Harvard law professor named to Vatican post
The Vatican yesterday tapped Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard Law School professor who has been the leading legal expert for gay-marriage opponents on Beacon Hill, as the highest-ranking female adviser in the Catholic Church.
Pope John Paul II chose Glendon to lead the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which produces research to help the church establish its social policy. Glendon, a devout Catholic and longtime adviser to the pope, has made a name for herself as an articulate antiabortion scholar, and she was the first woman to lead a delegation of the Holy See, at the United Nations Women's Conference in Beijing in 1995.
"The challenge of the church is to keep abreast of changes, but not dumb down its doctrine to the spirit of the age," Glendon told the Associated Press yesterday.
Glendon specializes in comparative constitutional law in America and Europe, international human rights, and bioethics. But she has written on a wide-range of social topics, blending her conservatism on abortion, gay marriage, and other issues with more liberal views in other areas. Once a single mother, she recently took a swipe at Massachusetts politicians for cutting back on health and welfare programs. She is critical of the influence of big business on political parties, and is a registered independent.
While firmly antiabortion, in a 1988 interview Glendon criticized both camps in the contentious debate, saying she detected "a dark side of punitiveness toward women" among some antiabortion activists. She also has clashed with Margaret H. Marshall, the Supreme Judicial Court's chief justice, over the topic.
The pope's appointment, for a five-year term, comes at a time when Glendon's views are helping to drive the gay marriage debate. She met at least once with Governor Mitt Romney on how to draft a bill that defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman but toes the line drawn by the Supreme Judicial Court. Glendon also has consulted with gay-marriage opponents.
"She has been kind of an on-call, someone to give us legal opinions on various language proposals, and she has been helping us to understand various proposals offered by legislators," said Ron Crews, spokesman for the Coalition for Marriage. "When someone like Professor Glendon speaks, she speaks with authority and is well-respected."
Glendon, who declined to be interviewed for this article, downplayed the significance of her gender in her appointment to head the powerful Vatican panel. "Contrary to popular stereotype, John Paul II has done a great deal to put women in many responsible positions," Glendon, who will remain at Harvard, told the AP.
Alan Dershowitz, Glendon's Harvard Law School colleague and a supporter of abortion rights and gay marriage, described her as "one of the most brilliant and effective and moderate voices at the law school."
"If a woman could be made pope, she'd be my candidate," Dershowitz said. "She brings to bear all the best of religion and secular thinking. Whenever I get upset about religion, which happens from time to time, I think about Mary Ann Glendon and I remember the virtues of a religious perspective."
But the Rev. Richard McBrien, a Notre Dame theologian, compared Glendon's selection to that of Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court. His conservative views have been sharply criticized by fellow blacks, and Glendon's views, he said, are also extreme and out of step with the constituency she is supposed to represent.
"Catholic women who know her would not see her as one of their own and would not see her as evidence of the Vatican's commitment to place women in high positions of visibility," McBrien said.
Glendon, 65, grew up in Dalton, a small town in Western Massachusetts. Her father, Martin Glendon, was a reporter for the Berkshire Eagle and became the first Irish-Catholic Democrat to chair the local Board of Selectmen. Her mother came from an old New England family, and Glendon's relatives on that side fought in the Revolutionary and Civil wars. After earning an undergraduate degree, a law degree, and a master's degree in comparative law from the University of Chicago, Glendon went to work at the Chicago firm Mayer, Brown and Platt in 1964. Soon after joining the firm, she used her vacation time and a few weeks of paid leave to go to Jackson, Miss., to defend jailed civil rights workers and help local blacks assert their voting rights.Glendon married an African-American lawyer she met in Mississippi, but the marriage ended shortly after the birth of their first daughter in 1966. For three years, she was a single parent. "I know what single parents are talking about when they describe their difficulties," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. In 1970, Glendon married Edward Lev, a labor lawyer she had known at the Chicago firm.
In 1968, Glendon was hired to teach at Boston College, where she remained until she took a job at Harvard in 1986. Glendon began to develop a public profile in the 1980s with her writings on the politicized battlegrounds of feminism and abortion. In 1992, she clashed with Marshall, then Harvard's general counsel, when Marshall wrote a letter criticizing Glendon for using law school stationery to express her antiabortion views. The letter became an issue in 1999 when Marshall was nominated as chief justice, and Dershowitz and Charles Ogletree, another law professor, suggested Marshall treated Glendon harshly because they disagreed on abortion.
During the height of the clergy sex abuse scandal, Glendon also criticized the Globe and other news media for their reporting of the story, arguing that they were misleading the public. In a speech in Rome in 2002, Glendon described the Globe as "by far the worst offender," slamming the newspaper for making decades-old abuse cases appear current, and "creating a climate of hysteria by describing the story as a pedophilia crisis" when many of the cases involved teenagers, and singling out the Catholic Church when other institutions were guilty of similar misconduct. "All I can say is that if fairness and accuracy have anything to do with it, awarding the Pulitzer Prize to The Boston Globe would be like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Osama bin Laden," Glendon said in the Rome speech.
Leading opponents of gay marriage say Glendon has played a critical role in the current debate. Earlier this week, House Republicans handed out a letter, authored by conservative legal scholars, warning that a proposed constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman and creating civil unions for same-sex couples would "raise serious religious liberty issues statewide." The letter, signed by Glendon and several other scholars but closely echoing one of her recent articles, said the amendment would mean that "churches and other religious organizations that fail to embrace civil unions . . . may be forced to retreat from their practices or else face enormous legal pressure to change their views."
Yesterday, Senate President Robert E. Travaglini and House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran felt compelled to issue a letter of their own, assuring their legislative colleagues that the amendment would not "place any religious institution at risk of losing tax-exempt status, academic accreditation, media licenses, and other privileges."
Dan Avila of the Massachusetts Catholic Conference said Glendon is "very good at providing a broad picture of where a particular issue might lead." Glendon fleshed out that picture in an opinion piece published two weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that the benefits associated with gay marriage would cost the state millions of dollars at a time of tight budgets and "usher in an era of intolerance and discrimination the likes of which we have rarely seen before."
Laurence Tribe, another Harvard law colleague who professes respect and fondness for Glendon, called the article "unbelievably irresponsible."
"Those are arguments against any kind of benefits," Tribe said. "It goes much further than the center of gravity of popular opinion."
Michael Paulson and Yvonne Abraham of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Material from the Associated Press was also used. 