Every day in every way, the reigning pope revels in imposing his personal opinions on the Church and on the world as his 'teaching', regardless of whether they violate Church Tradition, Magisterium, and even Scripture. I found a memorable line rereading Fulton Sheen's Life of Christ, during his reflection on the Agony in the Garden.
"What is sin for the soul but a systematic principle of having its own wisdom and source of happiness working out its own ends as if there were no God? Anti-Christ is nothing else but the full unhindered growth of self-will".
I had never before remarked this passage particularly, but how can it not leap to the eye with the example of Bergoglio? Is he not defined by that?
Pope Francis’s new comments
on the death penalty are
incoherent and dangerous
He claims that his innovative 'teaching' “does not imply any contradiction”
of the Church’s tradition but, one has to say reluctantly, it indeed does.
by Fr George Rutler
December 18, 2018
Debate has always been an invigorating and constructive way of defining and refining views, assuming that the debaters have minds of probity and reason. This is increasingly absent in our culture, where subjectivism rules, and
where there is only one debater, and his opponent is a straw man of his own construction.
Yet when one reads the “spontaneous remarks” of Pope Francis on various subjects of the day,
the quality of reasoning and information of facts is so fugitive, that frustration yields to sheer embarrassment.
There is, for example, the Holy Father’s remarks to youth in Turin on a hot June day in 2015: Even a Reuters press release said that his smorgasbord of concerns, from bankers to the weapons industry to Nazi concentration camps, was “rambling.”
While constrained by respect for the Petrine office, and aware of the strains that imposes, it is distressing to look for a train of thought and find only a train wreck.
That has to be the impression after reading the Pope’s remarks to a Delegation of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty.
Pope Francis reiterated his absolutist opposition to the death penalty which, by a singular gesture, he has also ordered be inscribed in the Catechism.
Perhaps aware that public response might be problematic,
he did not mention his opposition even to life sentences, having called them a form of “hidden death penalty”. This went far beyond the second edition of the 1992 Catechism, which affirmed the integrity of capital punishment in Scripture and Tradition but added that the cases in which the execution of the offender as an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”
[Much needs to be said against Bergoglio's diktat that he considers life imprisonment a 'hidden death penalty'. In which he imposes his personal opinion that has been upheld by all known jurisprudences in history and at present. Who is he to set himself up now as the supreme arbiter of how men are to be judged by the law for their crimes?]
By adding to a catechetical text a prudential opinion, John Paul II did something unprecedented, and the whirlwind now being reaped in a pontificate less theologically acute, could justify concluding that the insertion of a prudential apostrophe was imprudent.
Pope Francis uses the term ”inadmissible” to describe the death penalty, although it has no theological substance, and by avoiding words such as “immoral” or “wrong”, inflicts on discourse an ambiguity similar to parts of Amoris Laetitia.
The obvious meaning is that capital punishment is intrinsically evil, but to say so outright would be too blatant. He also calls all life “inviolable,” a term which applies only to innocent life and has no moral warrant otherwise.
Then there is the ancillary and unmentioned consideration of the role of punishment and hell in all this, conjuring a suspicion of universalism, which is the denial of eternal alienation from God.
In 2004, Cardinal Ratzinger explained: “There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia” and should a Catholic support the death penalty “he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion.”
Pope Francis has discarded that, just as he has set aside the entire magisterial tradition of the Church on the kinds of penalties — medicinal and retributive — and their functions. This is no surprise, since an attaché of the Holy See Press Office, Father Thomas Rosica, has said in a statement ultramontane to the point of heresy:
“Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.”
Exceptional delineations of authentic teaching on penalties were explained by Pius XII in his discourse to the First National Conference of Italian Lawyers in 1949 and the Sixth Internal Congress of Penal Law in 1953. A definitive new study is the book
By Man Shall His Blood be Shed by Edward Feser and Joseph Bessette.
Professor Feser has logically asked
why we should have reverence for a father who has no reverence for the fathers, and warns that by divorcing his teaching from the constant tradition, Pope Francis is cutting off the very branch on which he sits.
Pope Francis justifies himself by invoking
a ”progress” in society, but this is a humanistic — even Pelagian — confidence that has no warrant in reality. It also lets loose a cataract of contradictions. For instance, one of the Pope’s men, Archbishop Marcelo Sorondo, praised Communist China for coming “closer to Catholic social teaching” than the United States, although there were 23 executions in the United States last year compared with 1,551 in China, more than all other nations combined.
Pope Francis says that his innovative teaching “does not imply any contradiction” of the Church’s tradition but, one has to say reluctantly, it indeed does.
The shift cannot be called a legitimate development of doctrine because it neglects all the classical criteria for authentic development, most especially what John Henry Newman named “preservation of type.”
And as capital punishment pertains to natural law, once it is rejected as intrinsically wrong, the same could happen to any aspect of natural law, not least the anthropology of Humanae Vitae or the moral doctrine of Veritatis Splendor.
Abidingly conscious of the claims and burdens of the Church’s highest office, that holy seat and high duty is diminished by neglect of its obligations to the perennial teachings of the fathers; and the faithful are at risk when they are offered confusion and superficiality in place of systematic thought.
In short, the Vatican has become a theological Chernobyl. We are in dangerous territory.
No time to do the necessary 'posting style' changes now but this is the article with Prof. Feser's reaction to the new Bergoglian self-indulgence on the death penalty and life imprisonment.
Sawing off the branch on which he sits:
Experts question Francis attack
on previous popes over death penalty
by Diane Montagna
ROME, December 17, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — Pope Francis has incited further controversy in a recent address expounding on his reasons for changing the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the death penalty.
As LifeSite reported earlier, Pope Francis told a delegation from the International Commission against the Death Penalty in a Dec. 17 address that popes “in past centuries” ignored “the primacy of mercy over justice” in using the death penalty, which he called an “inhuman form of punishment” that is now “always inadmissible.”
Insisting that the change to n. 2267 of the Catechism is not a “contradiction with the teaching of the past,” but a “harmonious development” of doctrine, Pope Francis reiterated that the Church now teaches, “in the light of the Gospel, that the death penalty is always inadmissible because it counters the inviolability and the dignity of the person.”
“In the same way,” he said, “the Magisterium of the Church understands that life imprisonment, which removes the possibility of moral and existential redemption, for the benefit of the condemned and for the community, is a form of the death penalty in disguise.”
The Pope has already faced criticism for seeking to change infallible Catholic teaching on the permissibility of execution in principle. This latest papal intervention will make it even more difficult for those who argue that there is no contradiction between Pope Francis’s teaching and the doctrine of his 266 predecessors.
Already, one prominent philosopher and writer on capital punishment is challenging the basis of the Pope’s new teaching, while a Dominican theologian and a Catholic historian have both expressed concerns at the coherence and defensibility of the pontiff’s novel claims.
Renowned Catholic philosopher Edward Feser, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California, is one of the foremost contemporary writers in the Thomistic tradition. He is the author of such works as The Last Superstition, Scholastic Metaphysics, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed (with Joseph Bessette) and the forthcoming (and much anticipated) Aristotle’s Revenge.
By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed, is a study and defense of the perennial Catholic teaching on the death penalty as legitimate in principle and often advisable in practice even in contemporary social conditions.
In comments to LifeSite regarding Pope Francis’s Dec. 17 address to the International Commission against the Death Penalty, Feser said:
Once again the Pope both appears to condemn capital punishment as intrinsically wrong and claims that his remarks are consistent with past teaching. He tries to justify the claim that there is no inconsistency by saying that the Church has always affirmed the dignity of life. But this is analogous to denying the doctrine that there are three divine Persons and then claiming that this is consistent with past teaching, on the grounds that the Church has always affirmed that there is only one God. In fact, the doctrine of the Trinity requires us to say both that there is only one God and that there are three Persons in God. Similarly, consistency with scripture and previous papal teaching requires us to say both that life has dignity but also that an offender can in principle lose the right to his life. To fail to affirm both of these things is precisely to contradict past teaching, not “develop” it.
Feser continued:
The Pope implicitly criticizes previous popes for upholding and applying capital punishment, such as in the Papal States, and he implies that these popes were deficient in their doctrinal understanding insofar as they lacked awareness of our “present level of development of human rights” and ignored “the primacy of mercy over justice” — this despite the fact that previous popes rested their teaching on scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and all their predecessors in the papal office. Perhaps the pope does not realize that he is inadvertently laying the groundwork for a future pope to criticize him the way he is criticizing his predecessors. If 2000 years of popes can be wrong about capital punishment — as Pope Francis implies — why should we not conclude instead that it is Pope Francis himself, rather than they, who has gotten things wrong?
The co-author of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed added:
As he has done several times in the past, the Pope appears to be condemning life imprisonment as well as capital punishment. Curiously, Catholics who praise the Pope’s views on capital punishment never seem to comment on his views about life imprisonment. Why not?
- Are Catholics now required to call for releasing serial killers and the like from prison at some point, however heinous their crimes and however dangerous they remain?
- If not, why not, given the Pope’s repeating sweeping condemnations of life imprisonment as no less wrong than capital punishment?
- How are we supposed to deal with the worst offenders if both capital punishment and life imprisonment are ruled out?
- Exactly how long should prison sentences be if life sentences are ruled out?
- Why do the Pope’s admirers not address these questions or call on the Pope to address them?
A Dominican theologian who wished to remain anonymous offered a more detailed critique of Pope Francis’s Dec. 17 address on the death penalty.
In comments to LifeSite, the Dominican theologian noted that Pope Francis’s claim that his teaching “does not imply any contradiction” with the Church’s teaching in the past “renders the entire speech incoherent, since the Church clearly taught in the past the legitimacy of capital punishment.”
In initial remarks, he notes that the death penalty cannot be a “cruel punishment,” as Pope Francis claims, arguing that “since capital punishment is sometimes just, it cannot always be cruel.”
The Dominican pointed out that Pope Francis confuses his own theological views with the teachings of the Church; for example, when he refers to “the Church’s commitment” to abolition. This is really “his personal commitment” and “Catholics as such are not obliged to share it,” the theologian said.
The circumstances, as laid down by the First Vatican Council, in which the teaching of the Pope is also necessarily the teaching the Church, are actually quite restricted.
The Dominican theologian pointed out that Pope Francis’s appeal to St. John Paul II rests on “a confusion between the doctrine of John Paul II and his personal judgement of the prudence of capital punishment in modern times.”
Taking umbrage at the Pope’s statement that the death penalty is “contrary to the Gospel,” he also points out that: “Christ says the law of Moses was given by God, instancing the command that those who curse their parents be put to death (Mk. 7:9-10), and that Scripture, including therefore the imposition of capital punishment for many offences, cannot be broken (Jn. 10:35).”
“Hence, it is the claim that the death penalty is opposed to the gospel which is opposed to the Gospel,” he argues.
While agreeing with Pope Francis that “extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions” are to be condemned, the Dominican theologian takes issue with the Pope’s appeal to the authority of St. Thomas regarding the death penalty as a (now obsolete) form of self-defense, observing that it rests on a misunderstanding. In comments to LifeSite, he said:
St Thomas is talking here about self-defense by private individuals, notabout the rights of the State. In article 3 of the same question in the Summa, he says: “it is lawful to kill an evildoer in so far as it is directed to the welfare of the whole community, and hence this belongs to him alone who has charge of the community’s welfare. Thus it belongs to a physician to cut off a decayed limb, when he has been entrusted with the care of the health of the whole body. Now the care of the common good is entrusted to persons of rank having public authority: wherefore they alone, and not private individuals, can lawfully put evildoers to death.” In article 2 he says: “if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good, since a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump.”
Like Feser and Bessette in their book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed, the Dominican argues that capital punishment can work powerfully to elicit repentance in serious criminals.
“Capital punishment offers the possibility for a repentant criminal to expiate at least part of his sin upon earth, more briefly and less painfully than in purgatory; hence it can itself be an offer of mercy,” he said.
The theologian added: “Cardinal Newman wrote movingly in Difficulties of Anglicans, about the compassion felt for condemned criminals in the papal states, and how special confraternities existed to pray that they would accept their penalty in this spirit, and how in this way the conversions of great sinners were sometimes accomplished.”
Pope Francis in contrast says that this “inhuman form of punishment” ignores “the primacy of mercy over justice.”
Like Feser, the Dominican is also concerned about the Pope’s attack on life imprisonment.
“He who can do the greater can do the less. Since the civil power can inflict death, it can also inflict perpetual punishment,” he said. “This claim [by Pope Francis] also gives new grounds for doubt about whether Pope Francis believes in the dogma of hell, in the way in which the Church teaches it, namely as a state, precisely, of ‘perpetual punishment.’”
In his Dec. 17 address to the International Commission against the Death Penalty, the Pope says that his predecessors, have unduly “sacralized the value of laws.” On the contrary, the Dominican theologian sees the Pope’s perspective as secularized.
“Temporal power, as a shadow of divine power, has an intrinsically sacred element. St. Paul states that the ruler, even if a pagan, is ‘the minister of God’, and that he ‘does not bear the sword in vain’, i.e. that he can legitimately execute the worst criminals. Pope Francis’s words put him at odds the apostle to the Gentiles,” he says.
A British Catholic historian based in the U.S also questioned the defensibility of Pope Francis’s novel teaching on the death penalty.
Dr. Alan Fimister is an Assistant Professor of Theology and Church History at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver, and Director of the Dialogos Institute, which encourages debate on legitimately disputed theological questions among Catholics.
Dr. Fimister has expressed concern in the past about the possibility of reconciling opposition to capital punishment in principle with the traditional teaching of the Church throughout the first and second millennium (up to and including John Paul II and Benedict XVI) and also about the compatibility of episcopal demands for its abolition in practice with the rightful autonomy of the laity in questions of temporal government.
As he explains “It is for the hierarchy to define, in accordance with scripture and tradition, the conditions under which capital punishment is legitimate but it is for the laity to decide when and where those conditions are met. Obviously, clerics will have views on these matters like anyone else but they ought not to be expressed in an official capacity.”
“Although the new paragraph in the Catechism is not unproblematic” Dr. Fimister told LifeSite, “it is still possible to read the text itself as making the inadmissibility of the death penalty dependent on the alleged fact that ‘more effective systems of detention have been developed.’”
“Read this way, while appearing to take up a temporal prudential judgment reserved to the lay faithful, it would not directly contradict the teaching of the ordinary and universal magisterium concerning the legitimacy of the death penalty in principle,” he said.
“On the other hand, it has always been clear that Pope Francis’s personal view expressed in less formal contexts (including sadly the statement cited in the new section of the Catechismand now this address) is much harder to reconcile with the immemorial teaching of the Church.”
Fimister continued: "There is an ambiguity in John Paul II’s 1997 version of 2267 as to what is meant by ‘the unjust aggressor.’ If ‘the unjust aggressor’ means ‘the murderer’ or ‘the rapist’ as a category then the 1997 version is giving us the same doctrine the 1566 Roman Catechism which implies that the legitimate use of the death penalty would both avenge crime and give security to life. Unfortunately, there is another way of interpreting n. 2267 (1997) and that is as saying that the actual individual murderer etc. has to be uncontainable by the prison system in order for the death penalty to be justified. This would not be consistent with prior teaching and would also imply a much too broad understanding of double effect. The use of the death penalty cannot be justified in such a way as would imply that one may do evil that good may come of it. One may never do evil that good may come of it. Pope Francis is coming down on the problematic side of this ambiguity and developing it into further and even more problematic conclusions (including the implicit condemnation of the universal and ordinary magisterium as “more legalistic than Christian” and “lacking in humanity and mercy”)."
Dr. Fimister also pointed to some remarks of the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe in her essay ‘The Dignity of the Human Being.’
“To regard someone as deserving of death is very definitely regarding him, not just as a human being but as endued with a dignity belonging to human beings, as having free will and as answerable for his actions ... Capital punishment, though you may have reason against it, does not, just as such, sin against the human dignity of one who suffers it. He is at least supposed to be answering for crime of which he has been found guilty by due process.”
Professor Anscombe, sometime head of the Cambridge philosophy faculty and celebrated pupil of Wittgenstein, was no slouch in her zeal for human dignity, facing arrest for barricading abortion clinics with her own body.
“We always have to be careful to avoid claiming that the teachings of Christ and the Apostles somehow contain hidden meanings contrary to how the Church has understood them and apparent to us only now,” Fimister said. “As Vatican I reminds us, ‘If anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the Church which is different from that which the Church has understood and understands: let him be anathema.’”
As one informed source observed wryly: “It is hard to understand how Pope Francis can hold that the death penalty is per se contrary to the Gospel and yet was taught and practiced legitimately (if regrettably) in the past but is now ‘inadmissible.’ But one needs to remember that the Pope is widely held to teach that sometimes some people simply cannot help but commit adultery and are therefore blameless. We can only hope that one day the ‘change in the conscience of the Christian people’ will make adultery inadmissible as well.”
How - and how speedily - does
the Teaching of the Church "develop"?
December 18, 2018
PF is reported to have declared a day or so ago that
his abandonment of the Church's previous teaching on the death penalty "doesn't imply any contradiction with the teaching of the past." He combines this with an insouciant statement that previous popes "ignored the primacy of Mercy over Justice". Dear dear dear. Pretty nasty, that. What silly fellows they must all have been to make such an elementary error. But Don't Worry. All, apparently, can be explained by 'development'.
We've had this cheap trick before. I don't know if you can still find it on the Vatican TV player ... the News Conference at which the Graf von Schoenborn 'introduced' Amoris laetitia. Right at the end, Diane Montagna, with an air of puzzlement, asked whether the new papal teaching contradicted that of Familiaris consortio.
With a sweet smile which has undoubtedly served him well in the Graf's rise within the hierarchy, he answered that No it did not; but it developed it. And he advised his questioner to go away ... and read Newman.
TIMELINE
(1) Familiaris consortio was published in 1981; it repeated the Biblical precepts which for centuries had underpinned the Church's conviction that the Holy Euchatist ought not to be administered to "remarried" divorcees.
(2) Sacramentum caritatis, 2005, repeated this teaching.
(3) Amoris laetitia is dated 19 March 2016, and was released 8 April 2016.
(4) On 5 September 2016 'Guidelines' published by a group of Argentine bishops reached PF. These guidelines are commonly interpreted as allowing some 'remarried' divorcees to approach the Sacraments.
(5) On the same day, PF replied to this group of bishops praising their 'Guidelines' and saying "There is no other interpretation".
(6) On 5 June 2017, PF formally instructed Cardinal Parolin in audientia to have these texts published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis as being "Authentic Magisterium".
(7) They duly appeared in AAS together with the Rescriptum ex audientia Sanctissimi.
(8) Cardinal Kasper, a Great Theologian, subsequently explained that the question was now authoritatively closed. Roma locuta est ...
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN ...
... gave a rather different, and more painstaking, historical perspective. I expect he was a Silly Fellow, too.
" ... the Church of Rome has originated nothing ...
" ... all through Church history from the first, how slow is authority in intervening! Perhaps a local teacher, or a doctor in some local school, hazards a proposition, and a controversy ensues. It smoulders or burns in one place, no one interposing; Rome simply lets it alone. Then it comes before a bishop; or some priest, or some professor in some other seat of learning takes it up; and there is a second stage of it. Then it comes before a university, and it may be condemned by the theological faculty. So the controversy proceeds year after year, and Rome is still silent. An appeal perhaps is next made to a seat of authority inferior to Rome; and then at last after a long while it comes before the supreme power.
"Meanwhile, the question has been ventilated and turned over and over again, and viewed on every side of it, and authority is called upon to pronounce a decision, which has already been arrived at by reason. But even then, perhaps the supreme authotrity hesitates to do so, and nothing is determined on the point for years; or so generally and vaguely, that the whole controversy has to be gone through again, before it is ultimately determined."
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/12/2018 02:31]