Church cannot accept the people can do no wrong

There was a time in the not too distant past when the public authorities in Ireland looked to bishops to give expression to the all but universally shared moral consensus of our people. Things have changed since then. Nowadays, any Catholic intervention which is not perceived as politically correct tends to be resented. Indeed, it is often rejected as lacking legitimacy.

But I believe the Catholic voice has an important contribution to make to the debate about Irish society.

Let me begin with the adage that the sovereign can do no wrong. This seems to make sense because judgment is the prerogative of sovereignty. How could the sovereign be subject to judgment without ceasing to be sovereign?

To say the sovereign can do no wrong may simply mean that the sovereign cannot be held accountable before a legitimate court. In this way kings have denied the competence of courts to put them on trial. This claim prescinds from the merits of the case, puts issues of justice in brackets and consists of a pure assertion of sovereignty. It might however mean that the vindication of justice is guaranteed by the fact that the sovereign is all-knowing and good.

Such unconditional sovereignty, in full accord with justice, pertains to God alone. Of Him alone can it be said in all truth that the sovereign can do no wrong.

This conviction is adumbrated in Plato. It is explicitly taught in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. It has been at the foundation of European systems of law. But since the French Revolution that foundation has been crumbling with the weakening of religion in civil society.

European culture is heavily indebted to Greco-Roman, Hebrew, and Islamic influence. But the Christian faith has exercised a predominant influence on the form it has taken. In spite of the faith it professed, Christian Europe witnessed the abundant abuse of sovereignty. But it retained the belief that its sovereigns were subject to judgment.

The claim that the sovereign could do no wrong had a purely relative validity. Iconography clearly exhibits tiaras and crowns and mitres in Hell as well as Heaven. However absolute monarchies became, they never claimed the privilege of immunity from the judgment of God.

With its declaration of the Rights of Man, the French Revolution subjected the king to judgment, by creating a constitution to define and limit his powers. But curiously, it still retained what it saw as the old, absolute sovereignty, by transferring it from the monarch to the people.

THE people, of course, could exercise that sovereignty only by delegating it to representatives. Before the revolution was over, the representatives of the sovereign people had disposed of God and driven a coach and four through the rights of man, by religious persecution, political trials, and unjust laws. In this way they prepared the foundations of the totalitarian systems which endowed with unqualified sovereignty the Nazi and communist regimes.

The last 200 years have seen the tension between sovereignty and judgment recur, and receive accommodations of various kinds. The British system supposes that parliament can do no wrong, but retains something of judgment in its Common Law tradition. Constitutional democracies subject the sovereign power to judgment, by subjecting it to a constitution. Ratification of international declarations of human rights introduces a further influence of judgment. But constitutions and rights declarations remain subject to change by the democratic vote in which sovereignty finally rests. In the last analysis, it seems that modern democracy confers absolute sovereignty on the people, and by that very fact renders sovereignty immune from judgment.

What then if the people should act unjustly? By what law could the charge of injustice be made? The Pope raises this kind of question in Veritatis Splendor. Our own Constitution gives recognition to rights and duties anterior to all positive law. Yet it also provides for such amendments of the Constitution as the people may favour, not excluding the cancellation of these rights.

Moreover, the Constitution is subject to judicial interpretation, thereby creating the possibility of conflict between the will of the people and the courts. Where does sovereignty ultimately rest?

In any case it seems to make little sense to question the justice of popular decisions. The sovereign can do no wrong. That is the final word in purely secularist terms. This is the crux of Nuremberg, perhaps even of current proceedings in The Hague.

It cannot, however, be the final word for a religious tradition that has always refused to acknowledge that the human sovereign can do no wrong. But how can that tradition still find legitimate expression, and hope to be heard, in a modern secular democracy?

The Pope has opened up a most promising approach to this fundamental question, by his teaching on the transcendent dignity of the human person. The acknowledegment of that dignity protects every right and duty required for its vindication.

The truth of the dignity of the human person is the theme of every legitimate intervention of the Catholic voice in public debate today. I am speaking of a principle of legitimate intervention and of a right to contribute to public debate. How it is to be applied to the questions that arise in practice must depend on the issues at stake. But the principle will be accepted wherever pluralism prevails, and is not confused with naive assertions of secularism.

Dr Desmond Connell is the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin.