Face To Face With The Death Penalty
Posted on July 31st, 2008 by Steve Skojec
My latest column, Face to Face With The Death Penalty, is up today at Inside Catholic.
Also, I’m noticing slowness on the blog today. Page loads are really dragging. Hopefully this is a traffic issue and will clear up. Probably something to do with the way the Internet tubes sometimes get tangled and/or clogged.
Filed under: Inside Catholic
Steve - interesting post. I disagree with your ambiguity on the death penalty - and yes, I’ve faced the issue personally, as well.
Recently, you critcized me, and by extension all liberal Catholics, on our ambiguity toward “gay-straight alliances” in high schools. My assertion was that they pose no threat to anyone, and as such could be safely ignored. Your interpretation of my ambiguity was not charitable - indeed, you called into question the sincerity of my faith. It’s certainly your right to beleive whatever you wish about my beliefs, but it’s a common tactic of yours and other hard-line traditionalists.
Yet here, you express ambiguity on a key Catholic social teaching. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops last year said:
“Catholic teaching about the dignity of life calls us to oppose…the use of the death penalty…We revere the lives of children in the womb, the lives of persons dying in war and from starvation, and indeed the lives of all human beings as children of God.”
This is not an ambiguous statement. Catholics are called to oppose the use of the death penalty - full stop. The lives of ALL human beings are to be revered.
Now, I will not call into question your faith, as it is clearly strong - also, unlike some, I understand that there are gaps between religious ideals and policy reality. My question to you, though, is this - how can you reconcile your harsh criticism of Catholics who do not share the Church’s stated beliefs on “culture war” issues with the fact that you seem to disagree with a key Catholic teaching that just happens to align with the political left-wing?
Asdaf,
It’s a fair question, but one that requires certain distinctions.
You say I called into question the sincerity of your faith, which is not accurate. What I called into question was the sincerity of your Catholicism. Your faith in God, depending on what you believe about Him, is something I am in no position to judge. But Catholicism, as a religion that has precise requirements - precepts, dogmas and doctrines - is easy to match up against a person’s beliefs. If their beliefs are different than those of the religion they profess, then I struggle to see how they can actually claim to profess that religion.
To use a grossly oversimplified analogy, let’s imagine that there is a club known as “The Brown Pants Club”, which requires its members, unsurprisingly, to wear brown pants. There is some latitude within the club as to whether the pants are to be made of cotton or wool, and as to the cut and style of the pants. But there is an absolute requirement that the pants worn by the members must be brown. If one of the members of this club began wearing red pants, in direct violation of the requirements for membership, are they still members of the club? Must the club formally expel them for their membership status to be questioned? Even if the club leadership itself is unaware of the fact that the member has begun to violate the rules (and even if some mid-level leaders are secretly sympathetic to the color red), would it be illogical for other members of the club to question the sincerity of that member’s adherence to the ideals of the organization? After all, they still all believe in wearing pants, so what’s the difference?
Of course, in a club like this, the rules are arbitrary. In a body like the Catholic Church, they are derived from Scripture and Tradition. It would make no sense for a Catholic to profess that his faith is divinely inspired and that its teachings on faith and morals are infallible and in the same breath profess that he disagrees entirely with some number of these teachings, yet still believes in the inviolable authority from whence they derive.
This violates the principle of non-contradiction.
Now, as for my position on capital punishment, the same analogy holds true. The difference between what I believe about capital punishment and what you implied that your belief was about homosexuality is that the Church has always and unequivocally condemned homosexual acts as immoral, but has a long-standing tradition of teaching that allows capital punishment as a legitimate act of the state in response to capital crimes.
I cited Cardinal Dulles on this fact in my article. To reiterate:
Unfortunately, deconstructionism runs rampant in the mind of modern man. Many of the Bishops, themselves often in opposition of the teaching authority of the Church which binds them, seek to establish as law that which can only be described as prudential judgment. There is no moral precept requiring capital punishment without regard to specific instances, meaning that one can always advocate that the instances in which it is a legitimate punitive action should be drastically limited.
What the Church has never done is advocate with any official teaching authority that capital punishment is in all cases a morally unacceptable act. It is not intrinsically evil, and can therefore not be objectively forbidden.
The Bishops’ statement you cited lacks ecclesial authority; it is simply a statement of opinion of several bishops, who joined together in creating it. They cannot override the long-standing teaching of the Church on the matter in this way, or it violates the very immutability of doctrine and the infallibility of the Magisterium.
This isn’t about politics, it’s about truth. Truth is unchanging, and that’s why consistency of application in teachings must be verified in evaluating these issues.
Steve - that’s a bad analogy. The better one is that I’m a member in good standing of the Brown Pants Club, but have chosen not to be offended or threatened by those that wear red pants. Unless I am somehow obligated by the rules of the Brown Pants Club to hate and vocally oppose red pants, my membership is safe. Continuing this analogy, I wear Dockers and you wear Revolutionary War-style breeches (I kid).
You’re right, the Conference doesn’t carry ecclesial weight. Maybe an encyclical does:
56. …It is clear that, for these purposes to be achieved, the nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.
In any event, the principle set forth in the new Catechism of the Catholic Church remains valid: “If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority must limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person”.
By the way, the scholarly consensus seems to be that the statements regarding the inviolability of human life were made ex cathedra.
To defend the use of capital punishment on the murderers of your mother-in-law, you’ve got to establish that life in prison, in solitary confinement (which is an option in the United States penal system) is somehow less adequate a protection for society than putting the offenders to death.
I hope you don’t misunderstand me - I’m not calling you out here. You, like me and the vast majority of American Catholics, hold a belief that is at odds with the consensus of canon law.
I just hope that you think of this the next time you’re condemning Catholics with different beliefs.
“To defend the use of capital punishment on the murderers of your mother-in-law, you’ve got to establish that life in prison, in solitary confinement (which is an option in the United States penal system) is somehow less adequate a protection for society than putting the offenders to death. ”
I think you have it backwards here. It is the abolition of the death penalty that needs to be justified. On its face, the death penalty is just, for having taken someone else’s life, one’s own is forfeit. So what needs to be justified is why we should forbear in imposing that penalty in every possible circumstance.
It is sad that utilitarianism has so totally guided modern approaches to the criminal law, because the purpose of the criminal law is to make a moral statement. The criminal law is not primarily designed to “deter crime” or “protect society,” it is to impose a punishment upon an offender so as to make a statement that the crime commited is an offense against the peace and dignity of the society. This is not to say that rehabilitation and deterrence may not also be legitimate concerns, but these concerns should not be allowed to completely trump the purpose.
I think we are so chickenshit relativistic nowadays, and so mentally enslaved by the modern administrative state bor out of the industrial revolution, that we simply cannot abide the existence of a thing without finding some way to justify its utility.
But if one has a proper understanding of the criminal law, viz., that it exists to be a statement about the mores of a society (as opposed to it being an tool to socially enginer persons), it is the total abolition of the death penalty that needs to be justified.
As an aside, spurious protests of “wrongful convictions,” raised primarily by folks who disingenuously hide the distinction between factual innocence, procedural irregularity, and misapplication of evidentiary rules, reveal that such protestors’ real complaint is with the existence of human fallability–a fact of life that will never change before the parousia.
In any event, the only justification for the total abolition of the death penalty that I can find is that we should abolish it as a general grant of Christian mercy. The question then becomes whether or not, in light of the post-Christian nature of our society today, as well as the fact that we no longer have penetentiaries (but rather “Departments of Corrections”), this message of mercy will be conveyed, or whether such alternative sentences are in fact merciful.
Steve - that’s a bad analogy. The better one is that I’m a member in good standing of the Brown Pants Club, but have chosen not to be offended or threatened by those that wear red pants. Unless I am somehow obligated by the rules of the Brown Pants Club to hate and vocally oppose red pants, my membership is safe.
Not really. First, it would be helpful if you stop using terms like “offended” or “threatened” or “hate”. It’s really not so personal or petty. Our faith teaches that homosexual acts (not homosexual persons) are intrinsically disordered and gravely sinful. They are a sin against nature. We may therefore do nothing to support them or to advocate them. In fact, we have a moral obligation to work against the advancement of these acts, just as we have a moral obligation to defend our faith and to promote virtue and to combat any sin.
I also believe that fornication is gravely sinful, and if school clubs were started promoting fornication as a “lifestyle choice”, I’d oppose them as well. I don’t hate or feel threatened by fornicators. I believe that they are doing something morally wrong.
So, going back to our analogy - yes, you are obligated in virtue of the sacrament of confirmation and your adherence to the faith to oppose red pants, if by red pants we are crystal clear in meaning “homosexual acts or those groups and/or agendas that promote their acceptance.”
Evangelium Vitae is indeed an encyclical, but we must remember that encyclicals are always weighed against prior Church teaching on a given topic. This has to do with the fact that doctrine can develop, but never contradict itself.
The long-standing teaching of the Church on capital punishment allows it. Even Evangelium Vitae does not rule it out. It is unfortunately naive that the Holy Father wrote that “as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.” One need only look at prison crime statistics to see that the prison guards, staff, and other inmates are all in danger due to the presence of violent criminals. Solitary confinement for all criminals is not possible at this time, so I would argue that these cases are not as rare as John Paul II has suggested here.
There is no scholarly consensus on the matter of capital punishment according to the teaching of the Church other than that the Church has allowed and defended this right of the state for so long that even John Paul II’s personal, ardent desire that it be severely restricted was as far as he could take things.
There is nothing remotely approaching an ex cathedra statement on this topic. (Such statements are of their very nature quite rare, in fact.)
The Second Vatican Council reiterated the teaching of the First Vatican Council, in which papal infallibility was defined. See the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen gentium, number 25.
There is a good definition here:
For a papal statement to be considered ex cathedra it must have three characteristics. Firstly, it must be universal; i.e. made by the Pope as supreme pastor and teacher of the whole Church, not of only a part of the Church. Secondly, it must be on a matter of faith or morals, which is the area within which the Church has authority to teach. And thirdly, it must be taught in a definitive way; i.e. stated in absolute terms that admit of no exceptions, to be accepted by all the faithful.
Clearly, again, JPII’s statements in Evangelium Vitae admit of exceptions. That alone is sufficient to disqualify EV as an ex cathedra pronouncement on Capital Punishment.
If you wish to see some other thought from the Church doctors on the issue, see the citations of Augustine and Aquinas in the original thread at Inside Catholic made by commenter “M.H.”.
Canon law forbids clerics to shed human blood, but makes no such claims on secular authority.
In conclusion, I think you need to re-evaluate the loopholes you believe you’ve found here. Even if I were incorrect on this issue and engaged in blatant dissent, it would not be a justification for another Catholic to dissent from Church teaching on a different issue. It would simply make us both wrong.