Killing Time
I don't pay too much attention to what Pope Francis (or any Pope) says. After all, his job is to lead the Catholic Church, and as such has no moral authority over me.
Though I have to wonder how the Pope's fellow Catholics feel about this. It's my understanding the Catholic Church has for centuries found the death penalty to be acceptable under certain circumstances. Was this attitude treated as provisional, or an eternal truth?
I would guess some Catholics--including some fairly high up in the hierarchy--must feel the Pope is not on firm doctrinal grounds. So what should they do? Put up with it? Quit the Church? Or just wait out this Pope and pick a better once next time?
posted by LAGuy @ 10:00 AM
7 Comments:
The wording of the new material leaves just enough wiggle-room that people can interpret it as consistent with the past. In fact, the change/development under John Paul II, in hindsight, might have been the bigger change.
Scripture and 1900 years of Christian tradition taught -- not perfectly consistently, but pretty darn close -- the following propositions: (1) It can be just and proper for a civil government to execute a criminal, at least under certain circumstances. (2) One of the primary reasons for capital punishment is that murderer and other heinous criminals deserve this punishment. (3) It is laudable for a ruler to show mercy to a criminal and give them a sentence less than what they deserve, at least under some circumstances.
After the carnage of World War II, the movement against the death penalty grew in many quarters, including the Catholic Church.
In the 1990s, John Paul II clearly stated the following propositions in various writings, including the Catechism: (1) It can be just and proper for a civil government to execute a criminal, at least under certain circumstances. (2) Since killing -- even killing of criminals -- is not completely in conformity with the dignity of the human person, executions should be limited to circumstances where they are necessary to protect the populace. Today, since we have reliable prisons, the circumstances in which the death penalty is justified are "very rare, if practically nonexistent."
There's nothing improper about the application of Catholic doctrine being updated due to changing circumstances, and it's certainly true that modern prisons are very secure, and that wealthy societies can afford to put people in prison for life. So most people interpreted JP2's teaching as keeping the same doctrine, but adapting it to new circumstances; he clearly stated that in principle the death penalty would be permitted under (perhaps non-existent) circumstances. On the other hand, some argued that there's a doctrinal change here, since the old motive of retribution has been replaced with the new motive of protecting society.
Pope Francis' change is significant, but perhaps a lesser change than JP2's. Francis puts greater emphasis on the dignity of the person, and then states that "the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person."
As he has often done, Francis is using common language, not theologically precise language. The word "inadmissible" clearly means "never", not "very rarely". But "inadmissible" is not a traditional theological term, so it's very hard to parse what it means. (A) One interpretation is that Francis is just taking JP2's teaching a step further: the death penalty would be moral under certain conditions, but today those conditions never apply. (B) Another interpretation is that Francis is teaching that the death penalty is intrinsically immoral.
The latter would be far more problematic, because it would mean that God was wrong to give laws to Moses that involved the death penalty, and that for nineteen centuries the popes have been wrong to think that the death penalty is not intrinsically wrong.
In the paragraphs of the Catechism that Pope Francis has revised, there is support for each of these interpretations: it refers to changes in practical matters (safer prisons) and to changes in how we understand purely moral questions (we have recently become aware that "the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes").
Already, various theologians, pundits, and bishops have issued statements interpreting Francis' text as meaning A or as meaning B.
My guess is that some folks will ask Francis to clarify which of these he means, and he won't answer. Last time he released a highly contentious and apparently ambiguous document, four cardinals sent him a private letter begging for a clarification, and later made the letter public -- but he never clarified it.
During the previous controversy, many of Francis' defenders argued "He doesn't need to clarify this document, because it's not ambiguous -- it's clear to me that he means X." Others, equally sincerely, argued, "He doesn't need to clarify this document, because it's not ambiguous -- it's clear to me that he means Y."
It put me in mind of the argument between Kirk and Kor in Errand of Mercy:
KIRK: You're the ones who issued an ultimatum for us to withdraw from the disputed territories!
KOR: They're not disputed. They're clearly ours!
None of this is a problem for liberal Catholic theologians, because they don't believe that there are any "intrinsically" immoral acts or any "absolute" moral rules, nor do they believe that every single Law in the Torah was actually given by God. So they're sitting this debate out.
The fault lines of the current debate are between the centrists (whose views align with Francis'), the conservatives (whose views align with John Paul II and Benedict XVI), and the traditionalists (who reject significant portions of Vatican II and recent papal teachings). Until 2013, these groups were quite distinct. But some of Francis' teachings have scrambled the picture. In some ways, it's analogous to the American political realignments after 1945 and after 1989.
Entire books have been written in response to the questions in your last paragraph. But here is a very abbreviated response.
Since the 14th century (if not earlier), the Catholic Church has distinguished between infallible teachings of popes and councils, and teachings by popes and councils that possess a lesser degree of certainty. When a pope or council teaches infallibly, they cannot err.
[Before 1870, all Catholic bishops and theologians agreed that a general council could teach infallibly, and they all agreed that a pope could teach infallibly if he submitted his teaching to the bishops for ratification. Whether a pope could teach infallibly without such ratification was a contentious question, debated for half a millennium until 1870, when Vatican I said the answer was yes. Since Vatican I was a general council, that settled the dispute!]
When a pope or council teaches non-infallibly, Catholics are expected to give a significant degree of deference to that teaching. But if they study the teaching, pray about it, and ultimately conclude that it's false, they have done all they are obligated to do. (However, someone who is commissioned to teach on behalf of the Church may have further restrictions on publicly dissenting from a teaching.)
If a pope were to teach something that was not merely wrong, but which actually contradicted something that has been definitively taught by a council or an earlier pope, then that pope would be a (material) heretic. That leads to all sorts of messy consequences.
In practice, waiting for the next Pope is the path of least resistance, and so it's the most likely. But in the 1330s, when Pope John XXII began teaching that the blessed dead do not behold God after their deaths (as the Church had always taught) but instead have to wait for Jesus' return at the end of history to behold God, there was a huge reaction on the part of Catholic laity, theologians, priests, and even some bishops, and he finally issued a retraction (of sorts) on his deathbed.
The Church evolves while pretending that it doesn't
NEG, the Catholic Church is quite frank about the many changes to its doctrines, rites, and rules over the centuries. Some doctrines and rites cannot change, and others can.
So the Pope and his favorite cardinal are sitting in coach and His Holiness is working a crossword puzzle.
He asks the cardinal, "What's a four letter word for a 'woman' ending in u,n,t?"
The cardinal says, "That's easy. Aunt."
The Pope says, "Can I borrow your eraser?"
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