A reader writes:

I was reading Ratzinger’s _What It Means to be a Christian_ — a provocatively titled collection of sermons he gave a while ago, meditating on the meaning of Advent. It has been something of a spiritual bombshell for my wife and me. Among the many treasures therein, Ratzinger consistently strips away the layers of obfuscation we like to interpose between Christ’s words and our ears.

I came across this passage, which was a dead ringer for JPII and your own emphasis on applying Christian ethics to the torture debate. It is more widely applicable than just to torture, of course, but that is where it is most needed, from what I can see. Here’s Ratzinger:

Here we meet with a theme that runs through the whole of Christ’s message. The Christian is the person who does not calculate; rather he does something extra. He is in fact the lover, who does not ask, “How much farther can I go and still remain within the real of venial sin, stopping short of mortal sin?” Rather, the Christian is the one who simply seeks what is good, without any calculation. A merely righteous man, the one who is only concerned with doing what is correct, is a Pharisee; only he who is not *merely* righteous is beginning to be a Christian. Of course, that does not, by a long way, mean that a Christian is a person who does nothing wrong and has no failings. On the contrary, he is the person who knows that he does have failings and who is generous with God and with other people because he knows how much he depends on the generosity of God and of his fellowmen. The generosity of someone who knows he is in debt to everyone else, who is quite unable to attempt to maintain a correctness that would allow him to make strict demands in return: that is the true guiding light of the ethical code that Jesus is proclaiming (cf. Mt 18:13-35). This is the mystery, at once incredibly demanding and liberating, to be found behind the word “superabundance”, without which there can be no Christian righteousness.

Just thought you’d be interested. Thanks for the blog and the books!

Thanks for sending this along. You are spot on. One of the maddening things about the way in which so many at St. Blog’s have approached the torture question is the sheer minimalist legalism that animates the discussion. Christ is nowwhere in sight in such calculations. Instead, we get grotesque attempts to parse the Catechism for the placement of a comma, so as to chisel out a loophole from bleedin’ obvious Church teaching and make the case that a) torture isn’t really gravely and intrinsically immoral and so, hey, no problem! It’s a prudential judgement and besides abortion is the only moral issue that matters.

(By the way, since when did Catholic moral teaching morph into the theory that opposition to grave sins other than abortion constitutes a distractioh which renders the grave-sin-that-is-not-abortion okay? If a guy feels like going off and raping a woman can he go to his confessor and say “Hey! It was just one high value target! What is that in comparison with the 1.4 million babies aborted every year? And besides, is sex with a woman really intrinsically evil? Men have sex with women every day! So who’s to say that I even sinned at all? What is “rape” anyway?”)

This whole minimalist legalist approach is, I think, foreign to the mind of Christ precisely because it has that character of moral miserliness and refusal of generosity Benedict describes. The only way I can get at what I mean is to suggest that the advocates of waterboarding and other such tortures really put their money where their mouth is. Let them go to their parish priest and tell him that they believe so strongly that it’s not torture that henceforth all baptisms should be conducted by strapping the catechumen to a board and holding them underwater till they are on the verge of drowning, while the priest intones: “I baptize you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

My point is this: the measure of our moral actions is not “What’s the absolute bare minimum I can get away with in terms of obedience to God? How much sin can I cling to and still escape the fires of Hell?” Rather the measure is Jesus Christ.

It is the peculiar doom of the Catholic torture defender that he winds up twisting himself into a pretzel defending something that is a blasphemous parody of baptism.