Cardinal Francis George’s ideas on law shaping culture reveal how legal systems, secular and religious, reinforce both justice and secrecy.
Newsroom (06/02/2026 Gaudium Press ) When Cardinal Francis George published “Law and Culture” in the Ave Maria Law Review in 2003, he sought to warn legislators considering same-sex marriage that legal systems are not neutral arbiters of morality. Law, he argued, is inseparable from the culture in which it operates. Change the law, he wrote, and the culture will follow.
George’s essay opened with a reflection on the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the decision that ended legal segregation in American schools. He observed that laws, whether just or unjust, act as teachers: segregation statutes had not only mirrored the prevailing racism of their time but had also deepened and legitimized it. It was only when those laws changed that American culture began the slow process of desegregation.
Decades later, George applied that same line of reasoning to the debate over marriage equality. He believed that legalizing same-sex marriage would erode sexual norms and unleash what he called a “sexual free-for-all.” Reality, however, has proved more nuanced. Legal recognition of same-sex unions has largely advanced respect and equality rather than moral chaos. Yet George’s broader principle—that law and culture shape each other in a two-way, interactive process—remains hard to dispute.
The Two-Way Influence of Law and Culture
Historically, legal philosophers in early nineteenth-century Germany understood law as a mere reflection of culture. By the 1980s, American jurisprudence had taken a more dynamic view: law, it held, both reflects and molds the cultural values around it. Laws are born from the culture that produces them, yet they also reinforce and sustain that same culture once enacted.
Few examples illustrate this more vividly than laws concerning homosexuality. The criminalization of same-sex acts once normalized homophobia by embedding it in the legal structure. To borrow George’s phrasing, such laws “reinforced, perpetuated, rationalized, and deepened” society’s prejudice. Conversely, the repeal of those laws in the late twentieth century led to measurable declines in homophobia, much as Brown v. Board marked a turning point in American racial attitudes. The dynamic also plays out globally: in Russia, anti-homosexual legislation has coincided with a rise in violence toward LGBTQ citizens. The law does not expressly endorse such brutality—but by stigmatizing a group, it sanctions hostility.
When Law Breeds Secrecy: The Church’s Canonical System
The same principle of legal-cultural entanglement extends into the inner workings of religious institutions. The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, in its 2017 Final Report, found that internal legal systems—especially those within the Catholic Church, some Yeshivah Jewish groups, and Jehovah’s Witnesses—had long fostered a culture of concealment. Canon law, the Church’s own legal framework, had mandated secrecy around clerical abuse cases for nearly a century.
That tradition began with Pope Pius XI’s 1922 instruction Crimen Sollicitationis, which imposed strict confidentiality on investigations into sexual misconduct by clergy. The rule was reaffirmed and expanded through subsequent papal documents: Pope Paul VI’s Secreta Continere (1974), Pope John Paul II’s Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela (2001), and Pope Benedict XVI’s amendments in 2010. Collectively, they entrenched what Cardinal George might have described as a law that “rationalized and deepened” a corrosive culture—in this case, one of secrecy and impunity.
This insularity extended beyond legal codes to institutional behavior. In 2013, after a prolonged legal battle, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles released internal documents revealing that Cardinal Roger Mahony had quietly relocated known abusers across state lines to avoid arrest. The Royal Commission uncovered similar tactics in Australia, where accused clergy were sometimes transferred to countries without extradition treaties. Canon law did not explicitly authorize such actions, but its implicit demand for secrecy created a moral environment where evasion flourished.
Cultural Inertia and the Long Road to Reform
Even when laws change, cultures rarely transform overnight. The Vatican’s slow response to the abuse crisis exemplifies this inertia. Following recommendations from the Australian Royal Commission, the Holy See announced in 2020 that Pope Francis had abolished the pontifical secret—a long-standing rule restricting the disclosure of abuse cases. The Vatican promised to publish disciplinary decisions “on a case-by-case basis” while protecting the identities of all involved, including perpetrators.
Yet resistance soon emerged. Matteo Visioli, then undersecretary of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, argued that transparency could endanger witnesses and harm the Church’s reputation. This argument echoed the same reasoning—shielding the institution from scandal—that for decades had justified silence. As commentator Chris Altieri has observed, “justice done in the dark is no justice at all.”
For historian Massimo Faggioli, the Church’s mishandling of abuse represents its greatest crisis since the Reformation. The reluctance to publish disciplinary decisions reflects not only legal caution but also the lingering cultural momentum of the past—a testament to how deeply laws can entrench the very norms they were written to protect.
The Enduring Lesson of Law and Culture
More than twenty years after Cardinal Francis George wrote his essay, the world he tried to diagnose still bears the marks of his insight. Law and culture do not merely coexist; they create each other. Whether in the courtroom or the cathedral, legal systems continue to shape moral sensibilities—and as history shows, they can either liberate a culture or imprison it within its own contradictions.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from UCA News
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