I am sure many people are already rolling their eyes at such an indulgent title. You may want to say that torture is wrong. Period. End of story. Any inquiry into its purposes and meaning only opens the door to making it permissible. Torture, you may want to say, is indefensible all the time, no matter what. Even if you do not want to think such things, the Catholic Church seems to say that much or more. So why, then, would we even entertain defending it? Shouldn’t we quarantine it from our thoughts and actions?
The answer I have is theological. You see, we adore a tortured Christ. This is not to say that the torture of Jesus somehow justifies torture—not even close. What I am saying is that breaking of the Body and the flowing of the Blood of Christ are deeply attached to the sacred mystery of our faith. God being put to a death under the clear-cut conditions of torture is real and we should not turn away from the idea of it in daily life. To close the door completely, so to speak, on torture would require forgetting the raw, bleeding flesh of His sacred, bloody death.
So, beginning with the need to never, ever, forget the torture of Christ we must enter into a serious discussion of what it means to torture each other today as we continue to wrestle with the overwhelming excess of the Incarnation.
We are often quick—too quick—to say how deprived torture-talk is, but it is deeply attractive to me. The problem, as I see it, is that dialogue has lost its edge, it has become rather Puritanical and even worse: More and more, we are just talking to ourselves and “saving the day” as we clash with the enemy.
In other words, my main dispute with many of the views (on both sides, since, after all, there are only two sides to everything) on torture is that they are too heroic. Those who oppose torture seem to be relishing in the cut-and-dry state of the issue (while they argue that abortion is not so cut-and-dry). Those who defend it seem to have convinced themselves that their cut-and-dry approach to life issues need not apply in this case for all kinds of tail-chasing reasons. Each side fights their fight with vigor and heroic immunity to the beliefs of the other side, because, after all: they are right and God is on their side.
That is too melodramatic, but it makes my point. Namely, that neither side cares much about asking—or entering into the mystery—of the actual events of torture and what they mean. What does it mean to do that to a person, to kill someone; even to eat someone?
Such ideas seem heinous and nasty to our sanitized intuitions, especially considering the bloodless lives we lead, but without a full appreciation of the meaning and mystery of human suffering and, most of all, the suffering of God, we may live in peace and harmony (though I highly doubt it), but that life will be sterile—flesh with no blood. We need the mystery of violence to understand the meaning of life.
We need torture. By this I mean we should talk, write, pray, and think about it in ways that plumb as deeply as we can, not that we should do it to people for whatever reason. Consequential arguments for and catechism quotes against are distractions to the sacred flesh of the matter: We need the Crucifix. We need the Eucharist.
Of course we (I) should never torture, but that is all beside the point. The real point is that we should never let it rest in the laurels of taboo. We should restlessly try to understand it whenever it comes up, none more frequently than the holy sacrifice of the Mass.
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