As we saw yesterday, people who chatter about the Magisterial development regarding the death penalty seem oblivious to the really huge development of doctrine surrounding the Church\u2019s extremely recent denunciation of slavery.\u00a0 What is notable to me is that all the Church has done with the death penalty is call it \u201cinadmissible\u201d.\u00a0 It does not declare the death penalty to be\u00a0 gravely and intrinsically immoral.\u00a0 It just says, \u201cDon\u2019t kill people if you don\u2019t have to\u2013and you don\u2019t have to.\u00a0 So don\u2019t.\u201d\u00a0 But the Reactionaries are still shrieking that Francis has \u201coverturned the immemorial Tradition of the Church!!!!11!!111!!!\u201d<\/p>\n
If they actually knew anything about the Tradition, they would have a stronger (though still ridiculous) case if they started demanding the return of slavery since slavery was<\/em> declared gravely and intrinsically immoral (just like abortion is) for the first time in the Church\u2019s history at the Second Vatican Council.\u00a0 \u201cGravely and intrinsically immoral\u201d means that it is, by its very nature, a mortal sin and (mark this) always was and always will be\u2013including when the Church tolerated it.<\/p>\n Of course, sensible people can grasp that the early Church, while it disliked slavery, was not capable of mounting a global assault on an institution that was literally as old as the human race.\u00a0 It was a tiny persecuted sect.\u00a0 So it operated within the constraints of Greco-Roman culture, urging slaves to get their freedom if they could and calling them to be good servants and witnesses if they could not.\u00a0 As time went on, slavery became harder to maintain and disappeared for a while in Christian Europe.\u00a0 But it returned with the rise of the nation-state and with a tit for tat power struggle with Islam.\u00a0 Colonialism gave it a new lease on life too (it is never far away).\u00a0 The Church wrestled with it (precisely because identical \u201cwe\u2019ve always tolerated it, so it\u2019s part of the Tradition!\u201d arguments that undergird Catholic death penalty dissent were used on its behalf).\u00a0 But theological work went forward (courtesy of people like Bartolme de las Casas) that made it harder and harder to square with Catholic teaching about the dignity of the human person.<\/p>\n Still and all, it was not till the 20th century that it was definitively condemned as gravely and intrinsically immoral.\u00a0 What happened was the great doctrinal development of the Council: the declaration that man is \u201cthe only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake\u201d (Gaudium et Spes<\/em> 24 \u00a7 3).<\/p>\n That development\u2013formulated under the lash of the horrors of the 20th century, definitively declared that no human system could be exalted over the dignity of the human person and that no human being exists for some other end.\u00a0 We are made by God in his image and likeness and no economic, political, social, ecclesial, or cultural human system can make us into cogs in its machinery.<\/p>\n That spelled the utter doom of slavery, since slavery is, by its nature, the reduction of the human person to a commodity.<\/p>\n That development also did something else.\u00a0 Hitherto, Catholics had rationalized mistreatment of human beings under the argument that \u201cError has no rights.\u201d\u00a0 It was and is a true statement as far as it goes.\u00a0 As people say these days, \u201cYou are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.\u201d\u00a0 Even the bitterest enemy of the Church believes that \u201cError has no rights\u201d.\u00a0 If you disagree, just listen to them when the subject changes from the Church to climate change BS from the Trump Administration or kooks arguing for a Flat Earth.<\/p>\n But what the development at V2 did was bring the Church to the point of realizing that \u201cWhile error has no rights, persons in error do have rights\u201d.\u00a0 And so the Church was bound to commit itself to things like religious liberty and so forth.\u00a0 Putting the dignity of the human person at the root of its anthropology, the Church had to revisit a lot and is still doing so.\u00a0 Its views of everything from Just War to slavery to capital punishment and torture therefore changed radically.\u00a0 B16 has openly wondered if there is<\/em> such a thing as just war in the modern era.<\/p>\n All this is very bad news for every Catholic whose system is exalted over the human person, including the death penalty advocate.\u00a0 At the end of the day, what they really want is a world in which diagrams, not persons, are at the center of the Church\u2019s moral thinking.\u00a0 They will never get it now.<\/p>\n It will be fascinating to see whether death penalty advocates, in their lust to save the argument that the Magisterial move to abolish it \u201coverturns Sacred Tradition\u201d will likewise condemn the Church for declaring slavery gravely and intrinsically immoral.\u00a0 I hope they are not that dumb, but if there is one thing I have learned about conservative dissent, it has the worst judgment on the planet.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As we saw yesterday, people who chatter about the Magisterial development regarding the death penalty seem oblivious to the really huge development of doctrine surrounding the Church\u2019s extremely recent denunciation of slavery.\u00a0 What is notable to me is that all the Church has done with the death penalty is call it \u201cinadmissible\u201d.\u00a0 It does not 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