Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin — characteristically — wrote a balanced, reasonable, non-legalistic treatment on the issue as spanking (May 2011), noting that he was unaware of any magisterial teaching forbidding it:
My own conviction is that the issue of corporal punishment is one for parents to decide. I have known some parents who have successfully raised children using it seldom or never. I also know there are parents who feel it is has played an important and needed role in raising their children. The fact is that children are different, and some respond to different things. To one child a time out may be far more agonizing (and motivating) than a paddling. To others just the reverse will be the case. Whether corporal punishment is to be used in the case of their own children—and how much and when—is something that I view as within the natural law rights of the parents.
. . . I think reasonable people can have a legitimate diversity of opinion.
Fellow Catholic Answers apologist Michelle Arnold, writing for EWTN (11-13-08), concurred that the Church has not decided one way or another:
Spanking of children is a highly controversial issue that the Church has not explicitly addressed. . . .
Basically, the Church does not have an official stance on corporal punishment, leaving it to the prudential judgment of parents based on known Christian principles.
Akin also commented on the moneychangers passage above:
It’s easy to say that it’s hard to imagine Jesus paddling someone, just as it’s easy to suppose that he wouldn’t splatter people’s money, overturn their property, and physically attack a group of businessmen. Surely the meek and mild Jesus would never do those things! Our God is a God of order, not chaos, after all. And violence never solves anything.
Yet here we have the Savior of mankind brandishing a whip.
It seems like Jesus might be willing to paddle quite a few people.
In a second article on the topic, Akin also produced a sanction of corporal punishment from none other than Pope Francis, in his General Audience of 4 February 2015:
A good father knows how to wait and knows how to forgive from the depths of his heart.
Certainly, he also knows how to correct with firmness: he is not a weak father, submissive and sentimental.
The father who knows how to correct without humiliating is the one who knows how to protect without sparing himself.
Once I heard a father at a meeting on marriage say:
“Sometimes I have to strike the children lightly… but never in the face so as not to humiliate them”.
How beautiful! He has a sense of dignity. He must punish, but he does it in a just way, and moves on [emphasis in original].
For further related reading, see my earlier articles:
Spanking is Not “Beating” and is Sanctioned by the Bible, the Catechism, and American College of Pediatricians (+ Part Two) [1-26-08; Internet Archive posts; allow a minute or two to load]
The Great Spanking Debate Revisited [2-6-14]
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Meta Description: The Bible has some explicit passages about corporal punishment of children (spanking), & Pope Francis also condoned it.
Meta Keywords: Childrearing, corporal punishment, spanking, parental authority, parental discipline, chastisement, parenting
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