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This is a pretty interesting change. It may have been disccused before, but this article just hit the wire today so I am looking for some insight.

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1103884.htm

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When a journalist said the majority of Catholics in the United States favor use of the death penalty, Cardinal Ratzinger said, "While it is important to know the thoughts of the faithful, doctrine is not made according to statistics, but according to objective criteria taking into account progress made in the church's thought on the issue."

Forget for a minute if you are for or against capital punishment. Does this constitute a changing in the Roman church's teaching? How can it be called progress to teach the exact opposite of what was previously taught? I'm not saying it can't be. I guess I am just wondering how, with Rome's view of the infallible magesterium, it is possible to reconcile? Any thoughts?

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First: He appears to be reiterating his well known sound-byte "Truth is not determined by majority vote".

Second: Church teaching most certainly does mutate, the prime example being mandatory clerical celibacy.

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Just thinking...you may say that Church thought is progressing....away from capital punishment.
Whether one agrees or not, this has been the progression for the past, what, 50 years? In many parts of the Christian world governments have been moving away from CP. Does anyone know its status in Latin America? That might be an interesting stat.


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I don't think the Catholic Church ever taught that capital punishment was moral or right. It has been argued to be just, following the same arguments as the just war train of thought, when it has been essential to protect society (the self-defense argument). It is hard to visualise a scenario in which it is ever justified in the modern era under this criteria, where good prisons exist where dangerous people can be sequestered. The important point is that just and moral is not the same thing; the Church has always said there are circumstances in which war and killing might be justified, but they are never moral.

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Oops.
Mandatory clerical celibacy is not a doctrine/dogma of the Catholic Church but rather nothing more than an administrative discipline; and one that, IMO, is outdated and has become overly burdensome.

In other words: the problems associated with it now outweigh the supposed benefits of it. It's a discipline that needs to be mutated out of existence.

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In support of my post, the Catechism of the Catholic Church has made my point (with recourse to Thomas Aqunias) for almost 20 years, see the item:


2267. If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority should 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. (1992 version)

2267. Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm -- without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself -- the cases in which the execution of the offender is an abolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically non-existent." (John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 56) (1997 version)

See particularly the last paragraph above.

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Originally Posted by Otsheylnik
I don't think the Catholic Church ever taught that capital punishment was moral or right. It has been argued to be just, following the same arguments as the just war train of thought, when it has been essential to protect society (the self-defense argument). It is hard to visualise a scenario in which it is ever justified in the modern era under this criteria, where good prisons exist where dangerous people can be sequestered. The important point is that just and moral is not the same thing; the Church has always said there are circumstances in which war and killing might be justified, but they are never moral.

Well, the Cathechism of Trent suggests that capital punishment upholds the fifth commandment. Now we are being told it violates it.
http://www.cin.org/users/james/ebooks/master/trent/tcomm05.htm
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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.


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Scripture teaches that recourse to capital punishment is acceptable, and no one - not even the pope - can alter what has been revealed in scripture. This is a case where the pope is saying something that is politically correct but doctrinally unsound. Such is life in the modern Roman Church.

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Originally Posted by Apotheoun
Scripture teaches that recourse to capital punishment is acceptable, and no one - not even the pope - can alter what has been revealed in scripture. This is a case where the pope is saying something that is politically correct but doctrinally unsound. Such is life.

What makes it doctrinally unsound???

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Originally Posted by carson daniel "Metta Physical" lauffer
Originally Posted by Apotheoun
Scripture teaches that recourse to capital punishment is acceptable, and no one - not even the pope - can alter what has been revealed in scripture. This is a case where the pope is saying something that is politically correct but doctrinally unsound. Such is life.

What makes it doctrinally unsound???
It is unsound because God has said: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image." The Church is not above scripture, tradition, or right reason, and all of these things permit recourse to capital punishment in certain cases. No one, not even the pope, is above divine revelation or the natural moral law. It is one thing to say that Catholics may disagree on whether or not to apply capital punishment in a particular case, and quite another to assert that capital punishment is no longer morally permissible. The former is a doctrinally sound position, because it conforms to scripture and the Church's constant tradition; while the latter is not, because it is an innovation.

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"permit recourse" is the operative term which makes your objection unsound. They have not said that it is "no longer morally permissible." There is still the option for recourse to capital punishment. The issue behind the issue is whether or not or how much the Church should influence culture.

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It is sad to say that comments coming out of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church on this subject in recent years have sounded both fatuous and morally vacuous, channelling much more of the Zeitgeist of post-World War II Western Europe than either Scripture or the Tradition of the Western Church.

A much more insightful and morally serious argument in favor of capital punishment as the ultimate assertion of the value of human life can be found in David Gelernter's 1999 Commentary article What Do Murderers Deserve? [utne.com]

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Why execute murderers? To deter? To avenge? Supporters of the death penalty often give the first answer, opponents the second. But neither can be the whole truth. If our main goal were deterring crime, we would insist on public executions—which are not on the political agenda, and not an item that many Americans are interested in promoting. If our main goal were vengeance, we would allow the grieving parties to decide the murderer's fate; if the victim had no family or friends to feel vengeful on his behalf, we would call the whole thing off.

In fact, we execute murderers in order to make a communal proclamation: that murder is intolerable. A deliberate murderer embodies evil so terrible that it defiles the community. Thus the late social philosopher Robert Nisbet wrote: “Until a catharsis has been effected through trial, through the finding of guilt and then punishment, the community is anxious, fearful, apprehensive, and, above all, contaminated.”

When a murder takes place, the community is obliged to clear its throat and step up to the microphone. Every murder demands a communal response. Among possible responses, the death penalty is uniquely powerful because it is permanent. An execution forces the community to assume forever the burden of moral certainty; it is a form of absolute speech that allows no waffling or equivocation.

Gelernter addresses the issue of whether life imprisonment is not an equivalent community statement:

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The answer might be yes if we were a community in which murder was a shocking anomaly. But we are not. “One can guesstimate,” writes the criminologist and political scientist John J. DiIulio Jr., “that we are nearing or may already have passed the day when 500,000 murderers, convicted and undetected, are living in American society.”

DiIulio's statistics show an approach to murder so casual as to be depraved. Our natural bent in the face of murder is not to avenge the crime but to shrug it off, except in those rare cases when our own near and dear are involved.

He points to how murder is treated differently in the Bible, as opposed to other ancient sources of law:

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Murder in primitive societies called for a private settling of scores. The community as a whole stayed out of it. For murder to count, as it does in the Bible, as a crime not merely against one man but against the whole community and against God is a moral triumph still basic to our integrity, and it should never be taken for granted. By executing murderers, the community reaffirms this moral understanding and restates the truth that absolute evil exists and must be punished.

He does point to one exception--the truly repentent murderer. In the case of his essay, that murderer was Karla Faye Tucker, who apparently did undergo a true metanoia before her execution--an execution she did not oppose. Gelernter writes:

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Returning then to the penitent woman and the impenitent man: The Karla Faye Tucker case is the harder of the two. We are told that she repented. If that is true, we would still have had no business forgiving her, or forgiving any murderer. As theologian Dennis Prager has written apropos this case, only the victim is entitled to forgive, and the victim is silent. But showing mercy to penitents is part of our religious tradition, and I cannot imagine renouncing it categorically.

I would consider myself morally obligated to think long and hard before executing a penitent. But a true penitent would have to have renounced (as Karla Faye Tucker did) all legal attempts to overturn the original conviction. If every legal avenue has been tried and has failed, the penitence window is closed.

The impenitent man to whom Gelernter refers is Theodore Kaczynski, the "Unibomber", with whom Gelernter has a real personal connection: he was one of the victims of his bombing spree, losing one eye and most of a hand (computer scientist Gelernter then became a successful artist despite this handicap). Of the Unibomber, he writes:

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As for Kaczynski, the prosecutors say they got the best outcome they could, under the circumstances, and I believe them. But I also regard this failure to execute a cold-blooded, impenitent terrorist and murderer as a tragic abdication of moral responsibility. The community was called on to speak unambiguously. It flubbed its lines, shrugged its shoulders, and walked away.

Gelernter's summation might as well stand for my own position on the issue--and, coincidentally, the traditional position of the Catholic Church, until even its highest authorities were overcome by the vapors of political correctness:

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In executing murderers, we declare that deliberate murder is absolutely evil and absolutely intolerable. This is a painfully difficult proclamation for a self-doubting community to make. But we dare not stop trying. Communities in which capital punishment is no longer the necessary response to deliberate murder may exist. America today is not one of them.



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Originally Posted by carson daniel "Metta Physical" lauffer
"permit recourse" is the operative term which makes your objection unsound. They have not said that it is "no longer morally permissible." There is still the option for recourse to capital punishment. The issue behind the issue is whether or not or how much the Church should influence culture.
I am simply going by what the article said, and the author's use of the phrases "must no longer support" and "there is no room for supporting the death penalty" etc., do not allow for recourse to the death penalty, and that is clearly contrary to the constant teaching of the Church and to what has been revealed in sacred scripture. No one, not even the pope, can say that the death penalty cannot be used, since its judicious use is taught by God in sacred scripture (see Romans 13:3-4).

Nevertheless, on a case by case basis Catholics are free to debate its application, but - as I indicated above - no one is permitted to reject its use out of hand, because that is contrary to scripture, tradition, and right reason.

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The Latin Church has traditionally taught that there are three principles that inform punishment and that these three principles (taken together) apply in all cases:

(1) The rehabilitation of the criminal is to be sought when this is possible.
(2) Retributive justice, that is, the restoration of the social order by the punishment of the malefactor with a punishment that is commensurate with the crime, including in some cases the execution of the criminal, is to be enacted.
(3) The defense of the common good of society is to be sought by rendering the criminal harmless, and this principle also includes the possible execution of the malefactor.

As far as the second point is concerned, Pope Pius XII said the following:

"We called attention to the fact that many, perhaps the majority, of civil jurists reject vindictive punishment. We noted, however, that perhaps the considerations and arguments adduced as proof were being given a greater importance and force than they have in reality. We also pointed out that the Church in her theory and practice has maintained this double type of penalty (medicinal and vindictive), and that this is more in conformity with what the sources of revelation and traditional doctrine teach regarding the coercive power of legitimate human authority. It is not a sufficient reply to this assertion to say that the aforementioned sources contain only thoughts which correspond to the historic circumstances and to the culture of the time, and that a general and abiding validity cannot therefore be attributed to them. The reason is that the words of the sources and of the living teaching power do not refer to the specific content of individual juridical prescriptions or rules of action (cf. Romans 13:4), but rather to the essential foundation itself of penal power and of its immanent finality. This, in turn, is as little determined by the conditions of time and culture as the nature of man and the human society decreed by nature itself." [Pope Pius XII, Discourse to jurists, 1955]

Previous popes, at least on this particular hot button issue, appear to teach the more reasonable position, while the last few popes seem to be adrift in relativism and political correctness in connection with this topic.

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What the Catholic Church has been doing, these last forty years, is assuming that the recent European past would somehow be normative for all of humanity. So, not surprising that an Italian Pope who lived through Fascism, a Polish Pope who lived through both Naziism and Soviet Communism, and a German Pope who grew up under the Nazis would be convinced of the essential injustice of the civil justice system (this might also have something to do with their attitudes towards cooperating with the civil authorities in cases of clerical misconduct, too). But, in this cases, abusus non tollit usus--the abuse does not invalidate the use.

It seems to me that a Christian must believe in capital punishment if he is to affirm the ultimate sanctity of human life. Conversely, to reject capital punishment is to reject the necessity of earthly justice. To point to the possibility (increasingly remote given advances in forensic science) of executing the innocent is to deny God's ultimate justice and mercy. To say that execution denies the condemned the possibility of repentance ignores human nature; as Dr. Johnson said, "Nothing so concentrates the mind as the knowledge one is to be hanged in a fortnight". And, that given, a truly repentant criminal, like the Good Thief, acknowledges his crimes and takes his punishment--like Carla Faye Tucker. The true penitent would look forward eagerly to paying the price for his crime.

The claim that modern penal methods make capital punishment unnecessary does not wash, either. First, there is the moral reasoning given in Gelernter's essay. Second, on the pragmatic level, it's a lie: murderers escape from prison all the time, and often kill again. Life in prison is not life in prison--most murderers in the U.S. do less than twelve years; in Europe, it's typically around seven. And even if the murderer does not get out, he remains a threat to those around him--his fellow prisoners (most of whom are not murderers), and those who guard him. The high recidivism rate among murderers is a good indication that the potential for rehabilitation of such people is quite low.

So, at the end of the day, there really is no reason--other than aesthetics--for the Church to claim that capital punishment is either immoral, or unnecessary, or obsolete. As I said, fatuous.

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