Opinion: The Papal Chase

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I wouldn’t get into a theological argument with my fellow Pittsburgh native Archbishop Donald Wuerl, of Washington, D.C. But the archbishop has an unorthodox view of what goes on in American law schools.

Wuerl is chancellor of the Catholic University of America, the site of an address tomorrow by Pope Benedict XVI. In an interview with Newsweek, the archbishop defended the idea that theology professors at Catholic schools should be monitored for orthodoxy by drawing a comparison with law schools:

‘You couldn’t have a good law class where the professor said, ‘I’m going to teach you what I think the Supreme Court should have said, so forget all these rulings. I’ll teach what the law should be.’ I think after a while the university would say, ‘We need to shape up this law school’.’

Likewise, Wuerl said, if a theology professor rejects a papal encyclical, ‘the university has to look the same way they’d look at a law professor that rejects the Supreme Court.’

Actually, law school professors love to tell their students what they think the Supreme Court should have said. Far from getting you excommunicated, ‘rejecting’ the Supreme Court — or at least certain of its decisions — is the path to preferment for a law professor. And it isn’t just professors who diss the Supremes. Law students do, too. That sort of disputation is part of a legal education.

Of course, unlike the church, the court makes no claims of inerrancy. As the late Justice Robert Jackson put it: ‘We’re not final because we’re infallible; we’re infallible because we’re final.’