Book Reviews

This is noted Catholic constitutional lawyer William Bentley Ball's long-awaited book on the state of religious liberty and (related to it) parental educational rights in American constitutional law today. Since Ball was a principal in many of the important church-state cases of the past four decades, the book provides not just legal analysis and explanations of the prevailing judicial doctrine (which is well written and geared for the layman) but also absorbing insights into the people involved, the attitudes of governmental officials, the historical background, and the real-life nature of the controversies. The book seeks to show that the judicial culprit in our convoluted doctrine of church-state law in the U.S., especially in the parental educational rights area, was the 1970 Supreme Court decision of Lemon v. Kurtzman. This case not only was a bitter blow to the long struggle for distributive justice for nonpublic (especially religious) schools and their students' parents, but "the great legal instrument for the enforced secularization of the national culture" (p. 27).

The first chapter of the book, which, like so many others, bears a colorful title ("Of Bleak Houses, Lagado, and the Court That Is Supreme"), briefly recounts important events in the history of American church-state relations earlier in our history: the unique, probably overriding importance assigned by our earliest statesmen to the religion clause of the First Amendment, the pre-1900 Supreme Court's pro-religion and pro-Christian statements, and the crucial 1925 pro-parental educational rights decision of Pierce v. Society of Sisters.

The next three chapters comprise Part II of the book, the message of which Ball captures in its title, "'No Popery' in New Garb." He first discusses the legislative history of Pennsylvania Act 109, the first nonpublic school aid law whose constitutionality was challenged in Lemon, mixing with it a historical discussion which explains why the bill generated such intense controversy in that state. Then, he carefully, but briefly and without undue technicalities, examines the Supreme Court's Lemon opinion. Lemon is known for the tripartite test to be applied to cases contested under the establishment clause of the First Amendment: that for a law or policy to be constitutional, it must have a secular purpose and a secular effect, its primary effect may neither advance nor inhibit religion, and it must avoid an excessive entanglement of government with religion. Ball provides the unique insight that the opinion was heavily influenced by a 1969 Harvard Law Review article by Harvard law professor Paul Freund, which argued that aid to parochial schools created supposedly unconstitutional establishments of religion of two sorts: administrative (that it would require searching state surveillance of the schools to insure compliance with regulations, which was not true in Act 109) and political (the Court took as sine quo non that public debate involving anything with a religious component was divisive, so public policies which might do this are to be precluded). The result of this, Ball contends, is that for seriously religious people to be "engaged in the democratic process . . . [is] in that class of the 'principal' evils . . . against which the First Amendment was erected as a protection" (i.e., constitutes, in effect, a governmental suppression of religion) (p. 37). Ball then proceeds to acutely discuss the companion case to Lemon, Tilton v. Richardson, in which the Court sustained state aid to nonpublic colleges (largely, Ball tells us, as far as the Catholic ones were concerned, because they secularized pursuant to the notorious Land O'Lakes Statement), and the major nonpublic school aid cases in the two and a half decades following Lemon. The latter -which might be called Lemon's progeny -have resulted in our current state of contradictory, even schizophrenic, law on church-state relations.

A crucial point that comes through in Ball's discussion of the Lemon doctrine is that it was at least partly influenced by a latent, implicit anti-Catholicism.

Ball closes Part II with a digression in which he tries to put the Lemon doctrine in perspective, and issues a cautionary note. Lemon was not the cause of the decline of the Catholic school system in the U.S. The primary reason was the weakening of the attachment of American Catholics to both a sense of the sacred and to the teachings of their Church. He reminds us that as Catholic schools have closed, Evangelical ones-riding the crest of intense religious fervor and similarly without government assistance-have sprung up in record numbers.

In Part III of Ball's book, he shifts his focus from establishment to religious liberty as respects, primarily, parental educational rights and religious schools. He revealingly calls this section, "Criminalizing Religious Education." The first chapter, the lengthiest in the book, provides an in-depth look at the Supreme Court's famous Amish parental-religious educational rights case, Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), the constitutional case for which Ball is perhaps best known. He insightfully explains how religion, way of life, and education are all closely intertwined for the Amish, and makes clear how the unreasonable state mandate in the case-that the Amish send their children to secondary school-was really an attempt, at the bottom line, to make them conform to a secular outlook about education and life. The chapter includes a truly important, brief discussion-which I wish would have gone on longer-about the defective jurisprudential thought of two generally thoughtful conservative scholars, Dr. Walter Berns and Judge Robert Bork. Both have attacked the Yoder decision as wrongfully exempting the Amish from laws that everyone else must observe, and thus, in effect, "establishing" the Amish religion as the state religion. Ball says that the Berns-Bork view would greatly damage religious liberty-which is really what Yoder involved-by putting it strictly at the mercy of legislatures, which certainly will not always act to preserve it. Ball rightly calls this a "Benthamite view," that is, a version of legal positivism. What seems to me to undergird this is both a runaway view of deference to the legislative branch and constitutional literalism. While it is true that the U.S. Constitution does not anywhere speak of "parental rights," the tradition upon which it was erected clearly does. Our written Constitution goes hand-in-hand with an unwritten one (which is our Anglo-American legal heritage), and both embody the natural law. In seeking justice, it is to be expected that our courts will protect rights guaranteed by the latter-not in the reckless, magisterial manner of pseudo-Platonic guardians but as courts acting as courts in our tradition long have done. I hope that Ball will write more things critiquing what I agree is a disturbing school of jurisprudential thought.

The remaining chapters in Part III discuss, perceptively, the leading Evangelical Protestant school cases of recent decades (e.g., concerning such questions as whether such schools need state licensing) and the cases in which leading Catholic dioceses beat back NLRB efforts to control employment relations in their school systems. Ball had an important role to play in each group of cases.

The final part of the book is entitled "Retrogression." In its first two chapters, Ball analyzes other critical Supreme Court decisions of the past fifteen years which threaten religious liberty, including Employment Division v. Smith (1990), Goldman v. Weinberger (1986), Lyng v. Northwest Indians Cemetery Protective Association (1988), and Bob Jones University v. U.S. (1983) (the latter was the famous case involving the refusal of the IRS to give the University a tax exemption because it forebade interracial dating on religious grounds; Ball had an important role in it). The Smith decision was particularly damaging, since it turned against a long line of Supreme Court precedents and held that when restricting religious liberty the state no longer needed a "compelling public interest"-generally, the most stringent constitutional standard for the state to meet-at least when the regulation in question is "religion-neutral" and "of general applicability" (i.e., is not specifically directed toward a religious group or activity). This was essentially overruled by the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, although the matter is still somewhat in doubt.

In the penultimate chapter of the book, Ball reviews the other major post-World War II Supreme Court decisions on church and state (our present secularist doctrine dates only from that period). He also includes a terse, perceptive comment about how a new threat to religious colleges and universities is coming from the rabidly secularistic quasi-governmental accrediting agencies.

Ball's short final chapter is a momentary reflection about the dangers posed to freedom, republican government, and decent living by our current utilitarian, secularist, relativist ethos. He invokes the likes of Tocqueville, C.S. Lewis, Ratzinger, and John Paul II to emphasize the need for a democratic republic to be grounded on true principles of morality.

In sum, Ball has given us a thoughtful, perspicacious look at our topsy-turvy law on church-state, and what led to it. It is a particularly valuable contribution because it comes from one who has been, in the tradition of St. Thomas More, both a legal practitioner-dealing with some of the most crucial public law cases-and a legal scholar and man of humane learning. It is to be hoped that the various questions, problems, and themes that he presents in the book will be picked up and developed further by other scholars and writers and also that public decisionmakers will take not.

Stephen M. Krason, J.D., Ph.D.

Franciscan University of Steubenville

Steubenville, Ohio

"Thy will be done" is the perfect prayer, as Jesus and Mary show us. All of the spiritual life is based on these words. It is a striving to say them truly. This then is an apt title for a book of spiritual direction by the great St. Francis de Sales. The subtitle is apt also. This book is for us ordinary people, not a book by a mystic urging us all to be mystics. Such books are too profound, too much for us ordinary people. They are for spiritual athletes and we are infants hardly able to crawl.

Francis is kindly in his advice as these many letters to people show. He is practical. He is full of common sense. We wonder what ever happened to common sense in many areas of the American Church today. Changers are taking down the crucifix, while people, especially teens, who are hurting, find that the crucifix is the one thing they can identify with. The changers are dreamers, impossible idealists. But as John Gardner, founder of Common Cause, wrote, "To pretend that the darker side of human nature dissolves under the cleansing rays of idealism is to delude oneself."

Francis in his spiritual direction does not pretend. He understands well the darker side of human nature, unlike the Pollyannas today. And he knows well that evil does not go away simply by announcing good intentions. Full of common sense and practicality, the gifted Bishop of Geneva deals with real problems in the real world. Here are real answers, not dreamy illusions, for real people.

This is, without doubt, an outstanding book to be read by all, especially parish priests who live with the people and strive to help them grow in soul. As the spiritual leader for all in the parish, and not just the elitists, the parish priest needs very much direction himself. St. Francis de Sales is an outstanding guide in practical spirituality. We have had enough of the dreamers who, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, "write spiritual books though they know little of the ways of God with souls."

Rev. Rawley Myers

Colorado Springs, Colo.

Fr. Quay died in Chicago at Loyola University on October 10, 1994. He was 70 years old. Although his formal academic doctorate was in theoretical physics, his secondary area of interest was theology. He wrote on both morals and spirituality. When he died, he held the position of Research Professor of Philosophy at the same university. His mother preceded him in death by five months.

This posthumous book of 438 pages was first conceived as a project in 1964 through conversation with Winoc de Broucker, S.J., and then again in 1969 as a result of further investigation at Fourvière with Henri de Lubac, S.J. The book is really the exploration of the thought of de Lubac, and was distilled into its present form after being presented first as a university course, then as symposium lectures, then as essays. The book is therefore the result of thirty years of meditation upon the theme of Recapitulation, that is, how the individual Christian goes through "biblical stages" of gradual transformation into the likeness of Christ. Father Quay's concern is practical and concrete through the vehicle of his massive and refined erudition. Some of the motivation to ponder these things came from Prof. Alfred Shatkin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-a convinced atheist who forced Quay to answer hard questions about why Catholics are no better and often worse than atheists. Why is there this phenomenon of "baptized pagans"? [My own reason for reviewing The Mystery Hidden for Ages in God derives from the fact that Father Quay was my spiritual father for 22 years, and over that time I developed a familiarity with these ideas.] The book deserves a wider appreciation. Hopefully it will find a translation into other European languages in the near future.

There are three major parts: I. Adam and Christ: Original Sin; II. Recapitulation in Christ; III. The Church, the New Israel. The goal of the Christian life is maturity, and maturity in Christ is charity or love, as St. Ignatius says in the Contemplation on Love. Sacrificial love is not sentimentality. So how do we make progress in the Lord, and how do we go beyond "infancy" to "adulthood"? Father Quay explains in great detail the steps that are inherent in Sacred Scripture's presentation of spiritual development. The hermeneutical difficulties experienced by various generations of Christian thinkers and writers are outlined for us in a clear and direct style. The author is painstakingly precise. His definition of "the spiritual sense of Scripture" is particularly well defined and exact. It seems that, for the West, a disaster began with the detachment of learning from faith in divine revelation. Faith and reason were separated by a divorce, although very gradually and often not intentionally. We have arrived at the end of the present millennium with no faith at all, either in God or in man. The substitutes have all been found wanting, if not murderous.

Father Quay explains the progressive spiritual decline of the West between the Renaissance and our own time. And Catholics need not boast-they have lost the spiritual sense of Scripture just as Protestants have. What we have here is the loss of the Christian sense of dependence upon God and his revelation. The literal sense alone constricts the source itself and prevents us from really understanding what is intended by the Bible, especially the Old Testament. It has become a body of texts for mere technicians, not a vision of history and the explanation of human existence itself. Quay calls this "Marcion's Revenge: the Disappearance of the Old Testament" (Chapter 20, pp. 396-422). Moreover, since the Enlightenment even the literal sense of Scripture has been under attack by the savants, referred to by Paul Johnson as "intellectuals." As he says on page 414, "Now, the damage done by an academic approach to the faith through the growth of Western university culture seems to have come in large measure from the late scholasticism that increasingly ignored or misunderstood the spiritual senses of the Bible." Our contemporary fascination with cultural analysis is the symptom, not the cause, of a prior phenomenon in the loss of the transcendent. Love of God has been replaced with self-preoccupation. Incidentally, Quay is clear that St. Thomas Aquinas is not to be classified among the rationalists. Thomas had not lost or bypassed the spiritual sense of Scripture (pp. 414-415).

After some comments on Christianity outside the West, and its future in those places, the book ends with some reflections on the future more generally, and an epilogue. He says, "It is essential, however, to remember that recapitulation is a sharing in the inner life of Jesus" (p. 421). Evil in the world is only overcome by love, and that love is ultimately seen in the Trinity. We grow in Christ by suffering and learning to love as he loves us already. While it sounds so trite, what Father Quay has done for us is clarify the steps along the way, especially to show how the alternatives have produced the present state of affairs in our Western world.

This book is about structures. It is about the structure of charity, the structures of growth, and the structure of the Christian life. It is about the structure of the human person, that is, of ourselves, how we are structurally in sin, and how we can achieve by God's grace a transformation that makes us like Christ. While we take for granted the "what" in our thoughts about the Christian life, what Father Quay does is demonstrate that the "how" is both coherent and imperative today. Scripture is more relevant than ever, but only if it is fully grasped in all its senses.

Rev. Brian Van Hove, S.J.

Rome, Italy

This book is an introduction to the saints. It is a sad fact today that many Christians need to be introduced to the saints. In former times most knew the saints and prayed to them; they were their friends, their brothers and sisters.

Father O'Malley here gives us different types of saints, husband and wife saints, parents and children saints, sibling saints, saintly relatives, saintly friends and others.

The author tells us the saints took seriously the Gospel mandate to live Christlike lives. They loved people; they expressed their love for God by their love for people. They were constantly helping them. And they had holy relationships. He especially takes up these relationships, for he quotes the adage, "Show me your friends and I'll tell you who you are."

This is particularly true of young people. A woman asked me the other day what she could do about her teen daughter she was having problems with. I replied, "Try to see that she has good friends." Teens are most often greatly influenced by their peers.

Father O'Malley states, "Relationships are central to the meaning of life." Relationships bind people together; they affect people. Relationships help to make people who they are. "Saintly relationships can help to make people saints."

We should be careful of our friends and those we often associate with. Even if we ordinary people can't be close to saints in life, we can read about them and be inspired by their lives. Another proverb says, "Tell me whom you admire and I will tell you what you are." If one knows and admires the saints he is on the right road in life.

Father John Catoir of the Christophers says that this volume is "a readable compendium of stories, so carefully researched and well written that one enters an entirely new world of wonder."

Rev. Rawley Myers

Colorado Springs, Colo.

Some books help you to escape from life, others try to soften its harsh edges, while still others take you directly to its core. The surprising thing is that the core is not so bad. Reading Mother Teresa's A Simple Path took me back to a core experience of my own which I had just recently.

I was debating the abortion issue with a woman whom Henry Morgentaler had personally selected to be my opponent. In the audience was a woman from India who was pregnant with her first child. Her story offered a more powerful witness against abortion than I could ever provide. I knew the bare outline of her story because I met her earlier that evening. She had cooked supper for me.

When she was five years old, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity literally picked her up from a street in Calcultta. They provided her with love and care, and helped to arrange her adoption by a Canadian couple. She grew up in Ontario and married a fine Christian gentleman. But she wanted to explore her roots and to meet Mother Teresa again. So she, together with her husband, returned to India and was fortunate enough to spend some time with Mother Teresa who told the couple, as she tells many other married couples, that they must pray together as husband and wife.

Mother Teresa offers this same message in her new book. There is no discernible difference between who she is what she does and how she writes. She would not be surprised that a once abandoned five-year-old girl is now living well, happily married, and expecting a child of her own. She knows about the power of prayer, how prayers do get answered, how seemingly hopeless circumstances are really miracles of love and grace waiting to happen. "I see God in the eyes of every child," she writes, "every unwanted child is welcomed by us. We find homes for these children through adoption."

To read a book by Mother Teresa is to re-experience the core of life, to re-visit the things that are most important. It is to set foot on what she refers to as the "simple path." And what is this simple path?

It is expressed with eloquent succinctness on small yellow cards that Mother Teresa cheerfully gives to people she meets. The cards are the largesse of an Indian businessman who greatly admires her. The cards read: "The fruit of silence is PRAYER. The fruit of prayer is FAITH. The fruit of faith is LOVE. The fruit of love is SERVICE. The fruit of service is PEACE." This is the simple path that extends from silence through love to peace, one that passes directly through the heart of reality.

Mother Teresa refers to the cards as her "business cards." Let it not be said that she lacks a sense of humor. Nor is she averse to employing contemporary metaphors: "The gasoline of our life is prayer and without it we won't reach our destination, and we won't reach the fulfillment of our being." She is a thoroughly modern woman who is implementing a thoroughly eternal plan.

At the same time, the simple plan is so fruitful, creative, and transforming that it leaves the world breathless. It is really too much for a world, given over as it is to plans, statistical studies, and cost analyses, to comprehend. How can someone abandoned to the streets of Calcutta come to bear silent witness to the value of life before people of an affluent nation who often see abortion as nothing more than a "choice"? Similarly, how can some one by the name of Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, born in Albania, a country with the dubious distinction of being the world's only official atheist state, come to be the Mother Teresa who brings God's love to the hearts of all she meets? To read her book is to sense the will of God.

One of the doctrines Saint Thomas Aquinas propounded is that grace is a more important factor than either heredity or environment. This is precisely what gives hope to people who are looking for hope. We are moulded neither by our genes nor our external circumstances. We are creatures of grace, and this is what gives us the hope to believe in miraculous transformations.

Mother Teresa urges us to love each other as God loves us. She reminds us that Jesus came to give us the good news that God loves us and that he wants us to love one another. Her words are simple, direct, and without apology. So is her path. But she also wants us to know that though it is simple it is nonetheless bountiful.

Donald DeMarco

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada