Monday, October 05, 2020

So life imprisonment is now contrary to Catholic teaching.

 The Roman pontiff in October 2014:

In a dense and impassioned discourse to the Jurists assembled in the Vatican for a private audience, Pope Francis said that the “life sentence” is really a “concealed death sentence”, and that is why – he explained – he had it annulled in the Vatican Penal Code.

Many of the off-the-cuff comments during the Pope’s speech shone the light on how politics and media all too often act as triggers enflaming “violence and private and public acts of vengeance” that are always in search of a scape-goat.

Recalling the words of Saint John Paul II who condemned the death penalty as does the Catechism, Francis decried the practice and denounced “so-called extrajudicial or extralegal executions” calling them “deliberate homicides” committed by public officials behind the screen of the Law:

“All Christians and people of goodwill are called today to fight not only for the abolition of the death penalty be it legal or illegal, in all of its forms, but also for the improvement of prison conditions in the respect of the human dignity of those who have been deprived of freedom. I link this to the death sentence. In the Penal Code of the Vatican, the sanction of life sentence is no more. A life sentence is a death sentence which is concealed."

The Roman pontiff, almost six years later, in the encyclical Fratelli Tutti, paragraph 268:

“The arguments against the death penalty are numerous and well-known. The Church has rightly called attention to several of these, such as the possibility of judicial error and the use made of such punishment by totalitarian and dictatorial regimes as a means of suppressing political dissidence or persecuting religious and cultural minorities, all victims whom the legislation of those regimes consider ‘delinquents’. 

All Christians and people of good will are today called to work not only for the abolition of the death penalty, legal or illegal, in all its forms, but also to work for the improvement of prison conditions, out of respect for the human dignity of persons deprived of their freedom. I would link this to life imprisonment… A life sentence is a secret death penalty." 

Note that he cites to and quotes from the 2014 address given to delegates of the International Association of Penal Law reported in the first link. The same quote-yourself-magisterium that dispensed with the death penalty has been applied to life imprisonment in an encyclical, the highest form of papal teaching short of infallibility. 

The news today isn't that the pope has definitively changed the teaching on the death penalty.  That happened with the white-out of the Catechism months ago.

The real news is that he round-filed life imprisonment.

Because that's what Catholicism is these days: whatever the reigning pontiff wants it to be.

 


5 comments:

  1. I guess I can see the argument that he was being a bit cagey and hedging in his language.

    But his consistent opposition to life sentences truly stands out, if one cares to look. Personally, that next step, of rendering life sentences "inadmissible," is not long in coming.

    And that's quite the change.

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  2. I've said for awhile life imprisonment is just the death penalty using time as the execution tool instead of rope, blade, or stone. The logic to condemn the death penalty would always eventually have to condemn life imprisonment too. This is the biggest non-surprise I've seen in awhile.

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  3. Not in re the Holy See, but in re the agitation of lawfare outfits in the United States, Tom McKenna predicted this some years ago. The objection is not to capital sentences. Some idiosyncratic character like Denis Thatcher might object to capital sentences and leave it at that. The objection is to punishment per se, especially punishment administered by people the Anointed consider low status (that's us) against people they consider higher status (that's their mascot groups). The Pope has no original thoughts and cites no authorities; he just recycle tripe from bien-pensants. A document from some UN agency or from one or more of Jimmy Carter's 'The Elders' would say the same thing.

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