The Gazette 1980

GAZETTE

DECEMBER 1980

OPENING OF NEW LAW TERM 6 October, 1980

Roman Christians about their behaviour in and relation to society as a whole? "His position here was recently summed up by T. W. Manson: 'All other power or authority is derivative, either authorised or permitted by God. Hence resistance to legitimate authority, legitimately exercised, is wrong. It is assumed in these verses that the State is doing its appointed task of maintaining order and administering justice . . . The motive for obedience must be something more and better than fear of punishment: there must be awareness of a personal responsibility which may not be evaded. The obligations of a Christian to the State include payment of taxes, direct and indirect, since the civil rulers are in God's service (whether they know it or not) and busy with their proper task, the encouragement of good and the repression of evil. They have a right both to your material and your moral support. The sum total of Christian ethics is 'to love one another'. There is not duty that is not included in 'love', and nobody that is not included in 'one another'. "The apostle was saying to the Church members in Rome that they should put this whole question of obedience to law, of obligations and rights, in a new context. That context is 'love' and the concept of love is not simply an interiorized one. It colours and includes all the duties. It is not only creative of attitudes but productive of actions — 'Love cannot wrong a neighbour; therefore the whole law is summed up in love'. "In our contemporary society, because of its very complexity, people are deeply and currently concerned with rights, their own and others. Nobody in his senses, even were he competent, would attempt on an occasion like this to differentiate between justice as a cardinal virtue and justice in the fuller Biblical sense, or to expound commutative justice, distributive justice, legal justice and social justice. Nor could he begin to differentiate the various kinds of rights attached to each. All that we can ask here is to what extent commitment to the Christian world-view bears on the concept of justice and its administration, as we struggle to create in our own land a just society. Does this passage of Scripture suggest a direction, a line to be followed, if men and women are to have any success in building a just society? Or is it mere hyperbole to say 'love is the fulness of law', the sort of predictable thing clergymen may be expected to say? "Justice is differentiated in the light of the rights for which it caters. Aquinas says that it is the 'firm and constant will to give each one his due'. Justice, in this sense, is concerned with the actual and exact according of his right, his due, to each person. The law can determine the extent of the obligation and enforce its fulfilment. The New Testament concept of justice goes beyond this and takes love as its criterion and says that this justice is, in effect, love — 'love is the fulness of law'. "Is not the rendering of their dues, the granting of their rights, to all, the expression of one's duty to one's neighbour? We recall from the Catechism that this is a duty to love: 'My duty towards my neighbour is to love him as myself, and to do to all men as I would they should do unto me'.

The following are the texts of the homilies delivered for the opening of the Law Term:

SERVICE at St. Michan's, Church St., the Rt. Rev. Henry R. McAdoo, Archbishhop of Dublin said:

"Love cannot wrong a neighbour; therefore the whole law is summed up in love". (Romans 13:10).

"No doubt the servants and administrators of the law occasionally permit themselves a wry smile when they hear those words and reflect on some of their professional experiences. Further reflection may suggest to them that you cannot legislate for love anyway; that justice is all about legal rights. Holland's Elements of Jurisprudence tells us that 'Jurisprudence is specifically concerned only with such rights as are recognised by law and enforced by the power of the State'. "Indeed nobody could quarrel with this and the spectacle of judges pontificating on theology and ethics would be as terrifying as that of bishops laying down the law on law. "Yet that verse was not written by the apostle out of or into what you might call either a simply ecclesial or a purely personal setting. It was written to ordinary members of the Church who lived in a society controlled by the Imperial Roman Government. In this passage St. Paul is taking about law, rights, responsibilities and relationships in the context of citizenship, and he asserts that love is the ultimate. "The fact of experience is that man is native to two worlds, the physical and the spiritual, and his citizenship in the State and his membership in the Body of Christ cannot be disentangled, for he is one person. His outward actions and his sense of obligation, his sensitivity to the rights of others, are not detachable from his inner life of values, attidues and outlook. These latter are created and nourished, for the Christian, by his shared life in the Body of Christ, the new community of the new commandment 'that you love one another'. 'Love cannot wrong a neighbour, therefore the whole law is summed up in love'. Can the administration of the law take congisance of this, or is it an irrelevancy, something literally outside the law?" "One suspects that for the Christian lawyer and legislator and servant of the law there must often be felt a tension at the heart of things as he seeks, in the words of the prophet Micah, both to do justly and to love mercy. All the time he is aware that the law is legislating for persons in the rich totality and wholeness of their person hood. They are, as we clergy also need to be reminded, persons not problems, "What about justice and rights and love and law? "First of all, what exactly was the apostle saying in this passage written in or about the year 54 A.D., to these

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