For example, those who work tirelessly—and in my view, rightly—to abolish the death penalty generally have no problem with abortion being legal. Why? If it's pro-life to seek to protect vicious murderers from a fate many of them arguably deserve, why does not the duty of being pro-life call for inducing the state to protect conceived children from an equally violent fate that nobody says they deserve? Frankly, I don't get it. Perhaps somebody somewhere has explained it, but I don't know who or where and I doubt I'd be impressed with their argument if in fact they have produced one. The whole attitude reeks of ideological syndrome-thinking: the thoughtless aping of knee-jerk leftism.
By the same token, however, many who rightly oppose keeping abortion legal, and who agree with John Paul the Great's statements to that effect in Evangelium Vitae, nonetheless vociferously dissent from his statement in that same encyclical:
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.Alongside the Church's traditional teaching on capital punishment, that last sentence was even inserted into the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2267) by way of revising its original edition. Now as a merely empirical judgment, that statement does not call for the assent of faith, only for religiousum obsequium. So I wouldn't call somebody a bad Catholic just for disagreeing with it. But why do so many right-wing Catholics treat it with such scorn? It seems to me pretty obviously true even if failure to accept it is compatible with Catholic orthodoxy. So whence comes the emotional energy of dissenters? I don't find their attitude on this point any more "pro-life" than the attitude of the Left about legal abortion. It's coming from a place other than Catholicism, and it's syndrome thinking of the sort well illustrated among American conservatives.
What this whole debate shows me is that many Catholics don't adopt Catholicism as their primary template of thought. Especially on matters of political significance, their thinking is formed elsewhere and brought to their Catholicism. That shows they aren't Catholic enough. Of course few of us are; if we were, we'd all be saints, and I'm certainly no saint. But granted I find it harder to behave than to believe, I can and do expect consistency of belief and strive constantly to attain it. I don't understand why more Catholics don't do the same.
It's thanksgiving weekend and I'm home visiting family so I don't have time to formulate a long answer, but I just wanted to express my opinion on the issue. I don't think that the late Holy Father was off the base in connecting arguments against abortion with the death penalty. The only adequate way to approach the issues of ending human life such as abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty in our society is to look to the natural and divine revelation of the intrinsic dignity and sanctity of human life in the anthropology of man kind. This means that one's intrinsic value as a person is always positive and eternal. To take any approach other than a recognition of the instrinsic dignity of human life is to adopt a utilitarian approach to the human person. The only conclusion I can come to based on this is that if one is to call oneself prolife based on the argument of human dignity, one must be prolife on all bases.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteCharles:
ReplyDeleteJP2 clearly stated that capital punishment (CP) can be justified "if necessary" as a means of defending society from the convict. The problem you're addressing is about his claim, which got inserted into the revised CCC, that in today's world it's rarely if ever necessary. That's an empirical claim that does not command the same degree of assent from Catholics as the conditionally-phrased moral teaching. Thus we must as Catholics accept the late Pope's moral teaching, but it's not disloyal to disagree with the empirical claim. So even though I believe that claim to be true, I wouldn't call anybody a bad Catholic for disagreeing.
If a mistake was made, it was pastoral. Putting said empirical claim in the CCC alongside the moral precept gives many the impression that they are equally authoritative. They are not. I believe the Church once made the same mistake about religious freedom; it was held for a millennium that a Catholic state had the right to punish heretics, even by death, if that was necessary for the common good. It took a century of bloody religous warfare to make clear that such was never "necessary" for the common good. And that empirical lesson is what occasioned the insights of Dignitatis Humanae.
Best,
Mike