of the story. Our history has also been marked by periods during which illiberal methods were employed to renew and buttress solidarity. The political response to the upheavals of the industrial revolution was one such period. In that era, Woodrow Wilson played a central role.

Wilson is a hate-figure among conservatives. Along with Franklin Roosevelt, Wilson is credited with the erection of the dreaded “administrative state,” which is said to betray the great American tradition of freedom. Conservatives accuse Wilson and Roosevelt of favoring the direction of society from above, inaugurating an illiberal tyranny of technocrats.

There’s something to these criticisms. As a young man, Wilson made his reputation with an influential book about America’s constitutional system, Congressional Government (1885). In that volume, Wilson bemoaned the immobility of the committee-driven process of legislation. He urged a more dynamic and energetic form of governance, the better to address the new problems and challenges facing the American nation. In practice, pivoting away from the checks and balances that limit government meant empowering the executive branch, allowing the president to serve as the functional leader of the legislative branch, as the prime minister does in the British parliamentary system.

When Wilson entered politics, first as governor of New Jersey and then as president of the United States (first elected in 1912), he did not attain his goal by altering the Constitution. Instead, Wilson established himself as the undisputed leader of the Democratic Party. He pushed through legislation to establish the Federal Reserve, passed a federal income tax, created the Federal Trade Commission to enforce antitrust laws, regulated child labor, and set an eight-hour workday for railroad workers.

These measures addressed the economic problems of his day. Many were denounced as violations of one or another aspect of the liberal principle of freedom of contract, which is the foundation of a free market ­unhindered by governmental intervention and regulation. (The Supreme Court’s 1905 landmark decision in ­Lochner v. New York upheld this liberal principle.)  Moreover, Wilson achieved these legislative successes, because he often appealed over the heads of legislators to the American people. And as the Founders knew well, direct democracy is not a friend of liberal principles.

Wilson was not alone in his progressive zeal for reform. Had Theodore Roosevelt prevailed in the three-way election of 1912, he would have pursued his own version of muscular executive leadership. Both men were by nature attracted to power. But this does not explain their roles in our political history. The American people were anxious about plutocratic control. In the early twentieth century, trusts such as Standard Oil and U.S. Steel controlled entire industries. Labor unrest roiled the country. Left-wing political radicalism spawned acts of terrorism. Mass migration was transforming the demography of the country. And the extraordinary growth of American industry propelled the nation to the forefront of global affairs, a role difficult to square with older American traditions.

Put simply, the nation was rich but ill at ease, prosperous but at odds with itself. With his energetic and illiberal methods and programs, Wilson sought to stabilize and consolidate the country. And he largely succeeded. None of his signal achievements were reversed when Republicans assumed control of government in 1920. They persisted as central elements of America’s unique approach to regulated capitalism, an approach that renewed the social contract in the twentieth century and thus ensured that a broadly liberal approach to politics and economics would endure. Something similar can be said of Franklin Roosevelt, a demagogue in the mold of Wilson who likewise used illiberal methods to stabilize and unite the country in a time of greater crisis.

Wilson and FDR dominated the political culture of America in the first half of the twentieth century. ­Unlike the figures surveyed by James Davison ­Hunter, they do not fit into the liberal story of America. They did not expand the circle of inclusion into the American promise of freedom. (Wilson was a reluctant supporter of the Nineteenth Amendment, which accorded to women the right to vote; Roosevelt did not act to ensure civil rights for blacks.) Their vocation was different. They sought to renew American solidarity, which required taming and restraining certain kinds of freedom, especially freedom of contract. (Roosevelt intimidated the Supreme Court to secure the overturning of Lochner.) In a word, Wilson and FDR administered strong doses of illiberalism.

We are living in a similar period. Immigration, economic vulnerability, globalization—the American people are anxious. Once again, a powerful, energetic executive presses against liberal norms, as did Wilson and FDR. I don’t wish to commend any of the particular measures taken by the present administration, although some strike me as wise and necessary. My point is more fundamental. We do not need to read Carl Schmitt or Charles Maurras to meet today’s challenges. We’ve been here before as a nation, and we have had statesmen who addressed liberalism’s failures so that the American ideals of liberty could be renewed and reshaped for new circumstances. In 2026, we would do well to study the methods of Wilson and FDR and weigh their achievements as well as failures. For we need something of their innovation and daring to navigate our present crisis.

The post The Lessons of Woodrow Wilson appeared first on First Things.

In his announcement, Trump expressed strong opposition to recreational marijuana, stating his intent was only 1) to facilitate research on cannabis as a pain and nausea reliever and 2) to facilitate clearer guidance on products that contain cannabis but do not produce a “high.” Trump was firm: “Unless [marijuana] is recommended by a doctor for medical reasons, just don’t do it.” 

Nevertheless, marijuana is now to be regulated under the CSA no more than such common drugs as Advil and Motrin. This has the potential to be a terrible mistake. In order for Trump’s words about the dangers of recreational pot not to ring hollow, he needs to take firm action to inhibit recreational use. 

First, a growing body of research demonstrates that use of marijuana:

• can alter the genetic makeup of heavy users and the fetuses of heavily using expectant mothers, causing birth defects, faster aging, and higher rates of numerous cancers;
• is associated with elevated risks of cardiovascular disease; heart attack; stroke; arrhythmia; head, mouth, and throat cancers; pulmonary disease; and liver damage;
• can cause permanent IQ loss of as much as eight points when use starts at a young age;
• can cause significant reduction in working memory—an impact found not only in heavy lifetime users but also in recent users;
• is linked to depression, anxiety, suicide, and psychoses, including schizophrenia, especially in male users between twenty-one and thirty.

Moreover, estimates show 10 percent of all marijuana users will become addicted, a number that spikes to one in six for those who start use before eighteen. 

It is precisely because marijuana is so dangerous that a raft of federal laws exists designed to inhibit use. These laws are not impacted by rescheduling and can only be revoked by Congress. Marijuana possession and distribution remain illegal under federal law—although Congress and the executive branch over the past decade have watered down federal enforcement. 

In 2013, the Obama administration issued charging priorities stating that U.S. attorneys should not prosecute violations of federal marijuana laws in those states that have legalized it, except in cases of marijuana distribution to minors or distribution involving high levels of potential for violence, impaired driving, or revenue being funneled to cartels or gangs. 

During the first Trump administration, the DOJ formally revoked this policy but replaced it only with a statement calling for federal law enforcement to return to “well-established principles when pursuing prosecutions related to marijuana activities.” No further guidance was issued. The Obama policy had caused a sea-change in federal enforcement. In effect, President Trump ratified the Obama practice. The Biden administration did nothing to change it.

In light of the serious harms of marijuana and the real possibility that rescheduling could create a slippery slope toward further recreational legalization, Trump’s DOJ should rework its charging instructions. Given the connection between marijuana use and schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses in individuals under thirty, U.S. attorneys should charge in states that have legalized pot any dealers who make recreational sales to individuals under thirty. They should also prosecute in states with legal medicinal marijuana those dealers and physicians who sell without a valid prescription or who issue sham prescriptions. The DEA should also resolutely enforce anti-marijuana laws in states that have not legalized it at all. 

Lastly, a range of other regulations against marijuana are also unaffected by rescheduling. Regulations bar marijuana advertisements on radio and television, make marijuana use a cause for termination from federal employment, and impose banking restrictions designed to prohibit corporations from saturating locales with nationally franchised pot parlors. 

Firm and informed voices must preserve these regulations. Trump needs to reiterate the importance of federal banking rules, lest rescheduling encourage changes in the law that would aid the rise of Big Pot companies with every incentive to encourage widespread use—an outcome likely to cause misperceptions about the dangers of recreational pot. Trump must also reiterate the importance of the advertising ban, lest rescheduling enable changes that would permit massive ad campaigns for marijuana—an outcome also likely to create popular confusion about the dangers. Lastly, federal policy should reaffirm that recreational use is a cause for termination of federal employment. 

If Trump fails to put actions behind his words condemning recreational use, he will betray the American people—a bitter irony for a president who professes to Make America Healthy Again.

The post Trump’s Marijuana Order Could Be a Terrible Mistake appeared first on First Things.

Like many great Americans, Manny’s story began outside the country. Born in Havana, he immigrated first to Spain with his family and then to the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1976. 

Educated in New York City’s famous Catholic schools, he would go on to attend Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he distinguished himself as the student representative on the school’s executive committee and as a Circumnavigators Foundation Scholar. Manny had an abiding love for his alma mater, becoming one of the most ardent defenders of its Catholic character and a mentor to hundreds of Georgetown’s sons. As an alumnus, he was an active participant in Georgetown’s debating groups, having frequently attended the Philodemic Society and assisted in reviving the Philonomosian Society. 

After his alma mater decided it would officially recognize and fund a pro-abortion student organization called GU Choice on campus, he became counsel for the Georgetown Ignatian Society in its canon law effort to stop Georgetown’s funding of the group. After months of negotiation with church authorities and a final appeal to the Vatican, the university ultimately defunded GU Choice. The legacy of Manny’s advocacy continues to this day: Georgetown still does not permit abortions in its hospitals or tuition-funded abortion-lobbying groups on its campus. 

Decades later, Manny would be a primary advocate for keeping Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service named after its Jesuit founder, Fr. Edmund A. Walsh, when administrators sought to rename it to honor former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. There are countless more charitable efforts at Georgetown that Manny supported anonymously.

When I met him four years ago, I was charmed like so many by his love of life and ability to connect with so many different kinds of people. His commitment to Catholicism enhanced his appreciation for other faiths, and he was well-known for his friendships across denominational and religious lines. Manny was at heart a cheerful and courageous warrior who was never afraid to speak up when he felt the mission of his alma mater or country was being betrayed or underserved. 

He was also able to seamlessly incorporate his many talents into a robust career in both the private and public sectors. After graduating law school at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, he worked for the high-powered New York law firm Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts and then for the Washington legal group Russin & Vecchi, where he advised the Russian Orthodox Church in America. In the public sector, he held distinguished positions in Congress, working as a senior counsel at the Senate Judiciary Committee and as a policy advisor to then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. 

After leaving the Hill, Manny became chairman of the Third Branch Conference where he helped mobilize support for traditional Catholic Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination. When Alito was confirmed, Manny was thrilled. He was honored by the American Conservative Union with its prestigious Ronald Reagan Award for his efforts in 2006, but his real reward came when Justice Alito authored the Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. 

Manny also had a significant career in foreign policy, having served as the director of the Office of Legislative Statecraft at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in 2007 and 2008. In that capacity, he sought to increase the Iraqi government’s ability to legislate and to harmonize the Iraqi and Kurdistan bars. He famously brought legal leaders of the country to Washington to meet with Chief Justice John Roberts in a bid to update the country’s legal system under American auspices.

Throughout his time in Washington, Manny was affiliated with many of the power players in the conservative movement. He was a visiting legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a policy fellow and senior counsel at the Family Research Council, and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Manny also served as the president of the Cardinal Newman Society, an organization that advocates for a common theme of his life: the preservation of Catholic faithfulness in the educational institutions of the Church. 

The conservative movement has lost an irreplaceable giant, one who was unafraid to challenge the popular opinion of the day in favor of the timeless truths of the Catholic Church and the American tradition. Now it is up to his many friends and mentees to keep his legacy alive for future generations.

The post The Legacy of Manny Miranda appeared first on First Things.

Recent decades have vindicated de Rougemont’s prediction. Consider Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Though he says that the “perpetrators” are different today, he insists on Hitler’s continuous presence. On January 23, 2020, in a speech delivered at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial, Steinmeier warned that Germany still faces “the same evil” that existed during the Nazi era. The specter of Hitler was also the focus of his most recent speech, given on November 9—the most symbolic and fraught date in recent German history. According to Steinmeier, November 9 serves as “the core of our identity.”

In his speech, Steinmeier made clear that he considers the AfD (Alternative for Germany), the allegedly extremist and anti-democratic right-wing party, Hitler’s successor. It is as de Rougemont predicted. Unable to imagine that economic, social, and demographic crises—not Hitler—are driving voters toward the AfD, the political establishment feels justified in exercising a continuously lawless, anti-democratic campaign against the party.

Steinmeier is now openly calling for a ban on the AfD—in the name of “defensive democracy” (“wehrhafte Demokratie”), of course. “Let’s do what needs to be done,” he urges. The remarkable mixture of helplessness in the face of voter dissatisfaction and autocratic arrogance did not go unnoticed, even by mainstream media. The German political establishment faces an obvious dilemma. Eight state elections are coming up next year. Polling suggests growing support for the AfD. The establishment must either launch a risky attack on democracy and “elect a new people,” as the German author Bertolt Brecht once quipped, or be voted out of power.

Steinmeier is in a certain sense right when he accuses the AfD of being unconstitutional. The Federal Republic, almost from the beginning, has had two constitutions: the written one—the Grundgesetz, dating from 1949—and the “lived” one, the anti-fascist constitution. The second, unwritten constitution is animated by an ideology Paul Gottfried describes in his 2021 book Antifascism. The crisis of meaning in modernity, the disenchantment with socialism that had already taken hold during the Stalin era, and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc caused the German left to take a new form. It became “the political incarnation of unconditional morality,” as the Berlin philosopher Peter Furth put it in 1990, and unconditional morality turns on resisting “the same evil.”

The rise of this unconditional political morality began in the immediate postwar period. First came “Gruppe 47,” an influential literary group, and the return of the Frankfurt School (“Marxism without the working class”) in the early 1950s. The turbulent 1960s and the terror-marked 1970s are well known. Both decades saw the beginnings of a paradigm shift in public attitudes. However, until the end of the Helmut Kohl government in 1998, the written constitution clearly dominated in terms of state policy.

Since then, the lived constitution—significantly influenced by the German Democratic Republic’s old-fashioned communist anti-fascism after reunification—has been replacing the written one. On February 20, 2016, seventy-six personalities from Berlin’s cultural scene celebrated Chancellor Merkel’s opening of the border, signing a tribute advertised in Die Welt. It reads as if Merkel had personally defeated Hitler by welcoming a million Muslim migrants. The relief of these people was enormous: They were finally free from a Germany capable of “the same evil.” Hence the indifference with which German elites regarded Merkel’s breaches of law.

What Steinmeier calls “defensive democracy” obscures a creeping coup d’état. The AfD is an enemy of the lived constitution. The government is determined to revise (without saying so, and without voter consent) the written constitution so that it serves the unwritten one, even if that means openly violating the Grundgesetz. Of course, for German elites, the lived constitution has moral priority. Thus, the central issue in the conflict with the AfD is less about constitutional law and more about salvation history, one that follows the concept of the “optimistic tragedy.” Like the 1932 play of the same name by Vsevolod Vishnevsky, the secular salvation history promoted by Germany’s establishment promises a positive meaning, even for a tragic event. According to this concept, the global catharsis of defeating Hitler once again will be worth the German sacrifice. The idea makes me shudder, but only time will tell what the future has in store.

Image by Metropolico.org, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

The post A Tale of Two Constitutions appeared first on First Things.

One reason for this ongoing crisis of trust might be the most obvious: the pervasive fear that if and when a priest is ever accused of misconduct, he will be thrown under the proverbial bus rather than presumed innocent, given competent legal representation, and afforded due process. A similar survey three years ago had stated that “82% of priests regularly fear being falsely accused of sexual abuse.” There is no reason to assume that percentage has decreased over the last three years.

Quite the contrary. Even as the number of “substantiated” allegations of child sex abuse involving current minors (as opposed to abuse involving victims from decades prior) has plunged nationwide to near zero (seven in 2022, three in 2023, and only two in 2024, according to page 18 of the USCCB’s 2024 Annual Report), a disquieting phenomenon known as “Charter creep” has spread like a virus through the U.S. Church. When the nation’s Catholic bishops released the Dallas Charter in 2002, their focus was on quelling the raging scandal of clerical sex abuse of minors and the related mismanagement by church authorities. Justly proud of the subsequent advancements made in the prevention and detection of abuse, legal and compliance personnel in U.S. chanceries have now turned their gaze to many things other than the sex abuse of minors by clerics.

One of the most disconcerting trends is the scrutiny of past conduct, including sins from the distant past that were repented of and forgiven long ago. As a result, priests with spotless records of selfless service to the People of God are now being removed from ministry—and even publicly humiliated—based on reports from decades ago, before they entered seminary, some even dating back to their youth.

As a matter of canon and civil law, the alleged misconduct in these cases is not subject to criminal prosecution, either because procedural safeguards prohibit action on matters decades old, or because the allegations themselves do not involve criminal conduct (for example, the nebulous “boundary violation”). Yet in light of the current environment of virtue-signaling and political expediency, when the rule of law is deliberately neglected by those who should know better, ghosts from the past are allowed to destroy the lives of men who thought they could trust the Church to which they had given their lives. Such “Charter creep” is all the more problematic for an institution supposedly dedicated to the forgiveness of sin and reconciliation.

It is sometimes argued that in the interest of “protecting children,” no stone should go unturned, and—to paraphrase Barry Goldwater—“extremism in the prosecution of clerical child sex abuse is no vice.” Diocesan lawyers can argue that traditional principles of equity and due process, while noble in theory, have to be set aside “for the time being” so that negative publicity or financial liability may be avoided. After all, if the sins from a priest’s past are exposed, it might become an “embarrassment” for the Church—or, even worse, the diocesan insurance carrier might refuse to honor its liability coverage.

But observing the rule of law is most important when it is unpopular. Recall the words of Sen. Susan Collins, when she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court Justice during his hotly contested nomination process in 2018: “In evaluating any given claim of misconduct we will be ill-served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness, tempting though it may be. We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.”

In moments of moral panic, the only defense against the passions of mob rule is the calm insistence on rationality and justice. The obligation on the part of authority to follow the rule of law is just as important within the Church as it is for secular society. And what about the opportunity—let alone the duty—for the Church to teach in word and example about the power of God’s grace, of the forgiveness of sins, and of redemption?

To be sure, canon law does view certain acts as so problematic that they act as impediments to ordination. Canon 1041 of the 1983 Code addresses potential obstacles such as having cooperated in an abortion, attempting suicide, or suffering from debilitating psychological infirmity. Such factors raise serious red flags that must be addressed before anyone dares to submit himself to ordination. Not on that list of possible disqualifiers, however, are a whole range of behaviors that are endemic among today’s youth. Is the Church simply being naive here? Maybe in its zeal to recruit ministers, the Church is willing to overlook past misconduct? Shouldn’t the Church be more selective in its selection of ministers?

Interesting objections, certainly. But who among us wants to be defined by the worst thing he has ever done? Isn’t redemption possible? The Church, with two millennia of experience in the human condition, evidently believes so. Founded upon the rock of St. Peter, it cannot ordain only those men who are free from sin, even grievous sin. The seminaries, rectories, and chanceries would be very empty indeed if only the perfect could be ordained.

I am a civil and canon lawyer who often represents priests accused of misconduct. Thus I have firsthand knowledge of men who, notwithstanding several decades of faithful priestly service, are now out of work, out of ministry, and in some cases even have seen their names published on the internet as among those “credibly accused of child sexual abuse” (despite the Holy See’s disapproval of the practice). Wearing such a scarlet letter has life-altering consequences: They may not be allowed to live in certain housing, hold a job, or even volunteer. Some fear to show themselves in public or to share their last names or their former professions with people they may happen to meet. A few even worry about how they are going to pay the rent or buy food, given that making payments of any kind to those on the “credibly accused list” can be an unpopular practice within a diocesan chancery.

In addition to the obvious problems relating to the absence of proof and the lack of due process in such cases, there is also the fundamental violation of human rights when a person is punished with a retroactive application of the law (see Article 11 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The retroactive application of the church’s penal law is specifically prohibited in the Codes for both the Latin and Eastern Rite Churches (see c. 1313, §1 CIC; c. 1412 §2 CCEO). Yet citations to the law are often met with a yawn—or a contemptuous sniff—as if adherence to fundamental principles of justice is somehow incompatible with the genuine desire to protect children.

How would St. Augustine fare these days, one is left to wonder. His Confessions admit to such things as deliberate theft, persisting in false religion, and fathering a child out of wedlock, not to mention imposing untold suffering on his poor mother. Yet after Monica’s tears and prayers, and upon witnessing the faithful example of St. Ambrose, this apparent ne’er-do-well turned his life around, sought baptism, and became not only a bishop and a founder of a famous religious order, but a pillar of Western civilization—and a saint.

The post When Forgiveness of Sins Becomes a Financial Liability appeared first on First Things.

America is awash in rights talk. Rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness permeate our Founding documents and our culture. Rights are in the air we breathe. But, traditionally, Orthodox Christianity hasn’t used that vocabulary. Rather, Orthodoxy ­emphasizes the need to deny ourselves and crucify our fallen wills and desires. A. G. Roeber wants to change that emphasis. Tracing rights talk back to the late Middle Ages, he argues that Orthodox Christians can and should reason about rights as other Americans do.

Roeber’s case is impressionistic, not systematic. Modern rights talk, he notes, is grounded in the imago Dei. And of course that concept is central to Orthodoxy: the understanding from Genesis 1:26–27 that God made each of us “in His own image” and “after [His] likeness.” That’s the unshakable ground of our human dignity and infinite worth. But Orthodox Christians have long regarded “individual rights” as an alien vocabulary that could sunder our oneness in the body of Christ. Analogously, Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon famously warned that rights talk has flattened our moral discourse.

Roeber, however, is far more sanguine. We Orthodox Christians find ourselves in pluralistic societies with no established church. We cannot pretend that we still live in the Byzantine Empire. Our nation is founded on protecting men’s God-given inalienable rights, including freedoms of speech and religion. Rights talk, he suggests, could bring the Church up to date and into our context. As we confront modern concerns ranging from the laity’s role in church governance to gender and sexuality, we could engage in dialogue about competing rights. The error, he argues, is not in rights talk per se, but in divorcing rights from correlative duties. And as we learn more from critical biblical scholars and scientists about homosexuality and gender dysphoria, we could open our minds to new ways of seeing these questions.

Unfortunately, Roeber’s book cannot decide what kind of history to do: social, intellectual, or theological. And in waffling between descriptive and normative, traditional and modern, he puts the mind of the world level with or even above the mind of the Church.

Roeber’s book is part of a broader agenda. It appears in a series published by Fordham University’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center. As the book’s frontispiece proclaims, the series comprises books “that seek to bring Orthodox Christianity into an engagement with contemporary forms of thought.” That means applying “contemporary modes of thought” to update “Orthodox self-understandings” and apply these fresh perspectives to “cultural, political, economic, and ethical concerns.” The Fordham Center also publishes Public Orthodoxy, a progressive website that advocates liberalizing the Church’s approaches to same-sex relationships, transgenderism, and the roles of women in the church. In short, the Center is a progressive project seeking to assimilate the Church to the world, rather than other way around. 

This book is no exception. Although it purports to be descriptive, its subtext is normative, portraying traditionalists as stuck in the past, dangerously “retreat[ing] from dialogue and honest engagement with the realities of a society.” Bishops, too, come in for plenty of criticism, because they have refused to defer to scientists and “expert[s] in subject matters ranging from birth and beginning of life to dietary restrictions to social justice.”

George Bernanos wrote: “The worst, the most ­corrupting lies are problems poorly stated.” Roeber begins from the wrong starting point, follows the wrong map, and so goes down the wrong path. His is not a ­theological history, so there is no standard of truth against which to judge progress. The result is a book that adopts the mindset of the world, not the phronema (mindset, worldview) of the Church Fathers.

For instance, chapter 5 strongly implies that the church’s governance has been too “magisterial and autocratic.” The ­hierarchy, ­Roeber suggests, should follow “constitutional and legal procedures” to protect seminary professors’ academic freedom. He portrays the Greek Archdiocese’s top hierarch as paranoid about “infect[ion] by American values he identified with Protestantism.” Instead of insisting on obedience, Roeber seems to ­argue, the hierarchy should embrace dialogue.

Here as elsewhere, Roeber’s starting point is neither the Holy Scriptures nor the Church Fathers, but a farrago of ­predominantly secular and heterodox sources smushed together. He discusses shockingly few primary ­sources from the Biblical and Patristic eras. For instance, one would have ­expected him to anchor a ­discussion of the beginning of life in the Patristic tradition, stretching all the way back to the Didache’s teaching against abortion in the late first century. Instead, chapter 6 gives us nearly twenty pages on Roe v. Wade, Dobbs, Obergefell, ­Mormon polygamy, and suffragettes, before a quick social history of Orthodox women over the last two ­centuries—but no Church Fathers.In short, ­Roeber takes the Enlightenment as a given and so uses the language of rights, social contract, and ­democracy, importing a Western, libertarian, individualist epistemology. ­Roeber’s idea of “dialogue” is less witness than infiltration.

Accepting the American view of rights leads Roeber to see “dilemmas of values versus rights” everywhere. For example, in discussing the sexes in chapter 7, Roeber starts off with a couple of pages reviewing the scriptural basis for recognizing humans as created male and female, not mutable or socially constructed. But he quickly puts up for grabs the traditional understanding of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He wants “discussion of the questions of sex and gender that question any aspect of received teaching.” Likewise, he asks Orthodox Chrisstians to view the struggle with gender dysphoria as like the struggle to walk the path toward theosis, “‘becoming’ the increasing likeness to God.” Glib analogies like these yield the Church’s firm foundation to the zeitgeist.

Roeber does not see how shades of terminology convey important conceptual differences. As he notes, the Orthodox Church has traditionally reasoned in terms of authority, prerogative, seniority, and conciliarity. Those terms make sense within the church’s hierarchical structure. “Rights,” by contrast, bring us into alien individualist soil. As Wesley Hohfeld has written, they denote correlative legal duties between individuals. But the Orthodox Church views us not as atomized individuals, but as persons in relationship. Rights talk often distracts from or even interferes with those relations. Plus, rights claims are insatiable. As Roeber concedes,people incessantly make “elastic and increasingly broad claims” of rights. But he fails to see that giving ground or meeting them halfway is no answer, especially when new rights claimants keep moving the goalposts further from the faith. One needs a normative framework, grounded in Scripture and tradition, to reject many novel claims and limit many others.

Roeber’s appeal to democracy misses the point. In resisting the hierarchy, American laity have asserted their rights to influence church government and control parish property, linking rights to democratic input. And Roeber praises such contemporary dialogue as protected free speech. But the Church is the body of Christ, much more a family than a democracy. The laity are not voters, and the people lack the charism of their bishop. True, one can vaguely analogize Orthodox concepts to rights and democracy, but those analogies obscure more than they reveal. For instance, the laity do play an important conciliar role in the Church, but not the one implied by secular concepts like democracy. It is the bishop who, in selecting and ordaining a man, proclaims him worthy—even if the ordination is complete only when the laity likewise respond that he is worthy. The laity can veto an ordination but cannot force it.

Rights talk is natural to Americans. And it may be simpatico with many varieties of Protestantism, given their epistemological individualism. But both Orthodox and Catholic Churches predate the Enlightenment and need to start from their own foundations. Starting there, we see the dangers of going down the rights road.

The foundation of the Church is not a social contract among atomized individuals but the body of Christ. We are ontologically ­brothers and sisters in Christ, parts of the same body, children of the same God. We were made to live in unity and brotherly love with one another and with all Creation. ­Only Adam and Eve’s disobedience and self-will distanced us from God, the giver of life, introducing sickness, sin, and death into the world.

Our wills are fallen away from God. The Fall clouds our minds with selfish desires. That ­individualism is diseased; we are called to ­heal our fallen human wills. It is by losing ourselves that we find our true selves. By bearing one another’s burdens, we fulfill the law of Christ, the law of love.

Notice how far that account is from Enlightenment individualism. The Enlightenment, microeconomics, and rights talk all rest on a Hobbesian or Lockean anthropology. The highest good is autonomy, choosing as consumers what we imagine will satisfy our fallen desires. Within that framework, it is odd to say that someone has a right to something, then to critique how he exercises that right. Who am I to judge how a rich man fails to help the poor? What could possibly be wrong with suicide?

By contrast, Christ ­teaches us to quell our self-will. We may not play God. Spiritual autonomy, far from the supreme good, is spiritually harmful. In the Lord’s Prayer, we say, “Thy will be done.” And in the Garden of Gethsemane, our Savior stands as an example to us all: “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.” The consumerist will that hesitates and chooses, St. Maximos the Confessor teaches, is an artifact of the Fall. To heal our wills, we must train ourselves to obey—hardly a fashionable virtue. Roeber never ­touches on any of this.

The implications are severe. Our time, talents, treasures, even our bodies and lives, aren’t truly our own. They belong to God. But rights talk obscures all that. We must live not as individuals, but as persons in community and relationship, not standing on our rights.

It is not enough to counterbalance rights with duties. Buying into modern rights vocabulary cedes too much ground to the will, to autonomy as the highest good. As Mark Movsesian has noted, most secular human rights claims are subjectivist, based on each person’s will—which is not the Orthodox understanding of the imago Dei. That subjectivity slights man’s calling to grow into whom we were made to be by taking up our crosses, denying our fallen wills, and following Christ.

That is not an easy calling, especially in a wealthy, post-Christian world. God’s providence has put us here, and we must be grateful for that as for all things. We must render unto Caesar our taxes, our ­obedience, and our allegiance as far as we can in good conscience. And, fortunately, our country’s ­freedoms of speech and religion and ­protection of private property make it legally easier to live according to conscience. Those are providential gifts.

But our culture often cuts the other way; that is the true danger. My brother is not my competition, but my life. Christianity demands far more of us than noninterference with others according to the Millian harm principle. As Dostoevsky famously argues throughout The Brothers ­Karamazov, I am indeed my brother’s keeper. Only Cain, the first murderer, pretended otherwise. 

Rights talk exacerbates the cultural confusion, tempting us to confuse what is legal with what is morally and religiously right. Traditional Christians should take ­Roeber’s book as a cautionary tale. Our faith requires us to draw clear lines and not confuse secular vocabulary and concepts with the sacred ones that orient us. We can and should be good Americans. But we must be good Christians first.

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Princess Gloria is a well-known enfant terrible with a weakness for the public eye and a greater weakness for the Catholic Church. The former “punk princess” (a name she earned in her flamboyant youth) does not mince her words. Her outspoken conservative views have drawn hatred and criticism from the German left. Unfortunately, this arson attack marks a new stage in the Kulturkampf that is almost as old as the Federal Republic itself, a conflict that goes back to the Weimar Republic.

The wave of deadly political violence in 1970s Germany began with arson attacks as well. The Antifa manifesto claiming responsibility for the attack on the precious monument says it was intended to serve as a “warning,” citing Gloria’s connection with Steve Bannon and Viktor Orbán, as well as her stance against abortion. It was also a “direct reaction” to the imprisonment of Hanna S., an Antifa thug from the so-called Hammer Gang who was sentenced to five years in prison last month. Princess Gloria is, of course, not at all responsible for that event. “For centuries,” the Antifa manifesto states, “Thurn und Taxis has stood for monarchy, contempt for humanity, and a class-based society.” Gloria “belongs to the sections of the bourgeoisie that are promoting the return of fascism in Germany and around the world.” This is classic left-wing thinking. Gloria is a “class enemy” who deserves to be destroyed.

Despite the threat against the princess, not a single word of remonstrance has been voiced by state representatives. By contrast, the Hammer Gang, which brutally hunted down “right-wingers” in Budapest and beat them up, was punished with imprisonment by a Hungarian government that understands the importance of the rule of law. One of the imprisoned members is named “Maja T.”—a young, athletic person with a large Adam’s apple who identifies as non-binary. He received a sympathetic visit in June from the Green politician Katrin Göring-Eckardt, a vice-president of the German Bundestag from 2021 to 2025. I fear that German elites do not respect the rule of law and will tolerate violence against anyone whom the left deems a “fascist.” For the German establishment, the fact that President Trump has designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization speaks more in favor of Antifa than in favor of Trump.

The same week of the fire, the Berlin-Treptow chapter of the Left Party (today’s iteration of the former ruling party of the German Democratic Republic), together with a government-funded NGO, declared that it wants to “make life uncomfortable” for Apollo News, a young, successful, conservative-libertarian media outlet. The federal government has made no comment on this threat. 

This attack on right-leaning media contrasts with the fact that Germany’s mostly left-wing book publishers are supported by the chancellor’s cultural department. One of the publishers distributes a practical guide that explains exactly what violence can be lethal and how to write a letter of confession. When asked about this incitement to terrorism, Wolfram Weimer, the minister of State for Culture and a former conservative journalist, is said to have downplayed the guide. I don’t envy his situation. There effectively exists no state-sponsored culture in Germany other than left-wing and extreme left-wing enterprises. Weimer either distributes money to them, or his office closes. Were he to send even the smallest amount to a right-wing publisher, he, too, would be targeted.

The left long ago completed its “march through the institutions.” Yet it still believes itself to be under attack; thus “self-defense” by any means possible is permissible. Germany’s federal government openly colludes with extremism in order to exclude and damage the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is now the strongest party in the polls. The establishment parties have their backs to the wall, but they still control government power. Julian Reichelt, former editor in chief of the largest German newspaper Bild, has built up his own media outlet nius.de, where Gloria is a regular guest. Reichelt challenges the government’s narrative and misinformation. Smart, brave, and successful, he is now also a target.

Further escalation poses a serious threat. Up to this point, those on the right who have been attacked often remain silent. That may be an understandable tactic—staying out of the spotlight to prevent further attacks—but it is not a strategy. If those on the right do not defend themselves, the left will continue its threats—and deeds—of violence.

German society is paralyzed. The left-wing establishment is losing the support of the people, and it increasingly relies on sheer power to maintain its dominance. There is a widespread concern that a state of emergency will be used to suspend legal protections and crack down on dissent. Growing public tensions, migrant violence, economic decline, poor public finances—the pressure builds.

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Six hundred years after Catholics began to celebrate the Red Mass in England, this liturgical tradition arrived on American shores. The first American Red Mass was celebrated in New York in 1928, and soon thereafter, Catholic lawyers began organizing Red Masses across the United States. In 1941, for example, the Red Mass tradition was inaugurated in Boston, and by the 1950s, Red Masses were regularly celebrated in more than twenty major American cities. 

During the twentieth century, the Red Mass became an increasingly prominent feature of the American legal calendar for reasons both demographic and philosophical. For one, the first few decades of the century were a period of substantial growth in the American Catholic legal community. Indeed, the first-generation American children of European Catholic emigrants increasingly saw entry into the legal profession as a reliable means of socioeconomic advancement. To serve this burgeoning population, numerous Catholic law schools were established before mid-century, including Creighton (1904), Fordham (1907), Loyola Chicago (1908), Marquette (1908), Santa Clara (1911), Gonzaga (1912), Loyola New Orleans (1914), Loyola Marymount (1920), Boston College (1929), and San Diego (1949). As more Catholics entered the legal profession and obtained positions of influence in domestic law and politics, so too did the Red Mass become increasingly well-recognized. 

These demographic realities aside, the Red Mass also grew in prominence during the twentieth century because of the distinctive philosophical claims that early and mid-twentieth-century Catholic lawyers made about the American legal tradition. In fact, the Red Mass tradition was inaugurated in Boston during the Second World War partly because the Jesuit dean of the Boston College Law School, William J. Kenealy, believed that the legal profession had erroneously abandoned the American legal tradition’s foundation: what the Declaration of Independence termed the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Contrary to the legal pragmatist’s view that “might makes right,” Kenealy argued before an audience of hundreds in his 1941 Red Mass sermon that the “majesty of law” does not consist of force, “[a]t least not physical force.” Rather, he proposed, the law’s majesty is a “moral power . . . arising from a free people’s realization that the law is the means, under Divine Providence, of enjoying in security the inalienable rights founded in their human nature by the natural law.” 

The 1941 Red Mass in Boston—co-sponsored by the Boston College Law School and the Archdiocese of Boston—occurred over a decade after the Archdiocese of New York’s inaugural celebration of the same liturgy. But Catholic leaders in Boston and New York shared a strikingly similar understanding of what wartime Americans should hear from their religious leaders. As the New York Times reported, Archbishop Francis J. Spellman emphasized at the 1941 New York Red Mass that the Declaration of Independence’s “principles” must be put into practice by the American people because “rectitude is the only guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

To be sure, most early and mid-twentieth-century Red Mass homilists did not articulate exceptionally nuanced legal philosophies—not least because the Red Mass is a liturgical celebration, not the occasion for an academic lecture. But these homilists did effectively communicate that American Catholics understood themselves as making a distinctive contribution to the legal profession. It should therefore come as little surprise that early and mid-twentieth-century Catholic lawyers critiqued those in elite legal institutions and those in comfortable political majorities who, in their view, failed to see the teaching and practice of law as more than the mere management of social disagreement. 

For example, interwar and wartime Red Mass homilists frequently took aim at academic theorists—especially legal realists—who rejected the law’s function as a teacher of moral rights and wrongs, and occasionally of moral absolutes. And decades later, some homilists took the occasion presented by the annual Red Mass to call even hostile Southern audiences to account for racial discrimination. These views—typically informed by the natural law tradition—were not always popular, and once even led former U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle to describe several Jesuit legal scholars as approaching the jurisprudence of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. with the “zeal and intolerance of the crusading fanatic.”

Today’s celebrations of the Red Mass are largely a vestige of a distinctive vision of Catholic lawyering—a vision that so animated the Red Mass tradition’s growth decades ago, and a vision that similarly animated much contemporaneous Catholic legal teaching and scholarship. With few exceptions, unfortunately, today’s American Catholic law schools—which often are (and have been) co-sponsors of annual Red Masses—fail to offer students distinctive professional formation, instead resembling in most meaningful respects their secular peers. 

As John Breen and Lee Strang have persuasively argued, the decline of a distinctive vision of Catholic legal education—and, I think, of Catholic lawyering—was not a historical accident, and was certainly not a historical inevitability. And so, perhaps this year’s celebrations of the Red Mass offer an opportunity for Catholic law students, teachers, administrators, and practitioners to reflect on the principles that underlie the vocation of a Catholic lawyer—and the practice of Catholic lawyering. At the least, taking advantage of this opportunity to do so may remind American Catholics of the many ways in which they can enrich today’s most pressing legal debates with the insights of an intellectual tradition that has persisted even longer than the observance of the Red Mass itself. 

Image by Villanova Law Library, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped. 

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The girls’ stories were consistent not only in what they described, but in what they did not. Not one of ­Epstein’s initial accusers described being trafficked to other men. ­Marie Villafaña, the prosecutor who led the charge against Epstein in Florida, later recalled: “None of . . . the victims that we spoke with ever talked about any other men being involved in abusing them. It was only Jeffrey Epstein.”

It is now widely accepted that Jeffrey Epstein ran a pedophilic blackmail ring that implicated some of the world’s most powerful men, most likely on behalf of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Commentators who agree on little else are united in this belief. If such a ring existed, it must have been up and running in 2005—well into his career, and immediately before his downfall began.

But Epstein’s accusers in Palm Beach apparently had no knowledge of any blackmail ring. Nor has reliable evidence of one emerged in the years since. Ghislaine ­Maxwell, ­Epstein’s long-time associate, was convicted of sex trafficking in 2021, but she was charged with and convicted of trafficking minors to exactly one person: Jeffrey Epstein. Where did the idea that Epstein ran a blackmail ring come from? Answering this question requires separating Epstein the man from the Epstein myth, which has put a respectable face on once-fringe ideas.

The person most responsible for promoting the idea that Epstein engaged in blackmail is Virginia Giuffre. In a 2015 affidavit, ­Giuffre claimed that Epstein had trafficked her “for sexual purposes to ^­many other powerful men”—including Prince Andrew of the British royal family and the attorney ­Alan Dershowitz. Epstein did this, ­Giuffre claimed, to ensure that his targets would be “in his pocket.” She also later suggested that he had done it on behalf of Israeli intelligence. It isn’t entirely clear why Israeli intelligence would need to blackmail ­Alan Dershowitz, a lifelong defender of the Jewish state. And faced with legal action from Dershowitz, Giuffre later admitted that she “may have made a mistake” in identifying him.

Giuffre had a history of making claims that failed to withstand scrutiny. In 1998, at age fourteen, she swore that two male acquaintances, aged eighteen and seventeen, had sexually assaulted her. Following a months-long investigation, prosecutors declined to pursue the case, “due to the victim’s lack of credibility and no substantial likelihood of success at trial.” This incident is omitted from Giuffre’s memoir, which instead describes her being kidnapped in a stretch limousine by a man named Ron Eppinger, then freed by a team of FBI agents. (The FBI has no record of this incident.)

Giuffre’s first uncredited allegation is mirrored by her last. On March 30, 2025, shortly before she committed suicide, Giuffre accused a bus driver with sixteen years’ experience of hitting her car while going 110 kilometers (68 miles) per hour. Giuffre posted a photo of herself with a black eye, supposedly ­sustained in the crash, and the caption: “They’ve given me four days to live . . . I’m ready to go, just not until I see my babies one last time.” Her claims may have been an attempt to make contact with her children, whom she had been barred from seeing under a restraining order. In any case, the driver refuted her allegations, explaining that his bus was factory-designed never to go more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) per hour.

Sarah Ransome, another Epstein accuser, also claimed that he ran a blackmail ring. In 2016, she told a reporter at the New York Post that she possessed sex tapes featuring figures such as Donald Trump and Bill Clinton. She also told the reporter that she was involved in an international cat-and-mouse game: “My emails have been hacked. I have reached out to the Russians for help and they are coming to my aid. Thank goodness for Anonymous!!!!” (Ransome later told the New Yorker that she had invented the tapes.)

Perhaps the most substantial support for the belief that Epstein ran a blackmail ring comes from a 2019 article in the Daily Beast. The article contains a second- or third-hand claim from an unnamed source, to the effect that Epstein received a light sentence in Florida because he “belonged to intelligence.” According to the unnamed source, Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor in the case, gave this explanation to Trump administration officials while he was being vetted as secretary of labor.

There are several reasons to doubt this report, aside from the thin sourcing. Vicky Ward, the author of the story, has a history of dealing loosely with facts (as her former colleagues at Vanity Fair recently told the New Yorker). And Acosta later denied—on the record and under oath—that he had any knowledge of Epstein’s being involved with intelligence.

Fortunately, there is no need to take anyone’s word for it. A full picture of how ­Epstein received his light sentence—just eighteen months in prison, with work release—can be found in a report from the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility. It presents extensive contemporaneous evidence showing that, far from going easy on Epstein, Acosta was the key person ensuring that he faced at least some penalty for his crimes.

Epstein’s crimes were initially reported to state authorities. Acosta, a federal prosecutor, got involved only after it became clear that state-level prosecutors were reluctant to pursue the case. They had their reasons. #MeToo had not yet popularized the #BelieveWomen doctrine, and prosecutors expected that a jury would regard many of the accusers as lacking credibility. Their assessment was later ­seconded by a DOJ official who reviewed the case and concluded that a trial would have been a “crap shoot.” At one point, state prosecutors offered Epstein a plea deal that entailed five years of probation, no jail time, no sex-offender registration, and no need to pay restitution to victims—the ultimate sweetheart deal. So confident were Epstein and his attorneys that they turned it down.

Frustrated with state prosecutors, Palm Beach police approached­ ­Acosta, who agreed to take up the case. Because of the riskiness of a trial, he succeeded in arranging a “non-prosecution agreement,” under which Epstein would plead guilty to sex crimes. This task was complicated by the fact that Epstein enjoyed a world-class legal defense, led by the likes of Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr. Throughout the tense negotiations, Acosta insisted that Epstein must serve jail time, register as a sex offender, and offer restitution to his victims. On all three points, Acosta prevailed. Far from backing off Epstein at the behest of intelligence, Acosta was the reason Epstein faced any penalty at all.

It should not be surprising that the evidence for Epstein’s involvement in a blackmail ring is so meager, because the idea ­owes less to the facts of his case than to a long tradition of paranoid ­speculation—encompassing ­QAnon, the medieval blood libel, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

At the heart of the Epstein myth is the idea that an international conspiracy, notably involving Jews, relies on the destruction of innocence and the practice of blackmail to advance its power. This tradition presents sexual abuse of minors as a typically Jewish crime, an assault on innocence that amounts to ritual murder.

This trope emerged in a recent conversation between ­Tucker ­Carlson and the podcaster ­Daryl Cooper. Carlson claimed that ­Epstein was part of “a blackmail operation run by the CIA and the Israeli intel services, and probably others. . . . The usual darkest ­forces in the world colluding to make rich and powerful people obey their agenda.” Cooper added that ­Epstein’s crimes (as he perceives them) should be understood as a ritual practice that confers power on those who perform it: “Throughout history, people have looked at that as something that confers power. That’s what child sacrifice is.”

The idea that our elites are ­united in a pedophilic cabal has ­several recent precedents, including the satanic panic of the 1980s and the ­QAnon phenomenon during the first Trump term. But to understand the full significance of this exchange, one must revisit the history of the blood libel. The claim that Jews use human blood—­generally taken from children—to bake their Passover bread can be traced back to the second half of the twelfth century. An English monk named Thomas of Monmouth claimed that a Christian boy, ­William of Norwich, had been killed by an international Jewish conspiracy. Jews, he believed, were under the spell of Satan and “could neither obtain their freedom, nor could they ever return to their fatherland” unless they engaged in ritual killings.

The blood libel spread across Europe, bringing disaster to Jews and discredit to Christian communities. Today it is often seen as a relic of medieval societies. But it has proved to have a modern resonance. One can see this in the Damascus affair of 1840, when the Jews of Damascus were accused of killing a Catholic monk named Thomas in order to bake matzoh with his blood. Many ­Europeans—including those with liberal views—credited the allegations, shocking their Jewish neighbors.

The early nineteenth century was supposed to be an era of rising liberalism, rationalism, and freedom. But progress did not eliminate prejudice. In certain ways, it enabled it. Relaxed censorship allowed for the expression of uncomfortable truths, but also for the spread of falsehoods. Newspapers—including some with progressive principles—indulged in sensational and misleading coverage of the case. As the historian Jonathan Frankel has observed, “This newly emerging world was potentially more dangerous for the Jews than the old. Stripped of the protection offered by state censorship, they could easily fall victim to a scandal-seeking press and to demagogic politicians outbidding each other for electoral advantage.”

A similar dynamic has played out since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now known as X. The general loosening of speech restrictions has allowed for an increase in anti-Jewish invective. You no longer need to go to 4chan to find people claiming, as QAnon did, that satanic elites kill children in order to consume their adrenochrome. But mainstream and liberal sources that otherwise decry this rhetoric find a point of agreement with it when it comes to Epstein. They, too, believe that an international Jewish conspiracy is exploiting innocents. The title of an essay by Joy-Ann Reid, the former MSNBC host, is telling: “What if the Q-anoners were (sort of) right?” Perhaps not coincidentally, the emergence of these conceits has coincided with an increase in anti-Israel sentiment.

Alongside the blood libel, the most important precedent for the Epstein myth is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This 1903 text, purporting to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders, is in fact a fabrication that plagiarizes earlier texts. Its compilers were reactionary Russians, whose hatred of Jews was matched only by their contempt for democratic societies. It presents the Jews as masters of “the art of directing masses and individuals by means of cleverly ­manipulated theory and verbiage.” This is an attack not just on Jews, but on the principle of popular sovereignty. For if the Jews are consummate ­manipulators, and the common man is a dupe, then democracy is nothing other than the masked rule of world Jewry.

Extending its anti-democratic argument, the Protocols presents democratic leaders as especially vulnerable to bribes and blackmail. Lacking the inherited wealth and fixed rank that typify aristocratic society, elected officials are unable to resist financial inducements or threats to their status, which arises solely from public approval. Exploiting this fact, Jews permit politicians to come to power only if they “have in their past some dark, ­undiscovered stain”—some exposure to blackmail.

The Epstein myth updates these lies for the age of Jewish statehood. It presents Epstein as blackmailing American leaders—not on behalf of a shadowy world Jewry, but on behalf of the Jewish state. And it recasts Jewish ritual sacrifice in terms of child sexual abuse. The anti-Semitic implications of the Epstein myth may not be widely acknowledged, but they are understood by many of the myth’s most important promoters.

Take Maria Farmer, an Epstein accuser who has been interviewed by MSNBC and respectfully profiled by the New York Times. She remarked in a recent interview, “All the Jewish people I met just happen to be pedophiles who run the world economy.” She is an adherent of David Icke, the UFOlogist who has promoted the Protocols and suggested that the world is controlled by shape-shifting alien “­reptilians” that merely appear to be human, including the members of the Rothschild family.

Similar claims are made by another Epstein accuser, Juliette ­Bryant. Maurene Comey, the prosecutor of Ghislaine Maxwell, submitted a victim impact statement from Bryant at Maxwell’s ­sentencing hearing. Apparently, the government regards Bryant’s words on Epstein as credible. This is a remarkable judgment. Earlier this year, Bryant declared on social media that she had “witnessed Epstein turn into an alien reptilian creature.”

Certain facts about Epstein are well established and incontestable: He committed sexual crimes against minors. He deserved to be punished, and more severely than he was. What goes beyond the facts is the Epstein myth. This myth is a synthesis of conspiracy ­theories: satanic panic, blood libel, the ­Protocols, UFOs. It generally presents its assertions in a respectable guise, but as its most enthusiastic adherents reveal, it tends toward the demonization of Jews.

Acceptance of the Epstein myth reflects mistrust of our political establishment. That mistrust is in many respects reasonable. But you don’t need a Jewish cabal in order to explain the problems with U.S. foreign policy. You don’t need to theorize a pedophile ring in order to indict our elites. Americans are not the dupes of an international conspiracy. They alone are responsible for the leaders they’ve chosen, and they have the power to elect better ones in their place.

The post The Epstein Myth appeared first on First Things.

In the aftermath of Covid, New York required all public school teachers and staff to submit to vaccination or be fired. The mandate incorporated religious exemptions for Christian Scientists. It also exempted faiths whose leaders “publicly” opposed the shots. The practical outcome was that Christian Scientists and Seventh-day Adventists got a quasi-institutional exemption but Catholics, for example, could not because the Church did not universally condemn the shots. Indeed, Pope Francis called them a necessary “act of love.” The local federal and second circuit courts of appeal upheld this limited regime. The Supreme Court will now be asked to decide its constitutionality.

Kane has the potential to give real teeth to the idea of conscientious religious objection. I say that for two reasons.

First, the current Court has shown a marked receptivity to free exercise claims. Free exercise has come into its own—no longer relegated to the residue left over after we pretend society has no religious convictions to avoid “establishment” issues, and no longer confined to esoteric groups (Christian Scientists) or limited geographical locales (Lancaster County’s Amish). Indeed, the Court has in many ways adopted the late Richard John Neuhaus’s reading of the First Amendment, where free exercise lies at its core and non-establishment is but a tool to facilitate it.

Second, the Court’s recent resurrection of Wisconsin v. Yoder, a 1972 case that struck down part of Wisconsin’s compulsory education law as it applied to the Amish in higher grades, is significant. The fact that the Court cited it approvingly (over one hundred times) in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the recent case on compulsory gender indoctrination in early grades in Maryland, showed that the Court was ready to consider religious exemptions for more than just small, somewhat marginal religious communities.

Religious groups of few adherents and/or socially marginal—Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists, Christian Scientists, Amish—were generally afforded more leeway than widely dispersed confessions of significant numerical strength, such as Catholics, who numbered 20 to 25 percent of the American population. Perhaps it was implicitly believed that the exemption would not undermine the rule when granted to religious minorities. But when one crosses a certain proportion of the population, the stakes grow higher.

New York City’s vaccine religious exemptions seem to follow this pattern. A group historically recognized as having its own perspective on medicine, such as the Christian Scientists, are exempt. But other groups like Catholics need to establish that their institution shares the conscientious objection they do. As most Catholic bishops were at least initially advocates of the jab, New York considers Catholics seeking exemptions “bad” Catholics.

There’s a paradox here. It’s one thing for a denomination to say something is forbidden. But to say that something is allowed—not mandated but permitted—is not a converse position. What to do when there is no prohibition is a substantially broader scope of action, dictated by prudence. In such a case, even Catholic theology would recognize there is a legitimate scope for differing conclusions of conscience, something New York City’s “one-denominational-size-fits-all” approach ignores.  

It also betrays a fundamental ignorance of the nature of conscience. Conscience as a judgment that, in this instance, a good is to be done or an evil is to be avoided, is ultimately individual. For Catholics, it is individual not in the sense that everyone’s conscience invents its own morality out of whole cloth, but it is individual in the sense that Gaudium et Spes reminds us it is the forum in which a person stands most directly before God. Man is ultimately alteri incommunicabilis: No one can will for me. For the Jewish and Christian faiths, where man’s relationship to God involves a moral component, the state doing violence to that conscientious integrity strikes at the dignity of the human person. 

There’s a second paradox here. America traditionally recognized the dignity of the individual conscience: That was the hallmark of Protestantism and its main objection to “Romanism.” But New York’s rule truncates the individual conscience, measuring its sincerity (or at least right to be respected) by conformity with denominational policy. Which means one of two things: Caesar now arrogates the right to decide what is denominational policy for a specific group while he is baffled by the modern phenomenon of the “spiritual-but-not-religious.” If one of the latter objects to the Covid vaccination on “spiritual” grounds, is that “spiritual” conviction to be ignored because it is not a “recognized religion”?  

This question will need to be addressed, and not just in this context: One unresolved issue from Mahmoud v. Taylor was that forcing children’s participation against parental wishes violated parental religious freedom. What about non-religious parents who object to the curricular content?

Full-throated protection of free exercise through religious objection/exemption has long been cramped when sought by denominations that are more than religious curiosities. Kane v. City of New York offers the opportunity to afford them meaningful constitutional protection. 

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In 2024, National Religious Broadcasters, along with several other parties (including two churches), sued the IRS over the constitutionality of the Johnson Amendment. The amendment, which has been part of the federal tax code since 1954, prohibits tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organizations from engaging in any political campaign activity, which includes the endorsement of or opposition to political candidates. The lawsuit claimed that the Johnson Amendment violates the rights of religious organizations, including their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and free exercise of religion. 

When the lawsuit began, the IRS was headed by a Biden appointee; the agency is now headed by a Trump appointee. It is therefore no surprise that the IRS has changed some policy priorities since the lawsuit began. All parties to the lawsuit came together and filed a motion asking the judge to enter a “consent judgment”—one that all parties agree on—ending the suit. If and when the court officially accepts this motion and enters an order (there is no reason to believe it will not), it will resolve the matter between the parties. But this is the private settlement of a lawsuit in a trial court, which technically only affects and binds the parties. Whatever the result, it only applies to National Religious Broadcasters and the handful of other religious organizations that filed the lawsuit. The motion does not say that the Johnson Amendment is unconstitutional or that churches can now endorse political candidates; the language is clear on this matter. 

Rather, the IRS does not consider some forms of political expression as political activity or endorsement of a candidate. The communication must be “in connection with religious services through its usual channels of communication.” This likely means speech coming from the pulpit, from sermons and other communications that are normally part of a religious service—which is not the same as a church leader holding political rallies and endorsing candidates on behalf of the church. The IRS’ position in the motion is that the time and place that these political communications are appropriate remain quite limited. 

Additionally, the communications must concern “matters of faith.” Religious leaders cannot simply use their sermons to speak about their political views and encourage their congregations to adopt those same views. These communications must be an application of the principles of religious faith to politics. So, if a pastor is reflecting on the church’s religious stance on marriage, family, and human sexuality, he can safely preach about the connection those teachings have to a certain campaign and the views of opposing candidates. He can even state which candidate’s position aligns with the church’s teachings. But he cannot simply give his views on the regulatory state, the current tax rate, or any other issues involved in a political campaign if those views do not spring from the religious views of the church.

So, if the outcome in this case does not mean churches are free to start endorsing candidates, what does it mean? For Catholic parishes in America, it doesn’t mean anything. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement on July 8 clarifying that its position has not changed: “The IRS was addressing a specific case, and it doesn’t change how the Catholic Church engages in public debate. The Church seeks to help Catholics form their conscience in the Gospel so they might discern which candidates and policies would advance the common good. The Catholic Church maintains its stance of not endorsing or opposing political candidates.”

Again, the outcome in National Religious Broadcasters v. Long is not a binding precedent on the IRS or on courts in future cases. But the outcome does signal that the IRS (at least during this administration) does not intend to police the practice of religious leaders preaching to their congregations about the application of religious principles to political candidates and campaigns. That position is subject to change in the future; even now, it is not an open invitation for churches to engage in campaign activity. 

If religious leaders want to preach a bit more boldly about how their faith should influence certain political campaigns and how congregants should vote, perhaps they can now breathe a bit easier knowing the current administration seems unwilling to consider communication from the pulpit as impermissible campaign activity. But to be clear, the Johnson Amendment is still on the books and no court has ruled it unconstitutional. Political preachers beware; this ruling may be a policy change, but it is not an open invitation to churches to dive into political campaigns.   

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