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GAZETTE
DECEMBER 1980
OPENING OF NEW LAW TERM
6 October, 1980
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
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'.
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