Those convinced that the postconciliar Church has repudiated its own moral-theological tradition often point to its apparent reversal on ecumenism or religious liberty as proof of their claims. Personally, I see its incoherence on the issue of capital punishment far more damning in this regard.
Here are two useful articles from my favorite modern apologist, Edward Feser, on the topic. In the first, he defends the moral liceity of the death penalty in terms of natural law. In the second, he blasts the ambiguity and equivocation of those clergy eager to chuck the Church’s historical teachings in their zeal to align themselves with the leftist zeitgeist. In the latter article, Feser ultimately concludes that the Church’s supposed opposition to the death penalty in the present age has been badly exaggerated; but it’s telling that the Church is quick to speak in terms that can be so easily misconstrued and slow to correct those misconstructions.
Which reminds me of a conversation I had with a Franciscan on the topic not long ago. I voiced my dislike of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is bulky, difficult, terminologically ham-handed, obscurantist, and peppered with passages plucked out of badly-needed context from papal encyclicals. Too many Catholics have read, for instance, its treatment of “conscience” and walked away from it with the impression that the Church gives us free license to dissent willy-nilly from teachings held since the dawn of the faith — and then proceeded to do exactly that. The exasperated Franciscan rolled his eyes and said, “That’s because the Catechism isn’t for the laity. It’s for the theologians!” Which is rather the problem, isn’t it?
Tollefsen is a moral imbecile. His idea of “essential dignity” must logically prohibit not merely capital punishment, but any kind of punishment at all.
This is a test case of tradition versus reason.
Anyone who believes that the death penalty is prohibited by Christianity, arguing on the basis of reason, is rejecting (and presumably) damning essentially all Christians until very recently, and nearly all Christians now; the most devout Christian societies in history, Holy fathers and Saints and great Protestant Reformers…
Capital punishment just is NOT prohibited by Christianity. This is a no brainer. There is nothing to discuss.
If modern Christians want to prohibit the death penalty then they will have to come up with some reason that does not entail assuming that our modern judgment, or reasoning ability (or our understanding of scripture and revelation) is superior to the consensus of vast numbers of historical Christians of vastly greater Holiness than anyone alive today – and who were, moreover, in touch with reality in a way almost impossible for modern Westerners.
What you are saying needs to be done is what they do. They don’t say that the death penalty is intrinsically evil. They say that, under modern conditions, the death penalty is nearly always evil. The idea is that we know more and can afford better solutions than past societies could. The CCC says (para 2267):
There is a link above if you don’t like all the ellipses. I don’t really have an independent opinion on whether or not they are right (which means I accede to what the Church apparently teaches, of course). It is a matter of prudential judgement of little importance.
Proph (and others) are clearly right on the larger point, though, that the CCC is a terrible document..
In fact, the cited paragraph from Catechism borders dangerously on error. The qualifier “if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor” simply misrepresents the traditional Church teachings on the matter, which is that the state may wield the sword as a matter of enacting justice, not merely “defending human lives.”
You’re right to say that it’s a matter of prudential judgment. The late Avery Dulles made essentially the same point here, saying that the Church’s present teachings reflect a prudential judgment the laity are in no way obliged to accept. Why, then, does it go out of its way to avoid acknowledging as much? Why do Churchmen everywhere declare consistently that the death penalty is the moral equivalent of abortion? etc.
Bill, well said.
Proph, Churchmen everywhere consistently declare this? You can find someone somewhere who will vehemently promote ANYTHING on the internet, but your leap is ridiculous.
It is important to respect the democracy of the dead, but I don’t see the portion of the catechism quoted by Bill as misleading regarding traditional teaching. The ultimate goal of the Church is the salvation of souls. It’s easy to say that life imprisonment is unlikely to accomplish much towards that end, and perhaps imminent death by execution could even be more effective in that regard. But it is also quite convenient to those of us disinclined to minister to the imprisoned, as Jesus called us to do.
I’m also a little taken aback by “the Church’s present teachings reflect a prudential judgment the laity are in no way obliged to accept”, coming from you.
That’s not my evaluation of the Church’s present teachings re: the death penalty. That’s Card. Dulles’, who was no theological slouch.
Yes, but you are assuming that “if” really means “if and only if” or “only if.” To be clear, I read that part of the para as giving one sufficient condition for the licity of the death penalty. Mine is certainly NOT the usual way one would interpret in that context — normally you would interpret it as giving a necessary condition. A reasonable reaction is to say that I am picking nits or chopping logic, and normally I would agree. However, I do this all the time with the Council and sequelae.
The Magisterium of the conciliar period presents real problems. If we interpret it using the hermeneutic of trust (that is, assuming that the text is NOT written by a lawyer trying to deceive the reader without formally lying), then we are pushed hard towards the conclusion that Rome is chock-a-block with apostates and heretics, including, perhaps, even in the Chair of Peter. I don’t want to go there, so I assume that conciliar documents (or at least the strange parts of them) are written in a way which leads the unwary to heresy but which are not actually heretical. As for why the documents are written this way, I assume the Pope has a gun to his head, figuratively or literally.
As for the Churchmen, I think it likely many of them are heretics. There are more charitable interpretations, though. Maybe they believe that the Church is about to be forced back into the catacombs and are playing for time. So, they, too are playing this game of making extremely misleading but not quite false statements. Or maybe it’s a mix of the two. Some are heretics and some are playing for time. Cardinal George, of whom I normally don’t think much, said “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr.” So, is he one of the people playing for time? Is he just some neocon trying to rally the troops? I dunno.
I can’t say I’m very happy with this way of resolving these tensions, but what’s the alternative? How do you resolve them? ‘Cause they are everywhere.
We are fortunate that we need not actually concern ourselves with much of what Vatican II taught. What do I care whether episcopal consecrations have a sacramental character, etc.? I can safely live my life pretending as if nothing that happened during Vatican II actually happened. So I do just that.
It is true that the death penalty was imposed more readily in the past, and that this was partly due to the inability of an agrarian society to support a large indigent population of incarcerated criminals. But it is an entirely modern notion that the sole purpose of execution or confinement is to protect the public from dangerous men. As I understand it, even today, the state does not technically punish a man for murdering another man, but for effrontery of breaking the law against murder. My family may sue him for damages in a civil case, but the plaintiff in the criminal case is the state whose law was broken.
Murder is an interesting crime since a great many murderers are almost certainly one-time offenders. Once they’ve chopped up their wife or garroted her lover, they’re finished. It’s one and done for them. They are no threat to the public, or even to the majesty of the Law. But we incarcerate, and even execute, them because justice is retribution for what a man has done , not an interdiction of things he might possibly do .
The death penalty is not a big issue for me, one way or the other. If a person is genuinely concerned with lives cut prematurely short, however, I can think of hundreds of mission fields more urgently demanding than Death Row. Every one of us is much more likely to be launched into eternity by a texting teenager than by the judicial machinery of the State!
But the really disturbing part of the passage Bill quotes, so far as I’m concerned, is the therapeutic understanding of Justice. Do you suppose Hell is a place of punishment , or just a quarantine zone to keep the riffraff out of Heaven? This therapeutic understanding of Justice is not at all the same as Justice tempered by Mercy.
The Catechism of Trent (1556):
Execution Of Criminals
Another kind of lawful slaying belongs to the civil authorities, to whom is entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent. The just use of this power, far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to this Commandment which prohibits murder. The end of the Commandment is the preservation and security of human life. Now the punishments inflicted by the civil authority, which is the legitimate avenger of crime, naturally tend to this end, since they give security to life by repressing outrage and violence. Hence these words of David: In the morning I put to death all the wicked of the land, that I might cut off all the workers of iniquity from the city of the Lord.
Far more cogent, clear, and convincing than the CCC version.
Far more cogent, clear, and convincing than the CCC version.
Amen.
“The end of the Commandment is the preservation and security of human life.”
Cogent, clear. and also, according to most of this thread, a departure from traditional teaching on the subject. The preservation and security of human life? You guys will be liberals this time next week.
“Cogent, clear. and also, according to most of this thread, a departure from traditional teaching on the subject.”
Note the date on the quote.
1556
That IS the traditional view.
Note the non-liberal themes: punishment of the guillty, civil authority as the legitimate avenger of crime, and the death penalty as a mechanism for the repression of violence.
” I don’t want to go there, so I assume that conciliar documents (or at least the strange parts of them) are written in a way which leads the unwary to heresy but which are not actually heretical. As for why the documents are written this way, I assume the Pope has a gun to his head, figuratively or literally.”
In other words, the conciliar documents are Straussian texts: written in such a way as to convey one theme to its intended (worthy) audience and another, less offensive one to its unintended audience. Incidentally, Strauss suggested this kind of esotericism was employed for the exact reason you mentioned — if everyone read the (intended) message, the offending philosopher would get the Socrates treatment.
If the Catechism isn’t for the laity, what is? Are we supposed to get our doctrine from those pithy homilies? Or should we rely exclusively on our memory of the stirring and rigorous lessons we received in RE or RCIA? The Franciscan you mention would do well to recall that Christ said “feed my sheep,” not “feed my shepherds.”
I am increasingly getting the impression that the laity are nowadays regarded as too stupid to “get it.” The deacon who ran my RCIA class more or less told me as much. (Imagine nine months of those “pithy homilies” every Thursday night — that’s the instruction we got in the faith!)
A better question is, who the hell’s brilliant idea was it to write a Catechism only people with doctorates in theology could read? These people have the least need of it and are least likely to benefit from it. The sentiment “It’s not for the laity, it’s for the theologians” may as well be applied to everything the Church did during and since the Council. Intellectual chaos calculated to provide cover-fire for hand-wringing academics, at the expense of the moral integrity of (the 99.9999% of Catholics that are) everyone else.
I agree with Proph that the CCC line of argument implies (to simplify) that modern societies are rich enough not to use the death penalty in situations where it was used in the past.
But this ignores the traditional Christian belief that the death penalty can justly be applied when it is DESERVED, and indeed that there are situations where it IS deserved – and therefore that NOT to apply the death penalty in these situations is UNJUST (i.e. the situation that applies in most of Europe and the UK).
This is NOT a matter of expediency.
I could imagine an impoverished medieval village in which a mentally handicapped woman killed a baby without intent, and she was regarded as likely to repeat the offense, and exile could not be enforced, and she might be put to death for lack of any other possibility (such as permanent confinement – which may be grossly impractical).
But this would not be a just punishment – merely expedient. I presume the CCC is referring to such situations; but as I say this is merely a matter of expediency.
The idea of the death penalty as a deterrent can be a red herring – there is massive evidence that it is indeed a strong deterrent to murder; however, capital punishment would still not be justified unless it was just. And if the death penalty is just, then it need not be a deterrent.
What modern society has lost (because we are lost in a fantasy world) is the human intuition, natural law, of situations where the death penalty is just and a failure to apply it is unjust.
I’ve been reading the Catholic Catechism (2nd ed), and the adjective obscurantist is too kind. It is largely a collection of quotes from various sources, usually without explication (they just lie on the page), and it is usually unclear about basic matters. E.g., is faith in Jesus necessary for salvation? Who knows? Is adherence to the Catholic Church indispensable to salvation? Who knows? What is Hell? The Catechism is vague on all these points.
I have a copy of the old Baltimore Catechism of my youth. It is a model of unbending rigor and clarity, although the message for modern readers is often unpleasant reading. Probably it should be. Isn’t that the Christian point: repent, and change?
Although apostate 50 years, I still attend a few masses for family solidarity: weddings, funerals, christenings, etc. The homilies are generally inane. No hard moral substance is ever preached. One who got the Church’s teaching from homilies would not be aware of its condemnation of birth control, abortion etc.
Then, of course, there is the utter banality of the English Mass. I might actually rejoin the Church if the Latin Mass were still available.
It is largely a collection of quotes from various sources, usually without explication
The sources really are not all that various. Mostly, the CCC is sourced to the documents of Vatican II and subsequent Papal encyclicals. There are good reasons for the lack of explication. Vatican II and sequelae are unique in the Magisterium in the way they chose to express themselves, and nobody really knows how this stuff is supposed to be interpreted. As for the pre-VII sources, those are not explicated because, again, nobody really knows what to make of VII and how VII modifies the traditional way of explicating earlier documents.
On top of all this, nothing in the previous paragraph can be admitted out loud by anyone in authority. “Nobody knows what the Church teaches” (to exaggerate a bit) is just not the kind of thing a teaching authority is going to say out loud. In fact, the usual practice is to vigorously assert the contrary: “The documents speak for themselves! It’s obvious what they mean!” What else can they say? The obscurantist tangle follows from these considerations.
Dear Bill,
Thanks. The reason for my confusion is explained, although I still remain confused. I guess my apostasy will have to continue for a while.
One of my sisters died a while ago, and we used to discuss various aspects of Catholicism. She was a convinced Cafeteria Catholic. She listened politely to the priests, and then she believed whatever she wanted. She took communion whenever she went to Mass, but hadn’t gone to Confession for 30 to 40 years. Etc. etc etc. She got this attitude from my mother. This is a road I might yet follow.
Bob,
I hope that you find your way back to the Church, and I will pray for you.
The Baltimore Catechism has not been suppressed, by the way. I have heard that some parishes use it still. (though I have no specific knowledge of it). So, perhaps you can just use it to consider your return.
I was talking to an older acquaintance, complaining about my children’s religious ed classes. He was still able to recite questions and answers from the Baltimore Catechism. It was really beautiful.
But wait, I thought rote memorizing stuff was bad…. somehow.
I guess that it can vary widely from one place to the next. I am Presbiterian, but my wife is polish and Catholic, so I sometimes attend mass here in Poland, usually with her parents. There are sermons with hard moral substance and once per sunday there is a latin mass (although probably not in every church).
But I do have to say that they could fundament their arguments better. Usually to me it seams that they don’t provide any fundamentation at all. They could clearly say: This is because of this, this and this verses in the Bible and we believe that the Bible is the word of God. Or: This is because we believe in tradition and traditionally it was done in this way. The Presbiterian Church of Brazil is very clear in its messages and all of those things that you asked it responds very quickly, and usually with strong biblical proof, in a class in preparation for the baptisms.
I’ll give you 1 concrete example: Kneeing in the mass. I never heard any catholic explain why it is done that way, or that it really matters. So to me it was just a strange curiosity, as it is not done in the Presbiterian church, I simply assumed it is a sign of submission, or maybe even some kind of idolatry … I would never actually think that it has a more objective reason for existing. But once talking to some friends of my grandmother, which are of the “Congregação Cristã do Brasil” church, where they do kneel, she said to me: You are doing it wrong. Kneeing is biblical. Read Romans 14:11 It is written: “‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord, ‘every knee will bow before me; every tongue will confess to God.’”
She actually knew the verse by heart. That strikes as convincing. Strong and to the point: We believe in the Bible and the Bible says X, so we believe in X. It an argumentation that is very easy to understand, and clearly allows everyone to debate what is right and wrong on objective and simple bases.
So it strikes me as odd: Why don’t the catholic clergy use this line of argumentation and thinking and pass it on for their flock to use too, like protestants do? They could easily use it to rebuff acusations against them and defend their own righteougeness.
Right, there are good priests who teach the truth. I suspect they are cribbing from older materials. Some of them admit they are cribbing from older materials. There is no lack of Biblical exegesis in the Catholic tradition. A great deal of the Church’s teaching can be traced back ultimately to some Church father’s exegesis of scripture.
You are hitting exactly on Proph’s point. Why don’t the Churchmen draw on this vast patrimony rather than spewing gibberish? It’s a real question.
“Why don’t the Churchmen draw on this vast patrimony rather than spewing gibberish?”
Basic answer: Unbelief. Most clergy in most denominations don’t really believe the faith they are nominally ordained to teach and defend. They believe some of it, but they are “cafeteria clergy.”
One of the main reasons for this unbelief is that they want to be popular, both with their parishioners and with the world. If a clergyman tells people what they want to hear, they’ll reward him with money, power and status.
“I might actually rejoin the Church if the Latin Mass were still available.”
It is! A couple of years back, the Church announced that Latin Mass could be performed without special permission required. In my native Chicago, there are several parishes and chapels offering Novus Ordo and Tridentine Masses.
It is certainly available most places, but sadly the permission granted was narrower than people think. Priests no longer need permission simply to say the TLM, but they still require permission to celebrate it in public, to alter the parish Mass schedule to accommodate it, etc. Bishops still have wide latitude to deny it, and even to deny priests the ability to learn it. I was talking with the vocations director of my own diocese recently who told me that the TLM was “not a pastoral priority,” and that training it was to be offered to priests only as a post-ordination “option” “at the discretion of the bishop” “according to the needs of the diocese.”
If the Catechism isn’t for the laity, what is?
I haven’t gone through the Compendium with a fine-toothed comb, but I find it much more straightforward than the phone-book CCC. In fairness to the door-stop however, I should mention that a chance encounter with it at my Lutheran church’s library was instrumental in my conversion, or to put a twist on Chesterton, even watered-down Catholicism is enough to boil the world.
The Compendium is certainly preferable to the CCC, but I still find it dense, boring, and insufferably ambivalent. I’ll stick with the Baltimore and Roman Catechisms, thanks. By the way, the Adult Catechism published by the USCCB is pretty much just as bad.
I am not opposed to capital punishment, though a part of me remains undecided about the kinds of cases in which it should be applied. In cases of mass murder, or no sign of contrition (think Breijvik), definitely. In cases of negligent homicide, probably not. But there are many cases in between that present difficulties in arriving at proportionality. Though I do not care for the Innocence Project’s advocacy against capital punishment, the fact that there have been cases of wrongful conviction and execution (see: http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Cameron_Todd_Willingham_Wrongfully_Convicted_and_Executed_in_Texas.php) persuades me that capital punishment ought to have a higher standard of evidence for conviction than other punishments, because a mistake there cannot be righted.
Putting an innocent man in prison can’t be “righted” either. If you release him, it does not restore his lost years or compensate him for the horrors he has experienced and witnessed.
That aside, right now capital punishment DOES have a higher standard of evidence for conviction than other punishments.
I have already thought about this before, and I think that this can be very easily solved. With the advance of technology we are much more prepared then ever before to have hard proof of things that happened: videotapes, DNA, etc. So executions should always include a very high amount of evidence, beyond doubt, of course. I agree it should indeed have a higher requirement of evidence then for normal conviction, and I’d say it should be utilized in cases of particularly cruel, unhumane acts, specially in the case of a reincidence.
The notion that the Catechism is only for moral theologians is malarkey, as it says itself:
It is also offered to all the faithful who wish to deepen their knowledge of the unfathomable riches of salvation (cf. Eph 3:8). It is meant to support ecumenical efforts that are moved by the holy desire for the unity of all Christians, showing carefully the content and wondrous harmony of the catholic faith. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, lastly, is offered to every individual who asks us to give an account of the hope that is in us (cf. 1 Pt 3:15) and who wants to know what the Catholic Church believes.
Maybe the problem isn’t lack of clarity in the Catechism. Maybe the problem is in reluctance to admit that there may have been an actual development of doctrine: that in addition to the traditional teaching, and in no way subtracting anything from it, charity lays upon us another burden, of resorting to the death penalty only when it is, in addition to being just punishment, necessary to do so for the protection of society.
Since I already used too many commas in that last sentence I’ll just point out that the practical judgement that society is capable of protecting others from heinous criminals strikes me as rather dubious unless we don’t consider fellow inmates worthy of protection. But if I’m right about that it doesn’t refute the doctrinal development.
I’m a strident anti-positivist, so I’m as aware as anyone of the limitations of language. But by the same token I think obscurity is often manufactured, that non serviam comes in many flavors, and that things really ought to be taken to mean just what they say.
“the practical judgement that society is capable of protecting others from heinous criminals strikes me as rather dubious unless we don’t consider fellow inmates worthy of protection”
The incapacity stems from the same problem – liberalism.
Traditional society is capable of protecting citizens from criminals via incarceration and the death penalty, and is also capable of maintaining order in prison.
A liberal society is incapable of maintaining order either inside or outside prison, because the authorities do not believe in punishment. This follows from the more fundamental problem that they do not believe in right and wrong — if you don’t believe in wrong, how can you believe in punishing it?
If the best we can get, in our liberal society, is that we are protected from some criminals for the duration of their incarceration, but the criminals are not protected from each other in prison, well, so be it, it’s better than nothing.
Are there any cases where life in prison would not render sufficient redress to the crimes committed?
Suppose if an extremely old man, someone say in his nineties, were to murder several people (by means of a gun or explosive or with an automobile or some other means)- his term in prison would be relatively brief. How should one proceed in such a case where prison seems insufficient as punishment?
Or what if a man killed an extremely large number of people. Does such a man merit only life in prison, or does he deserve to die, and perhaps die in a miserable way?
I think I understand the Church’s position as articulated today-
1) The state has authority to defend the common good by recourse to the deliberate killing of unjust aggressors.
2) By being able to safely imprison aggressors, the state is able to provide sufficient defense to the common good.
3) In light of the dignity of the human person, by keeping murderers and other grave criminals alive, the state gives more time and opportunity for repentance and conversion. Since the conversion of a soul is of exceeding value, this would seem to be a laudable policy.
I am unsure, however, about how to address the two hypothetical cases in light of these principles.
@Aegis – I understand you are attempting to express the RC position, not your own – but numbers one and two are expediency (what is best for the smooth running of society); not a matter of justice, nor what is deserved, nor what is appropriate.
(If some people deserve punishment, as some people do or else the whole of justice is a sham; they also deserve punishment of a particular kind.)
Number 3 is purely conjectural – and indeed goes against the wisdom of the ages which regarded imminent execution as the most powerful of inducements to repentance – there are many examples.
I’ve long been tempted by the third point regarding repentance, but it’s charm is certainly fading. I live in one of the barbarous states of this Union where criminals are executed, and even here a condemned man will have many years to rue his actions and repent. And it certainly seems possible that repentance might be encouraged if the condemned man has a lively sense of the wrath of an outraged society. In Christian repentance, as I understand it, the first steps are (1) sensing that God is angry with me, and (2) accepting that his anger is righteous. He’s not “disappointed” in me. That’s why the Puritans used to call the first stages of conversion “holy terror.” It’s rather like the case of a badly misbehaving child. One should not punish a child while in a rage; but if the punishing parent shows no trace of anger, the chastised child must wonder if he really did something that was truly wrong.
I recall some hubbub in my own state (Texas) when there was discussion about limiting appeals for cases in which the evidence against the plaintiff was particularly strong. If I recall, this would’ve reduced the average time from conviction to execution from 20 years to about 10 years. The horror!
Authorative not infallible.
This is probably one of the only areas I think the post VII Church is correct on. Unlike a lot of other ideologies like liberal capitalism and feminism ideologies which have been trying to pass themselves off as somehow in harmony with Church teaching. At least with the death penalty there are enough good authorities in Church tradition for a Catholic to legitimately argue for the abolition of the death penalty.
From my understanding of history, practices like capital punishment and torture had been largely condemned by the end of the Patristic period. It was only with the rediscovery of Roman law in the high to late Middle Ages that we see are return of these concepts and a sort of fusion (Aquinas) with Catholic teaching.
St. Augustine is the key to getting us out of the swamp of classical liberal vs. totalitarian dichotomy.
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