Catholic and Enjoying It!
Part II of my series on the Death Penalty at Catholic Weekly.
The problem is this in a nutshell: For centuries, the Church affirmed the power of Caesar to execute capital criminals. But since Evangelium Vitae, the Church has called for the abolition of the death penalty. Ergo (say traditionalists) the post-concilliar Magisterium is contradicting the Tradition. For this reason, the three popes (Pope St John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis) and the global Magisterium who affirm this development can be legitimately ignored in favour of retaining the death penalty.
For some extremist Reactionaries, this supposed “contradiction of the Tradition” means the very legitimacy of those three popes and the post-concilliar Magisterium are now in serious jeopardy. But for the majority of critics of this development, the solution is not wholesale rejection of the post-concilliar Magisterium, but a sort of limited modified hangout argument that this development is a “prudential judgment” and we are thereby freed to just ignore it and even lobby against it with “Catholic defences of the death penalty” while affirming that the Magisterium is still authoritative and not utterly discredited. After all (goes the argument), the Magisterium has made other bad prudential judgment calls (such as Peter not eating with Gentiles at Antioch) and not thereby been utterly discredited.
So, for instance, we are told that the teaching of Evangelium Vitae on the death penalty, summarised in CCC 2267, is just John Paul’s “personal opinion” and is not “binding”. That teaching, just as a reminder, is this:
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 are more in conformity to 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 definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself – the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”
First things first: That’s not just “John Paul’s personal opinion”. Evangelium Vitae is an encyclical, the highest form of teaching document a pope can publish. In an encyclical, the pope is teaching as the Supreme Pontiff of the Church, not hanging out in a bar and popping off about his private views. It is, make no mistake, the teaching of the Church that “[i]f… 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 are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person”. Moreover, it is the teaching of the Church that the practical upshot of the “practical non-existence” of the need to execute is this: abolish the death penalty. That is the express demand of three popes and all the bishops of the world.
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