Catholic and Enjoying It!
I got het up yesterday about the execution of Troy Davis and spoke out of turn about his “innocence” when what I really was protesting was the dodginess of the evidence against him, dodginess that seemed to me to introduce an element of reasonable doubt concerning his guilt for the crime for which he was executed.
This in turn led to understandable confusion among some readers given the fact that, innocent or guilty, I oppose the infliction of the death penalty. Some people assumed (wrongly) that I was trying to say anything just to stop infliction of the death penalty, which was not my intent. You don’t (as I have been at pains to say for some time to Liars for Jesus) achieve good ends by evil means. And lying that somebody is innocent when they are not is an example of that. So I would not lie to achieve that end.
What really happened was this: I had an emotional outburst and, as is my custom, indulged hyperbole. That was wrong.
Permit me, however, to talk about what provoked the outburst. It was provoked by a number of things, or rather one thing that keeps manifesting itself in lots of different ways. That one thing is Christian *zeal* for death. That zeal for death expresses itself in numerous ways, such as Rick Perry’s conscience-free cock-a-whoop swaggering and boasting over being the most efficient executioner in Texas history and his cloudless lack of concern over the question of executing people who may be innocent. It manifests in treatment of Just War theory, not as an attempt to minimize killing, but as a sort of maze to be navigated with the hope and promise that we will *get* to start killing if we just outwit the Church’s ivory tower restrictions on “real world” brutality. It manifests in the utterly appalling and embarrassing sophistry of Catholic torture advocates over the past decade. It manifests in the zealous Christian defenses of the slaughter at Hiroshima and Nagasaki every August. It manifests in the open and naked contempt heaped on Evangelium Vitae, the Catechism, Popes JPII and Benedict (and virtually every bishop in the world), when the Church’s very clear desire to abolish the death penalty is bruited. Minimum Daily Adult Requirement Catholicism is rife on this question. The argument is perpetually made that because the death penalty is not intrinsically immoral, opposition to it is obviously stupid, the abolitionist is somehow mysteriously supporting abortion, and the whole thing can be blown off as “liberal”. So I get mail from embarrassing “witnesses” to the compassion of Jesus like this:
The Judeo-Christian DEATH PENALTY!!!!
Jesus told us that IN OUR PERSONAL LIVES, we should forgive the people who wrong us, 7 times 70 times. However, Jesus NEVER told the GOVERNMENT to forgive murderers and rapists and terrorists 7 times 70 times.
On the contrary, God, who is absolutely PRO-LIFE and who knows the full value of each human life, told Moses that the GOVERNMENT should promptly execute anyone duly convicted a HEINOUS CRIME.
CAUTION: Today we have APOSTATES who consider themselves … HOLY THAN GOD … WISER THAN GOD … MORE LOVING THAN GOD … , who think hard-working taxpayers should reward duly convicted heinous criminals with a lifetime of … FREE housing and meals and medical care and education and recreation … .
PS: The LIFE-IN-PRISON SENTENCE often costs taxpayers more than $1 Million … !!!!!!!!!
Then the King will say to them, “I was in prison and you thirsted for my blood, because I was expensive.” And people wonder why Christianity is repellent to many people.
I’ve even seen appeals to the glories of the death penalty like this:
Don’t any of you self-righteous death penalty opponents ever read the Bible? As he was hanging on the cross Jesus promised Paradise to the felon who confessed the justice of the death penalty (cf. Luke 23: 39-43).
The strange conflation of dogmatic death penalty maximalism with some sort of core doctrine of Catholic faith is a classic illustration of how a tribal shibboleth can get fuddled with the heart of the faith. For, of course, the actual biblical teaching is that Jesus promises paradise to the one who placed his faith in Him, not to those who place their faith in the death penalty. Such enthusiasts for killing never seem to get around to acknowledging the corollary to their argument: namely, that not just the death penalty, but crucifixion is, by their twisted logic, sanctioned as legitimate.
The bottom line is and remains this: The Church does not say the death penalty is intrinsically immoral. So what? The Church is on the side of saving and redeeming human life, not snuffing it out for the sake of cost efficiency. So the Magisterium–that would be the teaching office of the Church founded by Jesus Christ to conserve and articulate the Tradition–urges minimal use of the death penalty with an eye toward abolishing wherever possible. That is the teaching of the Church and those who are at war with this teaching are, in fact, dissenting Catholic every bit as much as those who are at war with the Church’s teaching on contraception. Something does not have to be dogma (as, for instance, Humanae Vitae, like Evangelium Vitae, is not dogma) for it to be normative teaching of the Magisterium to which we owe our obedience and not our weasel-worded dissent and contempt.
So: Watching this spectacle of *eagerness* to kill and the (as I took it) reluctance to take a look at the reasonable doubt about Davis, I got ticked. What bugged me was not that I was certain he was innocent, but the apparent disinterest in finding out. If I’m wrong about the facts in Davis’ case, I can live with that. I’m opposed to the DP nonetheless (per Evangelium Vitae). But cases where there’s a reasonable doubt that we are even executing the guilty just exacerbate the issue, because so many Christians are willing to fight for the death penalty, to be *zealous* for death, despite the fact that they *know* this means a certain percentage of the victims are going to be innocent. That’s because our legal system is not perfect. To embrace the DP is, at the end of the day, to say “Better the innocent should perish than the guilty survive.” I don’t buy that “Kill all! God will know his own!” moral reasoning. Neither do two Popes and virtually all of the world’s bishops. There are other reasons I oppose the DP too, but that’s not a small one.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In