Conflicts between Religious Liberty and the New Public Health

Jeffrey B. Hammond is Associate Professor of Law at Faulkner Law
Michael J. DeBoer is Associate Professor of Law at Faulkner Law

 

In the United States, governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have brought into focus conflicts between religious liberty and public health objectives and directives. State and local governments have utilized familiar and long-established public health measures to combat this pandemic, including orders mandating business closures, isolation, quarantine, testing, and contact tracing. These measures have had significant effects on religious believers and their places of worship. Apart from these public health orders’ disruption on routine worship assemblies, the orders have disrupted other important religious services, including baptisms, Eucharistic celebrations, weddings, funerals, last rites, and pastoral counseling.

(more…)

Continue Reading Conflicts between Religious Liberty and the New Public Health

Hands-Off Religion in the Early Months of COVID-19

Samuel J. Levine is Professor of Law and Director of the Jewish Law Institute at the Touro Law Center

For decades, scholars have documented the United States Supreme Court’s “hands-off approach” to questions of religious practice and belief, pursuant to which the Court has repeatedly declared that judges are precluded from making decisions that require evaluating and determining the substance of religious doctrine. At the same time, many scholars have criticized this approach, for a variety of reasons. The early months of the COVID-19 outbreak brought these issues to the forefront, both directly, in disputes over limitations on religious gatherings due to the virus, and indirectly, as the Supreme Court decided important cases turning on religious doctrine. Taken together, judicial rulings and rhetoric in these cases illustrate ways in which the hand-off approach remains, at once, both vibrant and vulnerable to critique.

(more…)

Continue Reading Hands-Off Religion in the Early Months of COVID-19

The ‘Drive Confession:’ The Care of Souls in a Pandemic

Daniela Tarantino is Lecturer at the University of Genoa, Italy

«These are almost unprecedented times in the longhistory of the Church. Future generations will look upon this time as the long one Lent of 2020». With these words begins the message that the president of the American Bishops’ Conference, Josè Gomez, addressed to all faithful at the beginning of the Easter triduum by announcing for GoodFriday, a day of national prayer to put an end to thepandemic caused by Covid- 19. «This Holy Week will be different. Our churchesmay be closed – concluded Gomez – but Christ isnot quarantined and his Gospel is not in chains.Even if we cannot celebrate together, each of uscan seek God in the tabernacles of our hearts» [1].

In fact, the current pandemic state limits severely gatherings and participation in liturgies and sacramentals. The Catholic Church has worked to find ways and times to answer to the Covid-19 emergency. In order to pursue the salus animarum– according to the “signs of the times” – the forms of exercise of the munera ecclesiae has been adapted, first of all those related to the munus sanctificandi, since they demonstrate the efforts to be close to the people of God, who demands of an ongoing “sociality” m that is wounded by the pandemic [2].

(more…)

Continue Reading The ‘Drive Confession:’ The Care of Souls in a Pandemic