I get what makes it “special” in terms of what it signifies historically and how people want it to function, but I just can’t get my head around why it is so sacred. Mozaic Law seems more important, and I don’t even observe it. I hope someone can convince me to take it a bit more seriously, because as of now it only seems worth what it might possibly mean—like any other piece of political literature.
What makes the prose so imposing? Do we really need something like this? England doesn’t have a constitution.
Even more confusing to me is what I owe the US constitution as a Catholic. I feel that there is such a treasure trove of Catholic thought out there that, comparatively, renders the constitution nearly irrelevant. I mean, should we really be so comfortable that this thing got it right the first time—even considering amendments and interpretation over the past 200 years—when the Church’s tradition and teachings have been growing for over 2,000 years?
For my part, I find “constitution worship” in this country to be creepy. (removed and replaced with text below)
For my part, what I don’t understand is how something being “unconstitutional” or “constitutional” is understood as having deep moral significance (which, of course, I don’t find very compelling to begin with).
When we say, in common parlance, that something is “unconstitutional,” I wonder why people gasp at the horror of the thing’s lack of constitutionality. Or, why they applaud the constitutionality of thing they liked already in the first place. As I see it, being “constitutional” amounts to, “something I like already that I can call an interesting word that has a cool piece of paper to rest on.”
Killing innocent persons is not “unconstitutional;” it is depraved, heinous, and ugly. Most like to call it immoral or impermissible—fundamentally, it is a mystery.
In other words, take this question as an extension of my comments on morals (see: Is There Anything ‘Moral’ About Morals and Tragedy and Morals). Constitutionalism may offer tremendous resources for governance, history, or what have you, but, what it cannot (it seems to me) offer us is anything approaching morals.
To be as clear as I can, just as I find morals to be a linguistic substitute for aesthetic intuitions, I find the constitution to be a further substitute for morals. All of these substitutions obfuscate us from the flesh of the matter and from God, I think.
Any thoughts?
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