U.S. national intelligence chief Mike McConnell told the New Yorker that water-boarding would, indeed, be torture if he were subjected to it. BBC has the story here.
Michael Mukasey, as Morning’s Minion reminded us, is a bit more vague on the topic. At least we know where Rudy Giuliani stands.
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 3:12 pm and is filed under News, Torture, Violence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Michael
A Pope in the 9th century condemned torture and Pope Innocent IV brought it back in 1252 excepting “danger to life and limb”….ergo pain not premanent incapacitating damage of limbs….and it lasted then for centuries with Cardinal Pallazini still defending it in 1954 in a moral theology book.
Which is Church teaching?….or are both Church teaching? Or was each position “Church Teaching” for its time in history and thus positions change unless a moral issue has been raised to the infallible level which is rare and rarely necessary since the Ten Commandments et al are inerrant being in the Bible… which satisfies for infallible.
And do we call such changes “development” when we like them. But that would mean Innocent IV’s generation could call his bringing back of torture…”development”….because it came after or postdated the Pope who condemned it in the 9th century. So….”arriving later in history”…..even by your inclinations… cannot always mean “development”. In short Catholicism can have “develpments” and can have “regressions” as when most bishops went Arian in the 4th century and a few like Athanasius did not go Arian according to Cardinal Newman.
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Christ actually told the devil that man lives not just by bread alone but by every word that comes “from the mouth of God”….the scriptures which He was quoting at the time. Memories….where would we be without them.
When Christ made the whip of cords and drove the men out of the temple with it….(fear of pain causing compliance), was Christ preemptively disobeying the alleged deep insights of Vatican II and “Splendor of the Truth”…a pastoral not dogmatic part of Vatican II (Gaudium et Spes) and “Splendor of the Truth”…a non infallible encyclical by a Pope who had the intemperateness to declare the death penalty “cruel”(1999-St.Louis) and further that “war solves nothing” (Easter-2002) …both of which contradicted more moderate things he said at other times on both topics. (Someday we will be actually honest about the drawbacks to advanced age in Popes but that is 3 millenia into the future.)
Or could it be that Christ when He whipped the men out of the temple was in line with Proverbs 20:30 ….from the “mouth of God” to use Christ’s words of the scriptures (very fundy by the way) to the devil….though He surely went far short of it’s quantitative permissions:
” Evil is cleansed away by bloody lashes, and a scourging to the inmost being. ”
Proverbs 20:30
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The Ecumenical Council of Vienne (1311-1312) like “Gaudium et Spes” was also not dogmatic but disciplinary and it allowed torture to extract confessions but stepped up the number of authorization checks preceding any torture. And the Third Lateran Council gave slavery as a punishment for piracy and it again was not dogmatic just as Vatican II was not dogmatic in Gaudium et Spes where it denounced slavery and torture wholesale….and later John Paul called both “intrinsically evil” without mentioning which Popes and Councils endorsed and promoted each.
Which of all these are Church Teaching…as eternal…..not as a development that might just vanish once again when another development occurs. For example, go 500 years into the future and imagine many nations with nuclear weapons and some of those nations suicidal via their religion. The world could well return in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust worldwide……to a dark ages in which we might well return to the societal conditions of the old testament world wherein guidelines arrived at in non dogmatic Councils (Gaudium et Spes) may vanish entirely and the Scriptures which have many passages that current Catholics abhor…regarding slavery and physical discipline…may again be consulted for authority in extreme situations…..since according to a dogmatic part of Vatican II…Dei Verbum…..the Popes are not above the scriptures :)….. ” This teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on….”
We should be so lucky at the non infallible level.
…not as a development that might just vanish once again when another development occurs.
There is a fundamental problem with that kind of question. It seems to presume that assent and obedience are optional as long as what is taught is not reformable. How very protestant.
Zippy,
Exactly true. The other problem with Bill’s analysis (aside from no citations from MGH or Mansi, which I doubt very much he has ever consulted) is his univocal hermeneutic. Again, very Protestant and fundamentalist.
But I am not sure what any of this has to do with the contemporary labeling of water-boarding as torture by intelligence officers.
But of course, if he were subjected to it as training it wouldn’t be torture… At least that’s what I’ve read on this site.
Bill – What motivates you to seek Scriptural and catechetical justifications for hurting people?
But of course, if he were subjected to it as training it wouldn’t be torture… At least that’s what I’ve read on this site.
I think that’s right. It would seem that the intent would have to be considered before determining the moral status of water-boarding. That’s certainly a sticky deliberation.
Kyle
What motivates you to ignore scripture?
Bill – What motivates you to seek Scriptural and catechetical justifications for hurting people?
Excellent question. Sadly, many Catholics are really good at doing just that.
Bill,
I don’t think he is ignoring Scripture. We are all questioning your biblical hermeneutic, which is far more aligned with Protestant fundamentalism than with the tradition of the Catholic Church, especially the ancient and medieval readings of Scripture. You appear to interpret the Old Testament univocally and statically, taking the texts without historical, contextual and spiritual discrimination. For one who appeals to the history of the Church, you seem to give very little regard to how the early Fathers and medieval Scholastics taught us how to approach Scripture.
It would seem that the intent would have to be considered before determining the moral status of water-boarding.
It isn’t so much intent (braodly understood) as it is a matter of who one is doing it to: what is the relation to the person waterboarded? This is similar to adultery: the behavior one is choosing is simply different as a behavior depending on one’s fundamental deontological relation to the person in question. Part of the problem with any discussion of moral theology is that people who want to justify doing evil always reduce the behavior in question to a physicalist description. But a physicalist description isn’t a description of an act at all. When a robot or zombie waterboards another robot or zombie (or even a human being) it isn’t strictly speaking an act at all; it is merely an event of the physical order.
Choosing as a behavior to waterboard a helpless prisoner, though, is always torture; just as engaging in sexual relations with someone not one’s spouse is always adultery. It isn’t complicated unless one wants it to be complicated. Unfortunately, quite a few people seem to want it to be complicated.
Zippy….Zippy…..
You wrote: ” It seems to presume that assent and obedience are optional as long as what is taught is not reformable. How very protestant.”
Not optional but not unconditionally binding either since post Lumen Gentium 25′s “religious submission of mind and will”, the very same Church has approved moral theology tomes like Grisez’s for seminaries that approve sincere well thought out dissent.
And I love how this liberal site of 24/7 love and compassion ….impugns “protestants” who we are supposed to be extending understanding toward in light of Vatican II which is then cited here to condemn torture…..
Personally I loved the protestant Paul Tillich on the “God above God” concept in the ‘Courage To Be”.
Well…on the matter of indiscrimate obedience of the intellect to the reformable…….Fr. Karl Rahner who knew an awful lot about dogmatics since he was the editor of the Enchiridion Symbolorum… dissented from Humanae Vitae and not privately as the moral theology tomes exhort…but he did it publically as did Bernard Haring….two of the best theologians of the 20th century. And what did the 2nd in command at the CDF say in 2004 to John Allen of NCR about Rahner in general at the Lateran which was holding a posthumous Rahner Conference? He…Archbishop Amato….Ratzinger’s right hand man at CDF and still has that post at the CDF….noted that Rahner was an “orthodox theologian”…a comment he had to know would travel to many in the US via NCR.
So….Karl Rahner publically dissented from reformable HV….and no Pope prosecuted him due to canon 749-3 which states that infallibility must be clearly manifest or don’t bring an issue to ecclesiatical courts and say that it is infallible……and Bernard Haring also dissented from the reformable….all these were fundamentalist morons who simply were well published and highly regarded (Haring based his dissent to Humanae Vitae on Corinthians).
So while some at Vox Nova would have us believe that John Paul’s every thought was binding as Church Teaching, recent occurences and non occurences,,,,non prosecutions so to speak…. in the living Catholic Church that involve the highest authorities including the Popes…..belie that position.
Michael
Where to begin on your errors. Modern liberal…non literalist…..demythologizing biblical scholarship began with the Protestants in the 18th century……began there….then Catholics like Raymond Brown and the Jerome Biblical Commentary people ingested it and at times tried to outdo it.
Fundamentalist?…..No I actually like Fr. Raymond Brown in “Community of the Beloved Disciple” but I believe that John Paul was very negligent in appointing him to the Pontifical Biblical Commission as did Paul VI since Brown (Birth of the Messiah) did not believe that Mary ever said the Magnificat and did not believe there was ever any slaughter of the innocents around the time of Christ’s death…..and the reasons he gives are not very exhausting of the possibles.
It is a small step from Brown’s demythologizing….which he got from liberal prostestants by the way…..to John Paul’s not believing that violent commands to the Jews came from God…section 40 of Evangelium Vitae.
Your retention is perhaps faulty. The early Fathers were pacifistic since as I noted to this site months ago….they lived prior to Romans 13:3-4 becoming canon. After it becomes canon, pacifism disappears for the most prominent writers with also the death penalty then being supported from Augustine to Pius XII in 1952 generally though I’m sure there were exceptions.
When I made that point….you Michael…stated that I might be correct. I remember the moment since it was surprising.
On fundamentalism, you are off track. What really frightens you is that I accept each passages without finding a way to totally subtract them…..as per the example of Aquinas which is why he accepted torture and the death penalty and he was more important theologically to Catholicism than many Popes combined. I accept the Church’s whole point on e.g. annullments of marriages where one person or both are insufficient emotionally to have made a vow. A fundy would never agree to that since it is not in the bible. I pray nightly to saints which no fundy would accept and which is not in the bible. I believe in indulgences which no fundy would accept.
But you need me to be in the fundy box because otherwise you must face your partial committment to God’s word and that is not easy.
that’s Christ’s birth not death regarding the slaughter of the innocents.
Bill: that your confused hermeneutic fails to distinguish between juridical, epistemological, and deontological issues isn’t a theological problem for the Church as much as it is a problem with your hermeneutic. (Just as the fact that some folks’ moral theology reduces to either physicalism or consequentialism isn’t a problem for the Church’s moral theology, but rather is a problem for their own flawed moral theology).
It may be a pastoral problem, mind you. Any time people become confused that is a pastoral problem.
Zippy
Anytime people use too many large words in rapid succession they are perhaps sinking on the level of actual content.
Popes used torture. Many had children out of wedlock. The practice of castration to create eunuchs for singing was once routine in the Church and slavery was endoresed and, even when not endorsed and forbidden, was down-played by even great meind like Cardinal Newman who really didn’t think that being forced to function as a slave would really change him much.
One can go to hell imitating the sins of the saints.
Well, Bill, I suppose when I do ignore Sacred Scripture it is due to my moments of weakness, stupidity, and laziness—my succumbing to the snares of the devil. That said, in asking my question to you, I was not ignoring Scripture or your peculiar interpretation of it. I was trying to understand from where you are coming. Do you have an answer that you would like to share?
Daniel
You lumped out of wedlock children (not approved by God) with torture and slavery which to a degree and in circumstances…were approved by God…see Sirach 30:26 on slavery and Proverbs 20:30 on torture.
Kyle
Maybe I’ll answer it if you rephrase it without implicitly glorifying yourself and dissing your opponent. And while you are rephrasing it, tell me whether Christ tortured others when He made a whip of cords and drove the men out of the temple as per Splendor of the Truth where it condemns: “physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit”. PS….if having mortal sin as the penalty for missing Mass on Sunday for an 8 year old is not coercing the spirit, I don’t know what is.
But just address Christ and the whip….not one soul has addressed that. Perhaps you are the man.
Maybe you’ll answer?
All of my self-glorification is explicit.
Mr. bannon:
So slavery’s a moral good approved by God?
Or are you submitting to a societal and time-specific relativism to suggest it was ok and is not today?
Are you suggesting that certain moral issues retain a relativism?
I’m too amused at being referred to as demythologizer to respond. I love it when theological trends are improperly referenced!
Dan
Did you take the trouble to look up Sirach 30:26? And there are a myriad more passages than that…. enjoining the details of slavery.
Obviously in sections of history wherein real civilization order is not strong, God permits slavery but it is wonderful when order is more prominent and slavery need not be a factor since it is a sad aspect of life when it does occur but it is not an intrinsic evil since Popes had slaves in some cases Muslim slaves given them by victorious Italian armies. Pope Gregory had them and gave them to others.
And the decretals for centuries…the old canon law….supported just titled slavery of those born to slave mothers. The exact decretal sites are actually given in the Summa T by Aquinas in the Supplement in the question on marriage and then in the subsection on slaves and marriage. If slavery is intrinsically evil then Catholic canon law was also promoting that which was intrinsically evil for centuries. But it is not intrinsically evil but is an existential evil when it occurs.
And it could occur again if society breaks down in the distant future due to worldwide nuclear war since the number of countries possessing nuclear weapons will probably simply increase and some of those countries like Pakistan now contain substantial numbers of people who are wahhabi muslim and do not mind mutual destruction with their enemy.
If you follow John Paul loyally, “you just might be a relativist” since he overturned the Church tradition from Augustine til Pius XII on the death penalty by use of a prudential judgement which circumvented the tradition and that prudential judgement was placed where it ought not be placed…in a catechism……and he overturned wifely obedience which God’s Providence placed in the NT 6 explicit times and which is no longer in the catechism……..and God’s Providence certainly did not place birth control 6 times explicitly in the same New Testament. But let’s let Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict warn us about relativism without they themselves ever facing any scrutiny whatsoever either face to face by the Catholic press or face to face by Cardinals whose red hats stand for bravery and blood.
In short, relativism is all around you but in the Pope’s cases we have agreed as a social unit to be an emperor’s new clothes culture that never criticizes the papal statements whatever their level and thus we have no intellectual life of great moment or energy. That is: Catholicism is without internal checks whatsoever on papal musings and such was not the case when Paul rebuked Peter in Galatians or when the laywoman Catherine of Siena rebuked Popes constantly in letters. Now we are a weeny culture that criticizes everyone but the popes…..Bush….CT Bishops on planB…..the Jesuits (rightly often) for supporting speakers who support abortion (Obama at St. Peter’s Jersey City last week….voted against a ban on partial birth abortions)…….but not a soul criticizes the Popes…. because all Catholic careers/money/ permission to publish….almost all that leads to the Popes. And corporations will never criticize them on capitalism etc….because Catholics are 25% of every corporation’s customers in the US.
The trouble with all that immunity from criticism is what Augustine noted: that no one grows just from grace but people grow from rebuke and grace.
And if the Popes are never being rebuked, it follows that they only have grace and that is not enough according to Augustine. They need a Paul who can rebuke them or a Catherine of Siena who can rebuke them and they don’t have that since John Paul inaugurated clergy profiles by which one’s career can advance or arrest depending on one’s behaviour. Paul would have ignored such profiles because he had his own income source in tent making…..but historically we have made clergy totally dependent financially on their being cooperative….and thus few are the sane Cardinals that are ever in the papers as being at odds with the Pope on any issue. And that is too bad.
Anytime people use too many large words in rapid succession they are perhaps sinking on the level of actual content.
My few big words can beat up your many small words any day.
Bill,
It is funny that I never saw a post that you have wrote that didn’t go in a remarkably similar fashion, right down to the Rahner references. Why don’t you ever write about anything else?
It’s interesting to see that St Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St Didymus the Blind, et. al. must have been Protestant time travellers. Thanks for the head’s up, BC!
It is funny that I never saw a post that you have wrote that didn’t go in a remarkably similar fashion, right down to the Rahner references. Why don’t you ever write about anything else?
Direct citations would be nice, too. Of course, reading the primary sources may severely alter one’s armchair view of things.
Bill – What motivates you to seek Scriptural and catechetical justifications for hurting people?
I second Michael: Excellent question! There is just something inherently wrong and sickening about this.
Mike
As long as the disease at Rome remains the same, my posts will remain the same.
If you have an inner ear infection and leave it neglected but keep returning to your doctor for a different diagnosis….he will simply repeat what he said before. This site endlessly repeats that certain positions are “Church teaching” without ever letting the reader know the nuances of what that phrase can mean at different levels. So the example of the blanket position against torture or the death penalty as being Church teaching is a partial truth. A passing intelligent and as yet unconverted Japanese reading this site would think that the position on the death penalty or on torture is equivalent to the infallible positions on the IC and the Assumption. The same is done by conservative sites around the issue of birth control….so I have argued just as forcefully against several of those sites. The pope and the CDF officials know quite well that there is a legitmate right to dissent in Catholicism but they let it be dormant hidden in very expensive moral theology tomes like Grisez’ “Way of the Lord Jesus”….because they essentially don’t trust laymen. They who oversaw the sex abuse debacle and did zero of an emergency nature….don’t trust laymen with knowing the right to dissent on the reformable. That is why the Rahner Conference incident is fascinating….it is the 2nd top person in dogmatics…..talking the opposite of all the convervative Catholic websites who speak of birth control Catholics as the great unwashed….while no Pope has prosecuted the very people they call heretics…..and Amato praises Rahner as orthodox. So you have a sleight of hand. Rome will let the intramural denunciations of liberals against conservatives and conservatives against liberals…….continue…..rather than inform publically both groups that they are overstating the binding nature of their particular issues. That sleight of hand….that reluctance to inform either side that infallible is different than non infallible within the moraltheology tomes which they approve…..is not honest or truthful…..and is blocking the conversion of certain types of intelligent people and blocking conversions is not a business Rome should be in but they are satisfied with large numbers of primitive groups as in Africa where there can be real conversions next to conversions that mix conversion with spiritism and unofficial wives for priests etc.
Bill Bannon, this seems to be your way of handling things: “The Pope listens to me, not I the Pope. I decide how to interpret the history of theology and the Church’s dogmas, not the Pope. Nor even Bishops. No, only I know the secret.”
Can you tell me how this differs from Martin Luther, when he claimed similar things?
As long as the disease at Rome remains the same, my posts will remain the same.
And there you have it. The assumption is that there is a disease at Rome. Of course, never do we get direct citations or documentation from major Church history sources such as MGH or Mansi in order to show a gross misdirection is occuring. Lots of assumption, it appears, with very little substance.
As long as the disease at Rome remains the same, my posts will remain the same.
I think we have found the root of the problem.
God forbid that Bill would be the one misinterpreting Church tradition. It must be those well-studied popes!
Henry
What if I likewise asked you how you differ from those Catholics whose excessive obedience led them to foster imperialism in Portugal’s name when Pope Nicholas wrote this in Romanus Pontifex 1455 using this site’s translation of that document in honor of Michael’s newfound desire for documentary texts:
” We [therefore] weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation, and noting that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso — to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit — by having secured the said faculty, the said King Alfonso, or, by his authority, the aforesaid infante, justly and lawfully has acquired and possessed, and doth possess, these islands, lands, harbors, and seas, and they do of right belong and pertain to the said King Alfonso and his successors….”
So a Pope in a bull was giving Portugal half the world to take from its natives so that they would also convert said natives….and he gave them the right to enslave those natives. Encyclicals do not occur until there is a printing press so that prior to that, Popes communicated actions through bulls which nevertheless revealed their intellectual positions implicitly.
What if I asked you how you were any different than the Catholics who then followed the lead of that bull into centuries of destroying South America….in this case Brazil….since a later Spanish pope gave most of SA to his native land with the same rights of enslavement to the Spanish king in Inter Caetera by Pope Alexander VI who had a married 22 year old….Mrs. Orsini….as mistress.
How would you feel if I equated you with the Catholics who obeyed their wills in the matter of imperialism.
Back on subject:
“I think that’s right. It would seem that the intent would have to be considered before determining the moral status of water-boarding. That’s certainly a sticky deliberation.”
And there’s the root of the problem. If waterboarding were intrinsically evil as I’ve read here many, many times, then the intent behind it has no bearing whatsoever on the status of the act.
You can’t have it both ways…
Bill,
The thing is that you say the same thing over and over to the same people. You rarely ever write anything different. And it appears you say the same thing to everyone else. Why do you go on like this? Are there any other issues in the Catholic world that interest you?
TT,
Say that enough and Zippy will be over here with a rationalization. You know, like its okay to execute terrorists to protect society but not okay to perform an otherwise legitimate training procedure on them to protect society.
Say that enough and Zippy will be over here with a rationalization.
Or at least Zippy will chime in with the fact that physicalism is every bit as condemned as consequentialism, that neither TT nor Phillip seem to have the faintest idea what that means, and that until they do have at least some notion of what that means they are incapable of even discussing the subject coherently.
And then Tim will chip in and remind Zippy that he argued with me saying that it was perfectly OK for him to argue and advocate certain policies even though he was blatantly ignorant of what it was he was talking about.
Also, since I know what physicalism is, please explain to me how physicalism has anything to do with pointing out the dead-end argument of saying waterboarding is intrinsically evil while simultaneously saying intent determines the quality of the act?
TT: you generate some of the most predictably boring comments I’ve ever encountered.
If you know what physicalism is and you know that it is just as condemned as consequentialism, then you also know that the physicalist sense of the word “waterboarding” that you use in this line of argument is question-begging, trivial, and pointless in addressing the arguments against waterboarding. But I haven’t actually seen any evidence that you know any of those things.
Zippy – You generate some of the most predictably asinine comments I’ve ever encountered. You rationalize and compromise in order to protect your own ego and flawed logic.
Oh, and you’re boring too…
Still no evidence whatsoever that you understand physicalism and how the need to avoid it – and its flipside, consequentialism – pertains to this discussion, TT.
Other than it’s wrong to narrow down the morality of an act to either its consequences or the structure of the act? Check.
I’m only saying that if intent is not applicable to intrinsically evil acts as we’ve gone over many times here, that if waterboarding is an intrinsically evil act it then does not apply.
Why do you get so nasty, anyways?
That depends on what you mean by “the structure of the act”. That you seem to think that pseudo-waterboarding in training and actual waterboarding of a prisoner automatically fall under the same species (presumably because a common physical description or label – waterboarding – can be loosely used to encompass both, as long as we don’t pay close enough attention), differing only by intent, is a big red flag.
I’m only saying that if intent is not applicable to intrinsically evil acts ….
Any word can be used to refer to more than one thing. Pertinent to the present discussion, this includes both “intent” and “waterboarding”. If by “intent” you mean the choice involved in choosing a particular behavior or action, then that kind of intent is very much pertinent to an intrinsically evil act. (It wouldn’t be an act at all without that kind of intent). If by “intent” you mean why the person is choosing that specific behavior or action, or what he hopes to accomplish by choosing it, then that isn’t pertinent.
It is true – but trivial and uninteresting – that if we choose a sense of “waterboarding” which is physicalist and a broad enough category, and if we use ‘intent’ to refer to any sort of intention at all, we can say that some waterboarding is bad and some is licit. That is also true of abortion: if we choose a broad enough category of physical description and allow ‘intent’ to be multivocal then we can say that some ‘abortion’ is bad and some is licit, depending on ‘intent’.
But all of that is really just a self-serving word game, which doesn’t address any of the criticisms of waterboarding prisoners or aborting children. I am beginning to think that self-serving word games are instrumental in opening wide the gates of Hell.
Hold on though. Waterboarding is called torture for the very physical aspects of the act that you’re now trying to dismiss as not pertinent to the discussion of the act. Which is it?
I also found it interesting that you’re the one playing the word games that you say open the gates of hell…
Well spoke TT.
My question for Bill concerns his Biblical hermeneutic. While it’s not clear to me at all that you are off the mark with your descriptions of Papal history and the implications of it for moral theology, it all ultimately stands on your exegesis of certain passages in Scripture, does it not? Could you tell us a bit more about your hermeneutical point-of-view? Could you give us the context for the passages you cite that would make them more intelligible, and perhaps a word or two about your interpretation?
I can’t seem to find Sir 30:26, or any numbering of it that seems to relate to slavery. What translation are you using? Could you please correct me on that?
Prov 20:30 indeed invokes corporal punishment; but is not a further and less obvious step of interpretation needed to paint this as a support for torture? Is the act of torture different in species than what is described? Understanding the literal sense (as the intended meaning of the author in his socio-historical context) would help to clarify this for me.
In Romans 13:3-4, it would help to know who exactly Paul means by the “authorities,” in what sense does God “establish” them, and what is the nature of their “punishment?” Again, this does not seem obvious to me at this stage as an endorsement of capital punishment per se.
The same goes with the NT references to wifely duty. A bit more detailed exegesis would help to understand your position. My overall questions are: is your interpretation immediately evident with regard to the passages and if not, what guides your hermeneutic? And how justify it any more than those implicit or explicit in the teachings of recent popes on these issues? Is there an alternative interpretation that is not simply “demythologizing” or “liberal” in nature?
Further, a question about the death penalty: while understanding your hesitance about John Paul’s prudential judgment being inserted in the Catechism, I want to know: do you disagree with his prudential judgment? If so, why? Do you believe that in the modern American system flaws are present that lead to death penalty rulings that reflect incorrect prudential judgments? At the case-by-case level, the level of prudential judgments, do you think that the current system has “got it orthodox?” I think it would require a bit more work to employ passages like Romans to justify the specific case of John Doe who may be on death row for murder even…
Pax Christi,
[...] This admission comes on the heels of U.S. national intelligence chief Mike McConnell’s statement that water-boarding “would be [...]