(via CNN, “Barak: Israel in ‘all-out war’”)
“Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told CNN on Sunday that Israel has not ruled out a push into Gaza. Livni defended the airstrikes, saying the raids have been aimed at “only military targets and places in which we know Hamas members are.” “Unfortunately, in this kind of attack, there are some civilian casualties,” she said . . .
Another strike hit the Jabalya refugee camp, leaving five children dead in a home that was damaged when a nearby mosque was hit, said Dr. Mu’awiya Hassanei.
“Unfortunately, in this kind of attack, there are some civilian casualties.”
How, exactly, does describing one’s murderous actions grant legitimacy to those murderous actions? If one could wipe away sins simply by describing them (as opposed to confessing them), we might hear things like this:
Unfortunately, in bank robbery, people sometimes get shot in the face and die slowly and painfully.
Unfortunately, in prostitution, sometimes men get STDs that they will then pass on to their wives.
Unfortunately, in torture, sometimes people will just die on you.
These ‘responses’ are all in an area only twice the size of Washington, D.C. And about half of that area’s inhabitants are 16 years old or younger. Right now, the death toll is over 300, while the bombings continue.
These actions are, at the very least, grossly disproportionate and will only further mobilize the disaffected toward Hamas.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the legitimate debate about the rightness or wrongness of the *proportionality* of the Israeli actions: do you really mean to suggest that any action with civilian casualties must necessarily be an immoral act? You compare war to bank robbery, prostitution, and torture… and I’m afraid these analogies simply don’t work; the latter are all intentional choices to do something evil (i.e. steal, commit fornication, or torture), while war has the possibility of being justified (as opposed to the others, which cannot be justified under any circumstances).
If you could somehow prove that the Israelis *intended* to kill (i.e. target) innocent civilians, then you might have a case.
“Making money” is to “robbing banks” as “defending the innocent” is to “war”.
As I understand it, Paladin, the traditional doctrine on the just-war theory would lead one to reject violence as a means of warfare, and embrace nonviolent resistance as a means of defense. It is with that understanding that I relate the modern understanding of war (with its horrific bloodshed) to robbing banks and prostituting bodies.
Nate
You are very confused and inaccurate on this issue. Meet with your pastor and show him your posts on such things. Even the Geneva Conventions allow military operations to proceed if human shielding…ie….hiding among civilians is extant. The principle of double effect of Catholic moral theology is also relevant. Check with your pastor.
any action with civilian casualties must necessarily be an immoral act?
Of course. Immorality comes in degrees, as does sin, and any action with civilian causalities possesses a degree of immorality. How great or small largely depends on proportionality and just defense.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the Iranian government et al., and the many in Gaza and elsewhere who support them, deserve a rather large measure of responsibility. Let us ask what actions Israel would take absent the consistently murdeous actions of these groups….
Let us ask what actions the Palestinians would take absent their trying situation since 1948.
Israel’s use of force is not proportionate, plan and simple. You can watch Livni disregard any concern for “numbers” here .
Mark wrote:
Let us ask what actions the Palestinians would take absent their trying situation since 1948.
…or what actions the Jews would take, absent the brutal Muslim conquest of the Holy Land in the 7th century A.D., or thereabouts? How far back would you like to push this? Isaac and Ishmael? Cain and Abel? Adam and Eve?
Israel’s use of force is not proportionate, plan and simple. You can watch Livni disregard any concern for “numbers” here .
That might well be true, in this case; I have no idea. It was never my intent to canonize everything done by the civil government of Israel… but it was my intention to protect Israel (or anyone else, for that matter) from some sort of blanket condemnation: either of the “the Palestinians can do no significant wrong” type (which is blithering nonsense), or of the “no war is justified, ever” type of “obligatory pacifism” (which is misguided and incorrect).
Paladin.
My statement was a response to the one immediately before it.
Is there such thing as just bank robbery? Just torture?
Mark wrote: My statement was a response to the one immediately before it.
So I gathered; my reply was tailored to that fact, since Jonathan raised a good point, IMHO.
given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a “just war.”
Ratzinger in a 2003
oops, Ratzinger in a 2003 interview
Nate’s point is NOT about the Israeli-Palestinian mutually reinforced nightmare, but about theconcept of”collateral damage”. It’s just an example.
How do people get to a point where countless, unending numbers of dead become a de-personalized afterthought ?
This cleaned-up term, collateral damage, (a euphemism like “final solution) actually means charred corpses and survivors scarred, maimed for life, people in the burn unit (if there is one) in pain beyond anyone’s imagination. It’s a son without a mother, a father without a wife, dammit. Collateral, in a sick way, is a fitting term, since it means secondary and subordinate. Sorry, buddy. Wrong time, wrong place. Blame it on a simple twist of fate.
“Collateral damage” is the ultimate carte blanche for every military and politician. Right down to the “We had to destroy the village in order to save it”. While not a real quote, it does sum up the issue in suitably crazed manner.
As penance for all the filth I’ve supported by abandoning my European upbringing, I’ve spent a long time in Photoshop and created a trilogy in “honor” of the Bush Years. Mind you, same goes for every other master of war. Granted, most of them are more straightforward.
http://augustphotos.com/?page_id=33
I don’t think that armed defense against aggression is per se wrong. Mind you, I’d still take my family and get out of here. No country is worth dying for. It’s an accident of history, created by soaking the soil in blood. I’d shoot anyone who’s a threat to my family or me, but not for a piece of land someone once amassed named, frequently with the claim god gave it to them – who can argue with THAT! Well, the other guy with the same claim).
In a tiny speck of land, most casualties will be civilian. They know that. They don’t care (enough). Of course, some, like Hamas, specifically target civilians. Negligent homicide versus murder one. There have been ways before when Israel would just take out one terrorist leader with entourage via precise hit. This is legitimate, IMO, since to get them otherwise would require another “incursion” (sounds just like excursion – who doesn’t like a little trip ?)
But, there is the illusion that a tough response would deter people, such as bulldozing the houses of families related to a terrorist. How is that not intended ? Not to mention that the opposite is true regarding the effect and this should be bloodily obvious by now. People who dislike their own horrid government will still dislike an outside force even more. Every dead Palestinian child perpetuates the nightmare.
See also: “Liberation” of Iraq. Hardly anyone liked Saddam, but an invading force doesn’t make many friends either. Bush and his Murder Inc. have killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, a large percentage of which were collaterally damaged. When tens of thousands die, “good intentions” don’t really matter. What matters, George let us know, is that his soul hasn’t been compromised.
“You have to break eggs to make an omelet.” But who ordered the damned omelet ? Those who like breaking eggs, those who feast on it. As long as someone believes in the “greater good”, the killing will never end and it will always hurt them more than us. As long as someone believes his own delusions without any self-doubt, like George W. Bush, he will go on and on. Especially when one suffers from the specifically American paranoia that everyone wants to “take away or freedom” – for which “they hate us”. Perpetual war for peace by our pro-life leader.
Kill ‘em all, God will know his own – a quote from the Catholic crusade against the Albigensians. “Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.”
The wars against Iraq don’t just include horrendous amounts of “Collateral damage”, ie. brutally slain human beings referred to as civilians. I think it’s safe to say that, Republican Guard etc. aside, Iraqi grunts were killed in exorbitant numbers, which would not have been “necessary” for the “war effort” (in order to kill a lot of people, you have to make an effort)
But who cares about “collateral damage”, let alone slaughtered grunts who posed little threat ? Not all that many are outraged by 4000+ dead American soldiers. They died for their country. Making omelets requires heroic eggs to be broken. Here’s the folded flag. Your husband died a) for his country and b) a hero. There’s dead and then there’s Army dead. Medals are the difference.
Aside from convincing people of the inevitability (= legitimacy) of “collateral damage” (I mowed the lawn and a sprinkler head became collateral damage. Gotta mow the lawn though), a mercenary army is a warmongering government’s best friend. Protests will not extend beyond those with “Bush derangement syndrome” (which, curiously doesn’t refer to Bush’s derangement but the imaginary one his critics suffer from). The biggest protests took place in Europe.
The Blue Angels look so nice. Until they drop bombs.
How to tear up the “collateral damage” carte blanche and shove it down the throat of those with itchy trigger fingers ? Patriots’ acts.
The Bush administration has been unusually thorough in its propaganda. We don’t see the collateral damage. Heck, we aren’t even allowed to see our own dead ! They are flown in at night and in the fog of war. Embedded troops got to cover the military “triumph”. The refuse of it is taboo. We don’t just break eggs for the omelet, we hide the egg shells like a murderer his weapon. If you oppose them, you don’t “support our troops.” Who made them my troops ?
All euphemisms, from pro-choice to pro-family to collateral damage exist because people do not see and do not want to see reality. Of course, the veiling efforts are enormous. It’s a lot easier to kill collateral than a mother, a “parasite” than someone’s son. There is decency, and then ideologues of political or religious brands come and poke holes into it through which hell enters.
As long as soldiers are viewed as heroes, as serving their country (rather than killing innocent people, unintentionally of course, and spending all the country’s money. What surplus ?), as long “our men and women in uniform” get standing ovations, what’s gonna change ? Look at my “pro-life” Bush poster. In the actual photo, that’s a double amputee being rolled in on a red carpet with people clapping. In the welcoming line is another amputee in a wheelchair. And, sometimes these poor souls want to go right back.
A society must shed military culture, glorification of “heroism”. Duty, honor, country (saw that on the wall of a military academy for minors – uhhh? child abuse ‘n all ??) must be ditched into the same sewer where “Gott, Kaiser und Vaterland” lies waiting. That notion is laughed at in most of Europe. Western Europe has not had a war since WW II. Military is about as popular as smallpox.
Uni-form should already deter instead of waving at the parade because they just look so spiffy. Love a man in uniform ! “All march together, everybody looks the same, So there is no one you can blame.” (Phil Ochs)
Being (in) uni-form, literally and figuratively, is the most dangerous status people can be in. As long as there are pledges of allegiance to a flag (!), as long as there are funerals of a Marine with his 4 year old son crying, wearing a mini-marine uniform (look at my gallery linked above), how can anything change ? True, there are vast numbers of people who aren’t devotees of such madness, but since there is no draft, only those who buy into it (and some who see joining as their only option. Gee if only college were cheap, but that’d be bad for the “war effort”. ) are in the military.
Someone whose life is on the line on a daily basis “has” to believe that he is doing the right thing. Dying for a vicious lie seems a more horrible concept than dying “in the service of your country”. The “greater good” promised by the lunatic in chief warrants aforementioned broken eggs. You vote Republican because you think that they are good for the military. You cheer on the very man who sent you straight into hell.
We’re not killing Ali or Muhammad, we’re killing the enemy, who, as we know, hates us because we’re free. America is good at replenishing the ranks of its enemies, heck they’ve established terror tourism. Of course, terrorist need to be stopped. It’s just that if Fatima and Kalila bite the bullet in the process, well that is too bad and wasn’t intended, that was unfortunate collateral damage. And another terrorist is recruited by the cynical masters of war of the other side. My parents are dead, but hey, we’re liberated. Thank you, Mr. American. This lollipop and hug from you makes up for it all. I’m a free orphan now. When will they hate me because I’m free ?
Across the field you see the sky ripped open
See the rain come through the gaping wound
Pounding on the women and children
who run into the arms of America
(U2)
there are many ways to defend the innocent which do not require us to kill other innocents.
Bill: As far as I know it, the doctrine of double effect and alike do not argue for the justness or morality of such actions, they only speculate about the possible justifiability of unjust actions. It does not somehow “moralize” to argue for their necessity in certain cases. Also, it find it rather odd that you so dearly want Nate to run to his pastor to double-check his analysis here. Why don’t you do him the favor of showing his work to be false or misguided as you say (type) it is?
Gerald wrote:
I don’t think that armed defense against aggression is per se wrong. Mind you, I’d still take my family and get out of here. No country is worth dying for. It’s an accident of history, created by soaking the soil in blood. I’d shoot anyone who’s a threat to my family or me, but not for a piece of land someone once amassed named, frequently with the claim god gave it to them – who can argue with THAT! Well, the other guy with the same claim).
…and apparently the Catholic Church, from Whom you’ve apparently divorced yourself completely:
— quote from CCC 2308 —
“All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war. However, “as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed (Gaudium et Spes, par.79, sec.4).”
— end quote —
This seems to suggest that “personal defense = ok, national defense = evil” just doesn’t fly. And as for your other “quote”:
Kill ‘em all, God will know his own – a quote from the Catholic crusade against the Albigensians. “Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.”
…didn’t you even double-check the authenticity of this (see note #22)? If even Wikipedia can qualify their answer, surely you could?
How quickly the professed opponents of hatred take up the very weapon they claim to oppose…
It is very interesting that both Vox Nova and Deal Hudson(that also had a good post) are on the same page
However I can’t help but notice that both places as well as me paid no attention to the hundreds of rockets that were hitting Israel. We seem just to pay attention when Israel responds which is curious and we should think about.
I note that Egygt made responses this week that Hamas was to blame not Israel. PErhaps we Americans should be a tad hesitant about condemming since we on both the left and right have not decided to pay much attention the last few months.
I think this situation is a tad complicated and I am trying to get up too speed. In the end we can not be experts in exverything though we all have blogs and have the power of the submit button
It’s sad to see the Catholic Right always bending over backwards to defend the possible legitimacy of every military action by the U.S. or U.S. allies…
It’s like they are addicted to a pornography of military violence.
Interesting that Bannon wants Nate to run to his pastor for an ethics lesson when most Catholic priests have not picked up a theology book since their M.Div. days.
“governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed”
Oh, I don’t and didn’t dispute that defense can be legitimate, I was relaying what I’d do, which is getting the hell out. I’m not gonna die for a country. Why ? I’m the same person regardless where I live. Once the generals come calling, hasta la vista. I’d also do whatever possible to keep children from joining the US military. I suggest the American blue states join up with Canada and let the red states pay for their own wars.
Mark: What U.S. allies ? :-P
Israel is saying it is justified in its direct bombings of the Islamic university in Gaza, citing that institution as a center for scientific know-how ,which Hamas can exploit militarily.
Oh, the strange, deadly fruits of the Bush doctrine…
“Didn’t you even double-check the authenticity of this (see note #22)? If even Wikipedia can qualify their answer, surely you could?”
Uh, the quote may not be authentic, but the slaughter sure was. It certainly describes the spirit well. Another classic example of de-humanizing humans. They had to die because they were heretics. Unlike them, the ‘orthodox butchers’ got their ticket to heaven. Nothing says Good News like wading in the blood of the infidels. It’s more like “Hey, I got news for ya”
Bill, my pastor is a Franciscan, so I think he’d agree with me that warfare is very much like robbing banks and prostitution (along with Popes Benedict, JPII, and Vatican II). Check out the Papal Peace quotes of the last four decades to see our Magisterium struggling with the demand of Vatican II, that we take another look at war, that we look at it in an entirely new way – through the lens of two World Wars and a nuclear one on deck. Yes, the Church has condoned double-effect killing en masse because of political and pragmatic considerations . . . but this very pagan and very ‘prudential’ theory of justified warfare is undergoing a transition. Once the Church realized that violence really couldn’t stop violence (see the Church’s changing opinion on torture, on death penalty), it became inevitable that we would embrace nonviolent means of peacemaking.
Gerald, you sure know how to take the ball and run with it. Thank you!
It certainly describes the spirit well. Another classic example of de-humanizing humans.
Gerald, just for the record, and for my own information: what’s your position re: being “pro-life” vs. “pro-choice [sic]“? I don’t seem to remember you being in the “no abortion under any circumstances” camp; is that correct? If so, I might point out a bit of irony in every comment you make re: “dehumanizing” other people…
es, the Church has condoned double-effect killing en masse because of political and pragmatic considerations . . . but this very pagan and very ‘prudential’ theory of justified warfare is undergoing a transition. Once the Church realized that violence really couldn’t stop violence (see the Church’s changing opinion on torture, on death penalty), it became inevitable that we would embrace nonviolent means of peacemaking.
Nate, are you listening to what you’re saying? A “Franciscan” (who has, assumably, taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience–or else he’d not be a pastor) would “agree with you” that war (which is not intrinsically immoral) would be in the same category as robbery and prostitution? I seriously hope you’re putting words in his mouth…
Re: “The Church” declaring something to be non-intrinsically evil “because of political and pragmatic concerns”; this is insane! You’re suggesting that your own Church, Who claims to be infallible in matters of doctrine (and identifying intrinsic evils is most certainly part of that!), has not only erred, but *deliberately hidden* a moral truth of this magnitude? If you seriously believe this, then whyever are you still a Catholic at all?
You wouldn’t happen to have a copy of the Catechism to read, would you? I’d seriously suggest studying it, when you have some time…
Gaza is being invaded by land forces as I write this.
God help them all!
Nate, better living through chemistry ;o) Being nuts (“chemically imbalanced) and wrongly medicated makes “staunch Catholicism” seem like Disneyland (woohoo! rules!) and “conservatism” like Magic Mountain. Not that I have any illusions re: Obama now (I’ve seen liberalism from the inside, too. I’m a method actor). Morality is simple. Stop #%!&ing killing people.
I’ve returned to my Austrian roots in these matters, with a more comprehensive view and the “advantage” of knowing the other side from personal, albeit frequently uneasy experience. Plus, I hear there is something in the Northern California water :D
My mother’s printed out my Bush tributes to show around, I guess as a means of saying “Look, he’s not crazy anymore”. Heh !
[...] Writing at Vox Nova, Nate Wildermuth characterizes civilian casualties as “murder”: [Citing ] “Unfortunately, in this kind of attack, there are some civilian casualties.” [...]
I’ve returned to my Austrian roots in these matters …
Is this the same Austria gave us World War I? The same Austria that cheered Hitler’s triumphant return after the Anschluss in 1938? The same Austria that then exported its Jews en masse to the death camps? The same Austria that in 2001 finally agreed in principle to offer reparations to Holocaust victims but has reneged on that promise ever since?
Some roots.
Paladin,
I’d love to continue this discussion, but I can’t if you think I am unfamiliar with the Catechism, or that I’m some insane anti-Catholic conspiracy monger. That has a funny ring to it though, huh? :)
I’d have studied Catholic teachings on war and peace in great depth, and continue to. The very passages you refer to in the Catechism were (and are) subject to serious internal debate among those who wrote the Catechism. Church doctrine does develop to the point where it seems to have actually reversed itself – see slavery, see interest-charging, see torture, see death penalty, and now . . . see war. It’s not a matter of fundamental dogma being wrong, but of practical application of that dogma. Church doctrine only seems to reverse if you don’t understand how the fundamental teachings never change. And what is the fundamental teaching about war and killing? That war and killing are holy? Never. The teachings are about the defense of life and love of brother and sister. The teaching is about laying down our lives for our friends. That dogma will never change. But how do we love? That’s the doctrine that is developing. It is clear to many that we cannot love by dropping bombs, even to my pastor, even to my Pope.
Read Zenit’s report on the Pope’s reaction:
“the pope urged serious dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians as the only way out of the “perverse logic of conflict and violence.” . . . ” I implore the end of this violence, which must be condemned in all its forms, and a restoration of the truce in the Gaza Strip,” he said.
Q: Is there any such thing as a “just war”?
Cardinal Ratzinger: This is a major issue of concern. In the preparation of the Catechism, there were two problems: the death penalty and just war theory were the most debated. The debate has taken on new urgency given the response of the Americans. Or, another example: Poland, which defended itself against Hitler.
I’d say that we cannot ignore, in the great Christian tradition and in a world marked by sin, any evil aggression that threatens to destroy not only many values, many people, but the image of humanity itself.
In this case, defending oneself and others is a duty. Let’s say for example that a father who sees his family attacked is duty-bound to defend them in every way possible — even if that means using proportional violence.
Thus, the just war problem is defined according to these parameters:
1) Everything must be conscientiously considered, and every alternative explored if there is even just one possibility to save human life and values;
2) Only the most necessary means of defense should be used and human rights must always be respected; in such a war the enemy must be respected as a human being and all fundamental rights must be respected.
I think that the Christian tradition on this point has provided answers that must be updated on the basis of new methods of destruction and of new dangers. For example, there may be no way for a population to defend itself from an atomic bomb. So, these must be updated.
But I’d say that we cannot totally exclude the need, the moral need, to suitably defend people and values against unjust aggressors.
– Cardinal Ratzinger, .
Citing the above is not to defend this or that action taken by the U.S. or Israel as automatically justified or “holy”; but I think there is the clear recognition — even by our current Pope, co-editor of the Catechism — that, in the defense of life against unjust aggressors, “proportional violence” may be an obligation.
I would also suggest that those charged with the obligation to defend and protect the lives of its charges, in Ratzinger/B16′s example “for example that a father who sees his family attacked is duty-bound to defend them in every way possible”, or to speak of a nation obligated to defend its citizens, that the refusal to employ ‘proportional violence’ [Ratzinger's words] in the defense of life would constitute a sin.
Nate Wildermuth, circa April 2008:How could the Pope repeat United States propaganda, and express admiration for US bloodshed? I racked my mind for ways to interpret his words in another way, but I couldn’t. …
I have so much to learn.
After a great deal of reflection and prayer, my heart has moved, my neck has bent. I have seen something startling: we live in a society where “defense of life” and “nonviolence” are mostly mutually exclusive, and because the defense of life must take priority over a commitment to nonviolence, most Christians are duty-bound to defend life with the least amount of violence possible.
Did I just write that? I did. But only after three days of gut-wrenching prayer!
I am not suggesting that violence is good, or even Christian. I am suggesting, however, that the circumstances of our society require us to choose defense of life over nonviolence. In other words – if the only way I can defend life is to use a gun, then I must use a gun.
Strikes will not stop robbers from breaking into our homes. Nonviolent communication will not stop those who do not wish to communicate. We have no nonviolent alternatives to police forces or militaries. We have no nonviolent alternatives to courts and prisons. Nonviolent means of defending life are mostly confined to idealistic exhortations to “love your enemy and trust in God’s grace to work miracles.”
Nonviolent means of defending life must be reasonable, passing the common sense rule, being as readily available as the gun in Target, or a call to 911. To criticize those who use violence to defend life when there are no other ways to defend life is . . . well . . . possibly scandalous.
I believe we’ve had this conversation before?
At the risk of beating a dead horse ;-) I’ll reiterate what I said then as well, responding to your post:
Just as Catholic tradition makes a distinction between ‘killing’ and ‘homicide’, it seems to me that rather than condemning any and all use of armed force as “violence” [= evil], the Catholic tradition rather evaluates the use of force, judging its worth according to moral criteria.
The former has often been dubbed the “‘dirty hands’ tradition” (whereby to pick up a gun, even defensively, is to unavoidably involve one’s self in sin), the latter the “just war tradition” of moral-reasoning and a moral evaluation of armed force. (My father examined this in an essay “War and the Eclipse of Moral Reasoning” back in 2002).
None of this discounts the witness of pacifists — who by their actions and adherence to nonviolence anticipate and manifest in this reality a time where the lion will truly “lay down with the lamb”, where all swords will be “beaten into plowshares.”
Probably no movie illustrates this ongoing debate between the two traditions than one of my favorite movies, Robert Bolt and Roland Joffé’s 1986 film The Mission.
Nate
Benedict said thje media thing to say……he also knows that one cannot talk with extremists who believe for religious reasons that they must destroy the state of Israel.
If they wished to destroy Israel as a state due to pragmatic reasons involving economy for their people, one could talk to them. When the reasons are religious, one cannot solve things with talk without changing their religion. Benedict took the easy media non nuanced route.
I agree that the catechism is less final as one’s knowledge of the changes increases.
But how to distinguish true developement from the interjection of the personal proclivities of recent Popes? Unfortunately John Paul II gave evidence of being more extreme and thus personal against the death penalty than his own catechism let on so that he ended up contradicting #2267 by his statement in 1999 that the death penalty was “cruel” (St.Louis) which the catechism implicitly rejected. Likewise on war, a late in his reign Easter speech by him that “war solves nothing” is contradicted by his own catechism. Benedict made similar comments on Europeans now knowing the futility of war which again contradicts their own catechism.
What is absolutely certain in Catholicism is not the ordinary magisterium but the extraordinary magisterium and the Scriptures. But even here in the latter, one sees John Paul in section 40 of Evangelium Vitae being revulsed by the Old Testament violence some of which was ordered by God. Keep in mind that heretics too opposed the Old Testament God as evil….the Manichaens e.g.
In short, I think this area is clouded by the obvious intrusion into “church teaching”
of the personal views of Popes recently and given an entire cardinalate that seems incapable of correcting Popes the way paul corrected Peter in Galatians, I believe we are in for constant intrusion of Popes’ personal views for centuries to come….and not for a good reason but due to conformism and the pressure of careers…catholic careers…as Bishop Martino of Italy noted some months back.
The intelligent Catholic then must remember that not only are there developements in Catholicism but there are regressions. I’ll note one you can agree on:
Torture is condemned by Pope St. Nicholas I, Response Ad Consulta Vestra, November 13, 866 and then brought back by Pope Innocent IV, Bull Ad Exstirpanda (May 15, 1252).
You would admit then that that (Ad Extirpandum) is a regression and not simply a developement simply because amore recent Pope wrote and enforced it as did a series of Popes after him.
So recentness is not always developement.
“Is this the same Austria gave us World War I? The same Austria that cheered Hitler’s triumphant return after the Anschluss in 1938?”
Western Europeans in general which has been peaceful for over six decades, a consensus of peace and anti-militarism that permeates Austria, Germany, France, you name it.
Granted, Bush isn’t Hitler. He could be Hitler, if he applied himself.
I don’t know where you hail from, but if it’s the USA, I wonder which USA you mean ?
The same USA that murdered a continent full of “Indians” ? Oh but now they get to gamble!
The same USA that allowed slaves until 140 years ago ?
The same USA that segregated blacks until people stood up in ever greater numbers ?
The same USA that attempted to wipe itself out in a civil war ?
The same USA that atomized two cities ?
The same USA that led the Korean war ? (lest they take away our freedom)
The same USA that led the Vietnam war ?(lest they take away our freedom)
The same USA that’s been doing all kinds of nasty things in Latin America and pretty much everywhere else, too numerous to count ?
The same USA that attacked Iraq (lest they take away our freedom) ?
The difference is that Europe has learned, whereas the USA still doesn’t have a majority of people who oppose these endless wars to protect our freedom (for which they hate us). An absence of paranoia
So yeah, unless you’re Canadian……
* An absence of the paranoia that everyone is after your “freedom” keeps wars down. So would stopping to lie about what you’re doing, from Vietnam to WMDs. So would not voting for insane people who thinks god wants them to start a war.
“Blue State America” is fairly similar to Europe. (The red/blue thing isn’t just about state-by-statewhich is about states to some degree, but of course within states there are distinctions, too. The more educated, the higher the income, the closer to the coast the less prone to war support. The income and education gap between Democrats and Republicans is huge these days. “Red State America” is what keeps the wars going, it feeds the beast with its sons and daughters. The good Christians of the religious wrong, always just one Beam me up away from rapture, are the military’s best friends. Good luck recruiting Episcopalians or Buddhists.
[Sorry, in advance, for the length of this!]
I’d love to continue this discussion, but I can’t if you think I am unfamiliar with the Catechism, or that I’m some insane anti-Catholic conspiracy monger.
Well… I was giving the benefit of the doubt, in assuming that you’d not known the Catechism’s contents and subsequently *rejected* them (or interpreted/”nuanced” them out of practical existence), yes. And to clarify: I called your *statements* insane, not you (I don’t have enough info to make a firm diagnosis on you, sorry! :) ); it’s quite possible for sane people to utter statements that are well into the “lunacy” camp. I’ll happily defend my assertions, but I reserve the right not to defend statements that I didn’t make.
Earlier, you wrote:
Bill, my pastor is a Franciscan, so I think he’d agree with me that warfare is very much like robbing banks and prostitution (along with Popes Benedict, JPII, and Vatican II).
Forgive me, but if you think that Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, or the documents of the Second Vatican Council somehow claim that warfare is intrinsically unjustified (like robbing banks, or prostitution–neither of which can ever be justified, under any circumstances), then you’ve either read fictitious accounts of these, or you’ve woefully misunderstood what you’ve read.
Check out the Papal Peace quotes of the last four decades to see our Magisterium struggling with the demand of Vatican II, that we take another look at war, that we look at it in an entirely new way – through the lens of two World Wars and a nuclear one on deck.
(*sigh*) Nate, you’re looking at the Church through socio-political lenses… and you simply can’t do that, without getting a fatally distorted picture of Her; the Church is certainly made up of weak and sinful creatures–many of whom are driven by political ambitions of varying degrees of pettiness–but the very *definition* of the Church as the Body (and Bride) of Christ, etc., insists that such dynamics >b>cannot be the final explanation for Her teachings and actions.
The flavour of your argument is in keeping with the non-Catholics who, when they see the apparent ‘political intrigue behind the scenes” of the Councils and key Magisterial documents (e.g. the definition of Papal Infallibility at Vatican I, the re-affirmation of the Church’s condemnation of artificial birth control in Humanae Vitae, etc.), assume that political pressures are the sum-total of the whole affair: “The vote could just as easily have gone the other way, so it’s mere chance–or political machinations, rather–which explains why we have the current teaching!” To which I reply: my friend, you do not understand Who the Church Is, in the least. Do you imagine that the ideas of “the Holy Spirit infallibly guiding the Church to all salvific truth (cf. 1 Timothy 3:15)” and “the Holy Spirit protecting the Church from defining any error as doctrine” are mere flummeries, used to pacify the ignorant, unsophisticated and “un-nuanced” masses?
Yes, the Church has condoned double-effect killing en masse because of political and pragmatic considerations . . . but this very pagan and very ‘prudential’ theory of justified warfare is undergoing a transition. Once the Church realized that violence really couldn’t stop violence (see the Church’s changing opinion on torture, on death penalty), it became inevitable that we would embrace nonviolent means of peacemaking.
Nate, pacifism (i.e. total renunciation of all violence, regardless of the provocation) is a legitimate (and even praiseworthy) position for you to take–it’s one of many valid options–but you err in believing that it’s the *only* legitimate option. The man who defends his wife and children from harm through proportionate means–even if those means harm or kill the assailant–is not sinning, thereby… but by your standard, he *would* be sinning. Do you not see that? If “nonviolence” is an absolute moral imperative, without exception, then any act of self-defense (or defense of others) which causes harm is immoral, by definition! If so, then God was ordering His people to sin, every time He sent them into battle against their foes (e.g. Philistines, Amorites, etc.)… or have you fallen into the heterodox belief that such Old Testament accounts are mythological? (If so, then you’ve left Catholicism far behind, I’m afraid.) Again, there’s nothing wrong with the adoption of pacifism as one’s personal conviction; but it’s a serious mistake to think that it’s a universal imperative. Some things are, but pacifism isn’t.
I’d have studied Catholic teachings on war and peace in great depth, and continue to. The very passages you refer to in the Catechism were (and are) subject to serious internal debate among those who wrote the Catechism.
This is what I referenced, earlier, when I said that you took the political dynamics of a Church matter, and assumed that it explained the whole of the matter. This simply won’t work; the (certainly evident) political dynamics exist, but God works *through* them–He isn’t simply content to let the Church bumble into falsehood here, and then “awaken” and renounce it there.
Church doctrine does develop to the point where it seems to have actually reversed itself – see slavery, see interest-charging, see torture, see death penalty, and now . . . see war.
Let’s take these, one at a time, then:
Slavery, in the sense of “buying, selling, and owning men as if they were property” (think of the more modern slavery of African-Americans in America), has always been condemned since the earliest ages as an intrinsic evil, and it was punishable by death (cf. Exodus 21:26). The permanent indentured servitude (perpetual servant, but not “property of which you can dispose as you see fit”) described in Biblical times was quite a different thing, and it was tolerated for a time (i.e. not intrinsically evil).
Interest-charging has never been condemned as intrinsically evil (and Jesus Himself used the image without condemnation in his parable of the servants and the talents, cf. Matthew 25, etc., to the point that He condemned the servant who did not invest his Master’s money so as to give it back to Him with interest [Mt 25:27]; only interest charged on an *unproductive loan* (i.e. “usury”) was condemned.
Torture is the hardest case you mention–since it was tolerated (and even implemented) by Church members of all strata; but not only has torture never been presented, even by the aforementioned people, as a “positive good”, nowhere in the Deposit of Faith has torture ever been given even the slightest approval. This case is the most scandalous, since it involved the weakness and ignorance of a vast number of the faithful (including clergy), but it will not avail as a case where “Church doctrine has changed”, since no doctrine ever touched the matter; only Church discipline (which has always been changeable, given sufficient necessity) allowed this sad state of affairs.
The death penalty is not intrinsically evil, and the Church does not see it so, today (see CCC 2267, where the point is made quite clearly). The fact that we now have deathless means of handling criminals is a happy development (no one of sense ever argued that the death penalty was a cause for happiness and joy) doesn’t affect the matter at all.
It’s not a matter of fundamental dogma being wrong, but of practical application of that dogma. Church doctrine only seems to reverse if you don’t understand how the fundamental teachings never change.
That’s true… but I argue that you’ve misdiagnosed several facets of the Church’s activities; if you suppose that the Church has ever, has now, or will ever pronounce warfare or capital punishment to be “intrinsically evil” (and pronounce Her own teachings in the past to be mistaken, in that regard), then you’ve woefully mistaken the Church’s teachings, Her charism of infallibility, and Her very constitution built into Her by God Himself.
And what is the fundamental teaching about war and killing? That war and killing are holy? Never. The teachings are about the defense of life and love of brother and sister. The teaching is about laying down our lives for our friends. That dogma will never change.
Herein lies a key problem: you’ve mentioned several disparate things, and you’ve equivocated them invalidly. For instance:
The Church’s teaching about war is that it is always an evil (to be avoided whenever possible), but that it may sometimes be tolerated as an unintended evil effect while pursuing a sufficient good. See my earlier post, re: the conditions necessary for morally tolerable “double-effect”. Ditto for killing; murder (i.e. the unjust killing of a person) is always morally unjustified… but because it’s unjust, not because it’s “killing”. The death of a person is always an evil, but such death can be brought about without sin in certain strict circumstances (e.g. self-defense, defense of others, etc., while using minimal necessary force). The fact that something isn’t “holy” doesn’t logically imply that it can never be tolerated.
Life must certainly be defended, in general; but your sweeping generalization doesn’t help much, when faced with conflicting moral imperatives; what does one do, for instance, when a maniac (who’s not culpable for his actions) is ready to cut your daughter to pieces with a razor? To kill him (and he’s certainly innocent of wrongdoing) is evil, but it is morally permissible to do so, if killing him is the only way to stop his rampage (and if you do not *intend* his death, per se).
“Love of brother and sister”, as opposed to the “warm snugglies” currently touted by our culture, means something quite specific: “love” is a free choice to sacrifice of oneself for the best good of another person. That doesn’t militate against just war, or self-defense, or even the death penalty, in the least.
“Laying down our lives for our friends” (which is incomplete–one is called to do so for one’s enemies, as well, cf. Matthew 5:44, etc.) also doesn’t excuse us from being simple-minded, and ignoring the key definitions behind moral life; it’s not enough to say, “Oh, I must lay down my life”, when your family’s lives are at stake (and you’re not morally free to dispose of *their* lives as you would be your own–and even your own life is not your own in an absolute sense, since God has a say in it, cf. 1 Corinthians 6:19), for instance. Just so: a president of a nation does not have the luxury of “laying down his nation’s life”, since the lives of his people don’t belong to him; he’s duty-bound to protect them, just as is the father of a household toward his children.
But how do we love? That’s the doctrine that is developing. It is clear to many that we cannot love by dropping bombs, even to my pastor, even to my Pope.
That’s a pretty-sounding slogan (and I’m not particular about bombs, per se), but it doesn’t advance your case; the Church has always, and will always, allow for just (though lamentable) recourse to military force, to the death penalty (under strict conditions), and the like. No one is asking you to like it–I don’t like war or death, either, of course!–but “liking” and “allowing” are very different things.
Re: the Holy Father’s quote: there’s nothing in there that even remotely supports the generalities that you seek to support (e.g. mandatory pacifism, alleged intrinsic evil of capital punishment, etc.). Even if the Holy Father were to denounce all specific actions of a specific conflict, that wouldn’t touch the generalities in question.
Finally: do you not see that your “nuanced” view is ultimately based on relativism? It’s a sort of “soft” relativism, to be sure (i.e. acknowledging “infallible doctrine” in theory, but picking and choosing which teachings to regard as being in that category), but your talk of “development” (which is a true idea, if correctly understood) cannot serve your purpose of “complete reversal of doctrine” (even if you hedge, and call it “*apparent* complete reversal”). Consider: how, exactly, do you settle your own mind as to what truly *is* unchanging doctrine (and to what extent can it be known by “mere mortals”)? You seem to “canonize” such Church teachings as agree with your personal opinions… which is a rather fickle standard, if so.
Western Europeans in general which has been peaceful for over six decades, a consensus of peace and anti-militarism that permeates Austria, Germany, France, you name it.
Funny, the Western European affinity for “peace” after World War II was bought and paid for by American military power and presence on European soil. Austrians in particular were more than happy to have young Americans – mainly your despised Red Staters – defend them from any possible Soviet agression because it allowed them to revel in the moral superiority of their supposed “everlasting neutrality,” a neutrality which faded, by the way, when war broke out in the Balkans.
Your argument reminds me of the surly teenager who despises his father as a sell-out because dear old dad schleps off to work every day to support junior’s lifestyle. It’s a childish argument, but then most of what you write here is foolishness.
Paladin or Nate…..I can’t tell which of you held that slavery in the OT was not chattel, but I would urge you to read Leviticus 25:
44
“Slaves, male and female, you may indeed possess, provided you buy them from among the neighboring nations.
45
You may also buy them from among the aliens who reside with you and from their children who are born and reared in your land. Such slaves you may own as chattels,
46
and leave to your sons as their hereditary property, making them perpetual slaves. But you shall not lord it harshly over any of the Israelites, your kinsmen.”
__________________________________________________________________
Hence it is a contextual evil not intrinsic evil varying with the primitive level of economies as drunkeness is a contextual evil which the OT warns against yet permits under great duress in Proverbs 31:6 (“give strong drink to him who is perishing wine to him who is on the edge of the abyss, that he may forget…”)….. but slavery is not an intrinsic evil as John Paul averred in the 80th section of Splendor of the Truth….otherwise God was urging an intrinisic evil on His people in Leviticus 25. He permitted them divorce but that was not an intrinsic evil for the non baptized though it was still an evil of some type to God even then…..Malachi 2:16 “I hate divorce says the Lord God of Israel..”
“If so, then God was ordering His people to sin, every time He sent them into battle against their foes (e.g. Philistines, Amorites, etc.)… or have you fallen into the heterodox belief that such Old Testament accounts are mythological?”
Basing views of war on the “Old Testament” is a rather curious thing, one has to be into crimes against humanity. How can anyone not view the “kill ‘em all” god as a genocidal maniac. A control freak, smoting people even for liturgical violations. (that does sound eerily familiar….) A curious penchant for dead animals wasted rather than eaten. I’m a vegetarian becaue I love animals, so I find the whole butchering awful.
“He” would have been at Nuernberg or The Hague today, on death row in the USA. With a god like that, who’d need a devil ? The excuse for that god is that “he” doesn’t exist. The evil ordered by that god is on par with all the major butchers in history, not in numbers but in deed. The rationale offered is particularly hilarious – they are unbelievers because they do not have our god. Of course, “they” are not “them”, so how could they ? It reminds me of Charlie Brown saying to Snoopy, “Why aren’t you a pony ?”
To use OT god as a way to prop up war might as well be followed by extolling the virtues of Blitzkrieg (not intrinsically evil) or the Killing Fields (not intrinsically evil).
Since I am not bound by anything in/to the Bible, I don’t need to offer up explanations, rationalizations or excuses. If this wasn’t “your” book (after stealing it from the Jews), you’d condemn the alleged divine actions, too – and it’d obvious that it’s simply a projecting of one’s values onto a divine entity. Surprise ! Our god is just like us. Who would have guessed ? He’s even a man, so I can praise him for not having made me a woman.
Any scholar worth his money will tell you that the Israelites’ god concept started as a tribal god among other gods and evolved over time. At first it was “My god is bigger than your god !”, complete with magical trick showdowns. If they were nice, god allowed them to be naughty and slay their neighbors. If they were naughty, said neighbors brought them coals. Heck, that god character punished israelites for not killing everybody. He was ok with incest – “Adam” and “Eve’s” children obviously, Lot, Noah…
Death penalty for everything under the sun, rules that’d make a canon lawyer beg for mercy…it’s like SSPX wrote Deuteronomy.
What one finds in the OT is a concern about social justice with the prophets next to divinely sanctioned killing sprees. An eye for an eye actually was a liberalization, to prevent disproportionate responses (of course, this didn’t extend to the “heathen”, just like the 5th/6th commandment didn’t) One can see the development of the god concept towards a universal god who’s not as much of a micromanager who should have a restraining order against him or. From thundering warlord-god to a “small voice”. Needless to say, many an “orthodox” Christian prefers the former.
…. and then there is Jesus, later modifications aside, who is completely unlike that and scolds the very sticklers of an angry god. He breaks the rules for the benefit of others, his approach could be called teleological versus “strict constructionist”. He wouldn’t hire a gentile to turn his lights on and off. If he hadn’t been “abducted” by the equivalent of the Pharisees and countless editors, we’d have an even brighter portrayal.
Jesus, despite the “tough” statements probably wrongly attributed to him, has nothing to do with stickler god. Heck, he disobeys the sabbath rules. Old Testament god would smote him. Jesus is pretty much the antithesis. OT god would have been the first one to throw rocks at the woman.
(Joke…Jesus “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Thunk – a stone hits the woman. Jesus turns around and sighs, “Mo-om !)
He would not order genocide. He would not order an Inquisition, a war on “heretics” and so forth. He wouldn’t need ornate palaces or run around like Liberace.
The history of Christendom, on an institutional level, is a history of unspeakable crimes, from “in hoc signo” on. Promising salvation for killing is just like Islamists’ promise. It became a means to keep the regular people down via guilt trips while propping up monarchs without scolding them for their manifold maitresses. Heck, many an archbishop, cardinal and pope had his own.
In recent decades, many Christian denominations have made enormous progress, including, to a considerable degree, the Catholic church. It helps that it lost all secular power. While it still supports insidious things such as Prop. 8 (what Catholics do by themselves doesn’t matter to me, no point in criticizing NFP etc. The same approach should be taken by Catholics), in matters non-sexual it is, grosso modo, a defender of peace and justice.
On the devolution side, there are large segments of Evangelicals (thankfully they don’t exist in Europe), a strange combination of willful ignorance, many -isms and penchant for war and Armageddon. I can’t even come up with a connection to Jesus. Reactionaries at prayer.
The aforementioned progress is pretty recent, given support for all kinds of dictators in the not-so-distant past. In those matters – that require no religion at all, mind you – the Catholic church is definitely now better and closer to “What would Jesus do” than at any point of its imperial rule.
Of course, the “orthodox Catholics” make fun of “peace and justice” (not that “those people” are always conducive to problem-solving) and have a tendency to ignore the Pope(s) on “Old Testament” god affairs like war. It’s not intrinsically evil to invade Poland, after all. I’d say that a Nate Wildermuth is much closer to Jesus’ worldview than one of the Catholic liaisons for the Bush administration who tried to put a Catholic mantle on their political agenda. He does things for people, which is far more important than reciting dogmas, that doesn’t benefit anybody.
In fact, when I was still “Catholic” I wasn’t all that Christian. Jesus bothered me, he was kind of in the way of the proud history of Christendom and what not. This “Catholicism” simply bolstered my hardass political views (not guilty by reason of mental defect) As a freelancer with a penchant for Buddhism, I like him, or my view of him, since there is no way to be accurate, a lot more.
Not that it’s a requirement to be a nonbeliever to like Jesus :D However, the “ground crew” certainly gives love a bad name (bad name). Any supernatural claims simply do not interest me – those are indeterminate questions according to the Buddha which cannot be answered in dualistic fashion and only destract from kicking one’s own ass by waiting for the miracle to come. I am only interested in the man, as I am in many women and men.
“Whoever would save his life, will lose it” is downright Zen. Grasping causes suffering.
It is possible for civilians to accidentally be killed – that is, for whomever is carrying out the specific attack to have the reasonable expectation that in this particular attack no civilians will be killed. In some such attacks civilians will be killed by accident, even though every precaution was taken and the bomber and his chain of command truly believed that no civilians were present. That kind of bombing may be morally licit, assuming the bombing was proportionate, etc. What is more, it can be licit to embark on a just war even knowing that these kinds of accidents will occur.
What is not ever acceptable is to deliberately kill civilians in an attack and then claim that their deaths were licit ‘collateral damage’. Dropping a bomb in the midst of a mixed crowd of civilians and terrorists is this latter kind of act: an act of deliberate murder. Simply wishing that the civilians were not there, so that we could kill the terrorists without killing the civilians, does not excuse killing the civilians.
Of course neither the dogmatic pacifists nor the more hawkish among us tend to like this result. Hawks don’t like it because it implies (for example) that human shields cannot be simply ignored, their deaths passed off as the other guy’s fault even though we are the ones who killed them. Pacifists don’t like it because it implies that there are circumstances in which violence is virtuous.
It is too bad that idealogues dominate the discussion.
I appreciate all the engaging responses and thoughts! I want to engage back, but my wife may kill me if I spend as much time as I want to. As Christopher pointed out, my position on this subject is . . . to put it politely, nuanced . . . to put it bluntly – incomplete and growing, if not mildly confused. What else can I claim in the face of the mystery of evil and war?
God bless!
“Funny, the Western European affinity for “peace” after World War II was bought and paid for by American military power and presence on European soil.”
Obviously, it was good to have the Nazis out. Whether Vienna needed to be carpet bombed, destroying half the buildings, most of which residential areas, mind you, well that’s another story.
Western Europeans have, by and large, a peaceful mindset. A big segment of Americans does not. It was a stroke of genius to end the draft. As evidenced by war after war. Korea, Vietnam, the 2 Iraq wars had nothing to do with “defending” America’s “freedom”.
Initial occupation was certainly a good thing to stabilize things, but still having military bases now seems more like imperialism than protection. Well, and the horribly injured c/o Bush don’t have to fly as long.
American politicians tend to think everything around their globe is their business. Paranoia that everyone is after “our freedom” and hates us because of it is the paradigm of, at least, Republican foreign politics. Thus the ubiquity of American military, advisers, special ops, what have you. That this is going to make you unpopular is not surprising. It attracts attention from some very dangerous people, which one then has to fight, upon which more get motivated, which one then has to fight, too. Perpetual war for peace.
Granted, there are many lethal maniacs around the world, Bush isn’t the only one.
7 years in Afghanistan, almost 6 in Iraq. Why not open an official terrorist recruitment office. Still fighting the Taliban, still no Osama. I read that Obama may send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. I do seem to remember something about the Soviet Union faring badly there. I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama got extra trigger happy,
You can’t wage war after war without paying for it, having endless numbers of your soldiers killed and maimed, not to mention an exponentially higher number of “the other side”.
All the money that could get commie things like healthcare, college without student loans is used to get the war machine going; and you become the favorite target of murderous lunatics. Granted, they’d murder anyone but this is like shouting “Me ! Me !”
Endless occupations perpetuate the problem. Unless you’re willing to nuke the various places, it will never end. The son of the dead father will be the next one to fight. It’s one thing to take out terrorist camps, another to think you can change a whole country. “Here’s a civics book, you $%!!#, there’ll be a test next Thursday” (Lewis Black). Well-intentioned people are the most dangerous. No pile of corpses is big enough to sway them.
My sister-in-law is marrying Colby Buzzell, who was a well-known “milblogger” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colby_Buzzell) and wrote a book (My War: Killing Time in Iraq) that won awards and high praise from people like Kurt Vonnegut. His Esquire article can be found here http://www.esquire.com/features/army-recall-0908
I recommend reading it.
“my wife may kill me if I spend as much time as I want to.”
So she doesn’t believe in nonviolence then
:-P
“What is not ever acceptable is to deliberately kill civilians in an attack and then claim that their deaths were licit ‘collateral damage’. Dropping a bomb in the midst of a mixed crowd of civilians and terrorists is this latter kind of act: an act of deliberate murder.”
Of course, no one will admit to that. Tens of thousands dead speak a pretty clear language though.
In general, the difference between terrorism and “collateral damage” inflicted by military is the difference between murder one and negligent homicide. Not to mention that it’s lip service anyway.
I wouldn’t really give a damn whether my family was killed intentionally or as the “broken eggs” of Bush’s omelet. Dead is dead.
In any case, I wanted to add that there is a reason why this country is the favorite target of large-scale-murderers and not Canada. I guess that’s why they actually have money for useful things.
Nate wrote:
I appreciate all the engaging responses and thoughts! I want to engage back, but my wife may kill me if I spend as much time as I want to.
:) Now, *that* sounds familiar! Been there…
God bless!
You, too! (Y’know, you may have a good idea, here… going back to real life, for a while!)
Bill wrote:
Paladin or Nate…..I can’t tell which of you held that slavery in the OT was not chattel, but I would urge you to read Leviticus 25:
44
“Slaves, male and female, you may indeed possess, provided you buy them from among the neighboring nations.
45
You may also buy them from among the aliens who reside with you and from their children who are born and reared in your land. Such slaves you may own as chattels,
46
and leave to your sons as their hereditary property, making them perpetual slaves. But you shall not lord it harshly over any of the Israelites, your kinsmen.”
I’m not sure what translation you’re using, but here’s the translation I have:
=== quote from Douay-Rheims ===
44 Let your bondmen, and your bondwomen, be of the nations that are round about you. 45 And of the strangers that sojourn among you, or that were born of them in your land, these you shall have for servants: 46 And by right of inheritance shall leave them to your posterity, and shall possess them for ever. But oppress not your brethren the children of Israel by might.
=== end quote ===
Someone was playing a bit “fast and loose” with your translation, it seems; “bondsmen/bondswomen” described indentured servants (forgive the anachronistic term), not chattel.
Hence it is a contextual evil not intrinsic evil varying with the primitive level of economies as drunkeness is a contextual evil which the OT warns against yet permits under great duress in Proverbs 31:6 (”give strong drink to him who is perishing wine to him who is on the edge of the abyss, that he may forget…”)…..
The use of alcohol–even to the point of influencing your mood–is not intrinsically evil, that’s true, as is clear at the Wedding of Cana (cf. John 2:10).
but slavery is not an intrinsic evil as John Paul averred in the 80th section of Splendor of the Truth….otherwise God was urging an intrinisic evil on His people in Leviticus 25.
There’s slavery, and there’s slavery. St. Louis de Montfort’s “slavery to Jesus through Mary”, for example, is certainly not evil–it’s praiseworthy–but that’s not at all the same thing as holding humans as chattel (which is always immoral); see my earlier post, for the distinction between “indentured service” (i.e. “Hebrew version” of slavery) and “chattel” (i.e. “Aftican-Americans in 18th century USA” version of slavery); they’re quite different, and Leviticus 25 describes the former, as Exodus 21:26 (etc.) makes clear.
He permitted them divorce but that was not an intrinsic evil for the non baptized though it was still an evil of some type to God even then…..Malachi 2:16 “I hate divorce says the Lord God of Israel..”
Yes… but that was a case where the principle of double-effect came into play (see earlier post); the unintended evil effect (of divorce) was tolerated in order to prevent a greater evil (e.g. husbands killing their wives, in order to be “free to marry again”). Matthew 19:8, etc., obviously wasn’t referring to mere petulance and sulking, on the part of the husbands, nor would it have made any sense for God to see them divorcing anyway, and say, “Oh, well… better make it legal!”
Gerald, forgive me, but I don’t see much point in trying to reply to you anymore. If you were to stick to logic, perhaps… but there’s only so much fambuoyant, vituperous rhetoric I can stomach, before the “effort to benefit” ratio becomes too poor to make it worthwhile. I’ll certainly pray for you… as I ask you to pray for me.
Someone was playing a bit “fast and loose” with your translation, it seems; “bondsmen/bondswomen” described indentured servants (forgive the anachronistic term), not chattel.
Paladin,
You may be the only one using the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible! Here is the translation of Leviticus from the New American Bible (on the USCCB web site):
Here’s the translation from the Jewish Study Bible (Jewish Publication Society):
Israelites could not subject fellow Israelites to harsh or ruthless treatment. (Another translation I have says “crushing labor.”) The implication seems quite clear. Israelites could own foreigners as property and treat them harshly or ruthlessly.
Dictionary of the Bible by John L. McKenzie, SJ., says “The slave was legally a chattel with no human rights. Male and female slaves were mated, not married, and their children were the property of the owner. Even in Hebrew law the wife and children of the slave remained with the owner after the slave was freed if the wife had been given him by the owner; they shared his freedom only if he had them before enslavement.”
In general, the difference between terrorism and “collateral damage” inflicted by military is the difference between murder one and negligent homicide.
I don’t think that is quite right.
When it comes to driving cars, we know that many people including innocent children will be killed in accidents. That doesn’t mean that people in favor of driving cars for various purposes are in favor of murde. Even though it is indeed possible to use a car in order to kill someone on purpose, most automobile deaths are accidents. This is obvious to most everyone with any kind of reasonably well formed moral sense.
When it comes to war, though, everyone seems to lose his capacity to distinguish between what is on accident and what is on purpose, and between those who are engaged in attacking behaviors and those who are not. Hawks lose the capacity to distinguish between killing a bunch of civilians because they happen to be in the way or intermingled with terrorists; doves lose the capacity to distinguish between knowing that some civilians will die on accident and killing civilians on purpose.
Both sides ‘benefit’ in a sense by keeping the matter muddled. Hawks will claim that individuals who were killed on purpose because they were in the way were morally licit ‘collateral damage’. Doves will claim that actually-accidental but statistically inevitable deaths were murders, or indistinguishable from murder. Hawks feel unrealistically constrained by the requirement not to, you know, murder civilians; doves feel that war can never be a noble pursuit of the defense of the innocent at all.
But we shouldn’t let the hawks and the doves keep things muddled in this way. Keeping things muddled in this way is just suppression of the truth.
Zippy:
Perhaps if you had once lived in a country–as I did, in Sri Lanka–where “terrorism” is a fact of every-day life, you would know that most “terrorism” is initially STATE terrorism, and that what gets labeled as “terrorism” is usually the response of a beleagured minority or conquered or expropriated or otherwise “ethnically cleansed” people who are responding to continuous degredation, harassment and relentless surveillance of their most routing behaviours.
The Palestinian people are not just deprived of their ancestral homeland; they are also subjected to daily humiliation, degradation and shaming by Israeli Defense Forces, as well as “Eratz Israeli” “settlers.” I KNOW this to be true because I have been personally acquainted with American expatriates who went to Israel with an open, if not a pro-Zionist outlook, and who changed after having the experience of BEGGING the IDF to stop harassing students they were educating, and being cursed and told to “get the hell out of Israel” and “mind their own damned business.”
Of course, none of this justifies shooting rockets at Israeli civilians, but the response of the Israeli government–mostly as a pre-election political stunt–is wholly disproportionate to any harm other than psychological that has actually been done to those Israeli civilians. Palestinians are being MASSACRED because of the anxiety that has been caused to people who are settled on land that they’ve actually–according to international law–STOLEN.
Hamas IS a group of ruthless, ideologically-crazed thugs who are willing to use their own people as cannon-fodder and human shields, but the Israeli politicians are COLLUDING with them in their crimes, for political effect.
One of the things that amazes me about American Catholics is how quickly and easily you have forgotten the history of persecution of your own co-religionists, primarily in what is now the United Kingdom. Are you people aware that the British Crown once effectively criminalized ALL of your Anglo-Saxon ancestors because of the conspiracies of a few “terrorists”?–”terrorists” who, in the so-called “Gunpowder Plot,” were responding to government provocation and persecution which was, from a historical perspective, rather analagous to what the Zionists are doing to the Palestinians? Of course, you American Catholics will deny this, and insist that the recusants were being persecuted for religious reasons only, but that would be to wholly ignore the very real fears of the English Protestant regime regarding the “foreign threat” posed by Spanish kings and excommunicating popes.
You will also deny it because you don’t know anything about the lived experiences of the Palestinians, and you believe only American mainstream-media propoganda about “an empty land for a landless people.” You don’t even know about the Israeli government’s persecutions of Christian religious communities in Palestine–about their expropriations of property through the manipulation of mortgage foreclosures or their denial of access by pilgrims, which effectively destroys those religious communities financially. You don’t WANT to know anything about these things, because you CHOOSE to believe your own government’s hateful propoganda about the “villainous Palestinians.”
Above, I meant “most routine behaviours.” It was a typo.
A few comments from one who is late joining this debate:
(1) I cannot possibly see how anybody can regard this as a proportionate response. The ability of Hamas to harm Israeli citizens pales in comparison to what other terrorist organization have been, and are, capable of. Think of the IRA in the 1970s and 1980s. Their reach across the UK was broader and more devastating. And yet, did the British army respond by bombing west Belfast? After all, the IRA were deeplyt embedded among a sympathetic populace, and one could argue that they were using human shields. No, such an action would have been vastly disproportionate, deeply immoral, and highly counterproductive. Which leads me to..
(2) As the Church never fails to stress, there can be no peace without justice. many Americans simply turn a blind eye to the suffering of the Palestinian people. I recently attended a discussion relating to this issue in the context of Catholic support for educational endeavors in Palestine. I remember distinctly when a bishop noted that the young American volunteers always arrive with a pro-Israel bias– because that’s all they hear. And yet without fail, after a few months witnessing the daily indignitities of life as a Palestinian in occupied territory, the stance changes. We must start from this position. It is not capitulation to terrorism, nor is it moral equivalence, to acknowledge legitimate grievance.
(3) Consequentialism is deeply rooted in the American psyche. I think it comes back to the atomic bombings. If Americans condemn Israel’s actions, they are implicitly acknowledging that their own country engaged in a monstrous evil act in 1945. Most Americans will not admit that, based on a theology of being the “good guys”. Read Elizabeth Anscombe here. I think Anscombe also condemned vociferously the bombing of the Belgrano by Thatcher during the Falklands war, which also raised issues of human shields. Bottom line: one cannot drop a bomb on a civilian center and claim that one didn’t really “intend” them to die.
And, by the way, right-wing “America-first” Catholics, your right-wing pontiff seems to agree with Gerald Naus and me—at least according to his spokesman:
“Hamas is a prisoner of a logic of hatred, Israel of a logic of trusting in force as the best response to hatred. They need to keep looking for a different way out, even if it seems impossible,” Father Lombardi said.
The spokesman said Israel’s attack on Gaza was notable for its intensity and the number of victims.
“Certainly it will be a very hard blow for Hamas. At the same time, it’s quite probable that there will be innocent victims, in fact many of them; hatred will increase and the hopes for peace will once again fade,” he said.
http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/
Digby:
I am not discussing the Israel-Palestine conflict, and you haven’t the faintest idea what I think of it, so don’t pretend that you do. I was discussing the collaboration of hawks and doves in muddying the moral theology of murder and war.
Both ideological hawks and ideological doves, in a ‘strange bedfellows’ kind of way, have in interest in muddying the moral theology of murder and war. In short I’m discussing MM’s third point, and that point alone, with which I agree completely – as one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is that violence, carried out against people engaged in attacking behaviors, in defense of the innocent, can be a very noble and even in some cases obligatory act; and it grossly distorts the truth to leave off this fact.
So, Zippy, since you think that “violence, in defense of the innocent, can be a very noble and even in some cases obligatory act,” you’ll have to agree that that “violence” must, in some cases, include “terrorist” violence–as in the instance of the 17th century Gunpowder Plot?
And so this entry, which I’ve just put up in my own livejournal, may interest you:
According to a cherished family tradition, I am descended from “terrorists”—specifically, from one of the “terrorists” who tried to kill James I and VI of England, Scotland and Ireland in the “Gunpowder Treason” of 1605.
Relating to this connection, my favourite history by the renowned British historian Lady Antonia Fraser (who recently lost her husband, Harold Pinter) is The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605. I own two copies of this book—one in my brother’s attic in North Carolina, and another paper-back copy that I found this past week in an English-language bookshop in Berlin. The story of the Gunpowder Plot also interests me on account of its seeming echo in the “equivocation speech” of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (which, as a recently-converted Oxfordian, I don’t believe is actually an echo at all—but that’s for another, future entry).
In her “Author’s Note” at the beginning of her account of this, for English Catholics, most dolorous chapter of British history, the author states, as follows:
By accepting that there was a Plot, I have accepted that the conspirators were what we would now term terrorists. Certainly, the questionable moral basis for terrorism–can violence ever be justified whatever the persecution, whatever the provocation?—is a theme which runs through my narrative. And there is an additional problem: is terrorism justified only when it is successful? These are awkward questions, but for that reason, if for no other, worth the asking.
In the course of her narrative, Lady Fraser makes clear that the Jesuit confessors of the plotters told them, over and over again, that what they were contemplating doing was unwarranted, unjustified by circumstances. However, they did not turn them in to the Jacobean, Protestant “secret police”—and paid with their lives for not having done so. That they did not, however, is regrettable for other reasons: the spies of Robert Cecil (son of the Elizabethan scoundrel who helped Elizabeth Tudor to judicially murder her rightful successor, Mary Stuart) were HOPEFUL THAT THEY WOULD NOT; the entire plot had been infiltrated and, by the time of the arrests of the plotters, had become a “government projection” for the furtherance of Cecil’s own anti-Catholic political designs; in other words, Cecil’s government had become, through their counter-espionage efforts, a PROMOTER of the conspiracy. The stir created by the mopping-up action enabled the government forces to demonize the mostly-loyal Catholic population of Great Britain FOR OVER TWO CENTURIES, to steal their land (sound familiar, Palestinian-supporters?) and to disenfranchise them of their voice in Parliament.
Despite her clarity regarding the disastrous results of the conspiracy and its ill-advisedness, as well as the conspirators’ stubborn foolishness in rejecting their confessors’ counsel, it is obvious by the tone of her narrative that the Catholic Lady Fraser sympathizes with her plotters. Her dedication to this tome reads like this: ” FOR Edward who would have defended them, Lucy who would have hidden them, [and] Paloma who would have succoured them in exile.
Like Lady Fraser’s dedicatees, I would have “defended them…hidden them…[and] succoured them.” However, I would NOT have joined them or supported their actions, once they were apprehended, and for, perhaps, exactly the same reasons that I cannot support Hamas in its so-called “struggle” against the Zionist occupiers of the Palestinians’ land.
I can only support “terrorism” when both of two conditions have been met: first, the “terrorists” must be acting in DEFENSE of a whole persecuted people, or of their just cause; secondly, it must be conceivable that there should be an outcome of the so-called “terrorist” action that would bring success to the aggrieved people’s cause or a relief of their suffering. The American Revolution, for example, met both of those conditions, and was, definitely, from the standpoint of the average British soldier, trained to fight according to European military manuals, a distinctly “terrorist” conflict.
There is no way that Hamas can win their cause, militarily, against Israeli military might. So why are they encouraging their people to persist in an armed struggle that is tactically futile? My contention is that they are doing it to bolster their own standing and credibility among a populace that is too ill-educated and unsophisticated to understand that what they want may only be won at the negotiating table by diplomats who have sufficient acumen to recognise the only thing that Israel is afraid of: American public opinion, and who have sufficient political skill to know how to turn that opinion to favour the Palestinians. In other words, political leaders who understand that, for the Palestinian people, the “soft war” MUST be considered more crucial than the futile “hard war” they have foolishly and vaingloriously pitched themselves into.
Meanwhile, by supporting Hamas so vociferously, the Palestinians and their Western supporters are prolonging the sufferings of those of the Palestinians who are the least hate-filled (the “hate-filled” derive most of the sustenance for their existence from the demonic elements that stir this conflict), and, worse—from their point of view—they are helping to elect, in Israel, the most racist and expansionist faction of Zionist politicians. That cabal of politicians is, as a matter of fact, the group who are sponsoring this latest blood-bath of the Palestinians, in order to create the atmosphere of terror that most benefits their electoral prospects.
It is a situation, then, that seems to me to be almost perfectly analogous to what British Catholics had to confront at the beginning of the 17th century: by resorting to mindless, purposeless violence, the leaders of the Hamas movement are helping the cruelest of Zionist warmongers and land-grabbers to demonize the masses of innocent Palestinians and to make permanent their campaign for what is illegal under international law, the so-called “Eretz Israel.”
As the patient priests of the disastrous Gunpowder Plot would have advised their heedless, impatient—and, ultimately, uncharitable—devotees (devotees who were, ultimately, most “uncharitable” to their own people): the ways of the Lord are wiser—and, ultimately, shrewder—than the ways of the Iagos of this world, the politicians’ “liberal counselor,” as Shakespeare calls him.
Ample evidence that a number of Zionist politicians already know that what they are doing is wrong, and—from the standpoint of international public opinion—risky:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22112
digbydlbein and Mornion’s Minion,
I wanted to make sure both of you are aware of the new Hopkins’ biography that came out this past October, by Paul Mariani:
http://www.amazon.com/Gerard-Manley-Hopkins-Paul-Mariani/dp/0670020311/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230741436&sr=8-1
There may finally be a perpetuum mobile.
…to watch someone who actually knows something about these matters put a jerk from the “main-stream media” in his place:
Zbigniew Brzezinski on the Gaza conflict:
Dec. 30: ‘Morning Joe’ host Joe Scarborough discusses the escalating conflict in the Mideast with former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/28433263#28433263
And thankyou, Mark, for the tip about the new Hopkins biography.
Digby:
I’m not discussing, or especially interested in, all that stuff. I was making a particular point: that hawks and doves make strange-bedfellows common cause in distorting and obscuring the moral theology of just war, just use of violence, and murder. Hawks dismiss as licit collateral damage many acts of deliberate murder. Doves dismiss as murder many legitimate and even noble acts of violence in defense of the innocent. Both are motivated ideologically to keep the truth about the moral theology of violence obscure.
I don’t have a position on the moral liciety of the Gunpowder Plot. I would have to understand it in much greater detail than I do in order to render an even slightly informed judgment, and I have no particular reason or motivation to do the necessary work. It would not surprise me in the slightest to conclude either way: that it was just, or that it was unjust (setting aside the particular evaluation of the many particular acts which we refer to in general as “the Gunpowder Plot”).
Happy Bush-free New Year, everyone. Of course, Obama’s planning to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. New Year’s Concert from Vienna tomorrow evening on PBS.
Does anyone in the USA cast lead ? You heat it and then throw it into cold water, then try to figure out what the shape is – kind of like Rohrschach. It’s a New Year’s Eve (called Sylvester in Austria) tradition, as are good luck pigs and chimneysweeps. Anyone got any other traditions ? (Maybe as a New Year’s thread ?)
With Beethoven, all is good. I havea huge audio system in my studio, blasting Beethoven symphonies lived by the Vienna Philharmonic and Simon Rattle :D
As we say in Austria, Prosit Neujahr :D
Read through this lively debate, and there’s only one lingering question:
What in the wild world of work do you all do that allows you this kind of time?
Blessings in the New year –
BS
Proportionality includes not only the methods used but also the consequences of those methods. While I acknowledge the right to self-defense and the use of force in that defense, I question whether it is really possible to ensure that the force used doesn’t produce evils graver than the evil to be eliminated. The structure of the world today, marked by its interconnectedness and interdependency, opens the whole world to the consequences of a local act of violence, and therefore renders the knowledge that one is using proportional violence difficult if not impossible to acquire.
Exactly, “Postmodern Papist”!
Complicating all this is that it is probable that all leaders of Hamas at the very top within Gaza want their own civilians to experience martyrdom which the civilians qualify for under the concept of falling buildings (see below Sunni hadith). Indeed the leader who was killed yesterday along with his family, urged civilians to stay in their houses and not flee to the outside.
Hamas is Sunni and they consider Bukhari hadiths canonical and an extension as it were of the Koran. Here is Bukhari on martyrdom:
Bukhari Volume 4, Book 52, Number 82
Narrated Abu Huraira
Allah’s Apostle said, “…. are regarded as martyrs: they are those who die because of plague, abdominal disease, drowning or a falling building…..the martyrs in Allah’s cause.”
The passage may well be unknown to the street muslim Palestinian but it explains why their prime leader would specify that they stay in their houses. Shooting 70 rockets on last Wednesday was done partly so that their own civilians would be killed since it gives them manipulative leverage at the UN and in Europe while in their religion’s terms, it sends the civilians to paradise as martyrs. Within their belief system, it is a win win…..no one gets really hurt even if it is their own children whom they see as entering heaven for having been in a falling building after a bombing.
Paladin,
The various translations of a word…”chattel” or “bondsman”….. do not matter all that much when the passage also notes that one may pass the slave down in a will: that makes him property and not a person if I read John Paul II’s heart correctly. Catholic web sites often merely repeat the history of slavery given by two 19th century Popes who left out quite a bit including the Third Lateran which gave slavery as a reward to those who would capture pirates. Slavery within Catholicism was denounced by a handful of Popes as to “new native slaves” or of the “baptized” in the Canary Island case and later of all slaves. But two Popes who preceded most of them made their job very difficult…..Pope Nicholas V and Pope Alexander VI (whose son, Caesare Borgia became cardinal and murderer).
Nicholas V and Alexander VI who at the inception of imperialism in the mid 15th century divided the world between Spain and Portugal and gave the right of pre emptive war and despoiling and slavery to the two countries while stating that their permissions could not be voided:
Pope Nicholas V giving Portugal the right to enslave in perpetuity in Romanex Pontifex 1452 ( you can click on on the frontispiece of this
web site and then go to the middle of the 4th paragraph)
if such new natives resisted the Faith…..(permissions repeated for the Spanish by Pope Alexander VI) and therefore the Spanish conqueror Pizzaro executed the Inca prince who would not believe and Pizarro removed the silver of those people to Spain where it would be safer after using forced labor when hired labor ran out through accidental deaths.
Pope Paul III in 1537 tried to undo the work of these two Popes (see his text)
but both canon law and the primary theologians of every century made his task hard in that they allowed for 4 just titles to slavery….one being captured in a just war or born to a slave mother (this latter title is mentioned with approbation by Aquinas in the supplement to the ST in the section on marriage of a slave
where he gives the canons or decretal cites to support it….on the web also).
Portugal which was last out of the slave trade of all European nations could always tell itself that the slaves it purchased in Africa were the result of inter African just wars and then the children of such women would be slaves under Aquinas’ and the canon’s insight that the children of such women were slaves. That is why that despite 8 or so Popes writing against slavery….none of them would explicitly revoke the decretals or go against the prime theologians on the issues of just titled slavery which was all over the Catholic world and which Bishop England was still writing in favor of in Catholic Miscelany in the 19th century in the US. Religious orders in the 19th century still had slaves as did Bishops and in one awful case documented by John T Noonan, a religious order near the end of the 18th century sold a mother away from its one child while letting her keep one and others involved in the transaction who were Catholic also, saw nothing unusual in the event.
Bill’s thoughts show more of why the military intervention as Israel has executed it has been gravely ill-conceived.
It should have been foressen that such resultant evil would gravely outweigh all the beneficience calculated/anticipated in such action.
Thank you.
Kyle,
Thanks for the intelligent comment on the point. I think you may be moving the goal posts a bit though. The fact that unintended and unexpected consequences abound, amplified by our technological potency, is surely true; but that doesn’t make it impossible to be reasonably sure that an act is or is not in fact proportionate in a great many cases.
Indeed, if I may be so bold, I suspect that there is a peculiarly modern heresy in the offing which holds that judgments of proportionality can no longer obtain because of the particulars of modern circumstances (high speed global communications, atomic bombs, etc). We should resist this conclusion — indeed, I would say that it would be not only false but also very imprudent to adopt this conclusion, despite its obvious appeal.
On the one hand I think it is true that modern technological capabilities (including both power and knowledge enabled by technology) makes the temptation to act disproportionately very strong. In an environment where the temptation to act disproportionately is very strong, it becomes concomitantly tempting to conclude that acting proportionately is impossible and that therefore the virtuous will choose not to act. I think though that that conclusion merely compounds the error, since it implies that we are released from the obligation to make a concrete judgment (when we ourselves are actually personally faced with a choice) and be responsible for that concrete judgment. Sometimes, in this fallen world, violence is the right and prudent and noble and virtuous answer.
On the matter of slavery and Catholic doctrine, I am often reminded of the way some Catholics have attempted to invoke historical juridical practices as a way of claiming that torture cannot possibly be intrinsically evil, no matter what later Popes have said about the matter. Kevin Miller’s response to this is classic:
Considering that much of Harrison’s conclusion [that torture may be licit in some circumstances] is logically dependant – not only on his history – but also on the assertion that it’s something like ecclesiologically impossible for the Church to have approved of something that turns out to be intrinsically evil (in effect, then, that when the Church, in what would otherwise be a non-infallible act, approves of action X, then this amounts to an infallible teaching that X is not intrinsically evil) – I’m not sure why a detailed response is necessary. “What is gratuitously asserted may be gratuitously denied.”
Folks who pursue the line that “the Church once approved of slavery” as if it had any pertinence (whatever the polemical goals of the commenter) are exhibiting ignorance of basic ecclesiology and development of doctrine. Hasn’t anybody read Newman?
Zippy,
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the conditions of modern society are qualitatively different than the conditions that have always expanded the consequences of war, but I do think that the modern global structures of the world today, global markets for example, expand the damage that war causes to such a degree that we cannot really know, in many cases, what the ramifications of a war will be. The War in Iraq, for example, has affected not only Iraqis and Americans, and not only those in the Middle East, such as the Iranians, but people in countries the world over that have economic relations with Iraq and with us and with all those effected by the war. I don’t see how one can have an accurate sense of what the full consequences of a war will be. A given war might still be just, but I’m not sure we can know it is just.
Zippy
That the Church’s canon law and its primary theologians and some, not all, Popes for centuries supported certain just titles for slavery is relevant to showing that the ordinary magisterium is mutable….the extraordinary magisterium is not mutable.
That the act of slavery including leaving a slave in one’s will is supported by God in Leviticus 25 is relevant to showing that some things are not intrinsically evil though they are awful necessities when very viable economies with alternatives to slavery are absent.
No one argued that the extraordinary magisterium can err in morals…..but the ordinary magisterium can err in morals. The ordinary magisterium can contain positions that will one day be stated to be infallible and the ordinary magisterium can contain moral errors as in the case of Pope Leo X in Exsurge Domine wherein he condemns Luther’s saying that burning at the stake is against the Holy Spirit:
33. That heretics be burned is against the will of the Spirit….
then below he writes:
“Therefore we, in this above enumeration, important as it is, wish to proceed with great care as is proper, and to cut off the advance of this plague and cancerous disease so it will not spread any further in the Lord’s field as harmful thorn-bushes. We have therefore held a careful inquiry, scrutiny, discussion, strict examination, and mature deliberation with each of the brothers, the eminent cardinals of the holy Roman Church, as well as the priors and ministers general of the religious orders, besides many other professors and masters skilled in sacred theology and in civil and canon law. We have found that these errors or theses are not Catholic, as mentioned above, and are not to be taught, as such; but rather are against the doctrine and tradition of the Catholic Church”
As it turns out, John Paul II in section 80 of splendor of the Truth agreed with Luther in that burning at the stake is torture which John Paul condemns as intrinsically evil while Leo X protected it in the severest of wording which made many think that Exsurge Domine was infallible and was the extraordinary magisterium but it never was in the first place.
The extraordinary magisterium cannot change or err….the OM can do both…..
but there are less things within the former than many catholics think.
Imagine that if you lived at the time of Exsurge Domine in 1520 and wanted to convert to catholicism but you told the parish involved that burning at the stake was wrong and you would always hold to that…..then your conversion would have probably been blocked in light of Exsurge Domine…..yet now in 2009, your conversion might
be blocked if you agreed with Leo X.
Bill: If all you are saying is “development of doctrine legitimately happens”, then we are in agreement.
Hi, David!
Sorry for the delay–I’m out visiting my wife’s mother, and I have spotty internet access!
You wrote:
You may be the only one using the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible! Here is the translation of Leviticus from the New American Bible (on the USCCB web site):
“Slaves, male and female, you may indeed possess, provided you buy them from among the neighboring nations. You may also buy them from among the aliens who reside with you and from their children who are born and reared in your land. Such slaves you may own as chattels, and leave to your sons as their hereditary property, making them perpetual slaves. But you shall not lord it harshly over any of the Israelites, your kinsmen.
Well… with all due respect to the USCCB (which–again, with all due respect–is a lumbering bureaucracy with many doctrinal and disciplinary problems of its own, which have brought it into repeated conflict with the Vatican), the New American Bible has some rather serious problems (see Luke 1:28, in St, Gabriel’s greeting to the Blessed Virgin Mary: “Hail, favored one!”, instead of “Hail, Full of Grace!”, which waters down [if not undercuts] a main evidence for the Blessed Virgin’s Immaculate Conception; too many other errors to mention, here–e-mail me, if you’re interested). Ditto with the TaNaKh (of which I have a copy) that you mentioned, which has diverged markedly from Orthodox Jewish theology into what Orthodox Jews could fairly call “La-La Land”.
Take a look at St. Jerome’s (Latin) Vulgate, which is the “Typical” (i.e. standard) Bible of the Catholic Church, of which the Douay-Rheims is a direct translation:
=== quote Lev 25:44-46 ===
25:44 servus et ancilla sint vobis de nationibus quae in
circuitu vestro sunt
25:45 et de advenis qui peregrinantur apud vos vel qui ex his
nati fuerint in terra vestra hos habebitis famulos
25:46 et hereditario iure transmittetis ad posteros ac
possidebitis in aeternum fratres autem vestros filios
Israel ne opprimatis per potentiam
=== end quote ===
The first line reads, roughly:
[Male servant] [and] [maidservant] [let them be] [to you (plural)] [from] [nations] [who] [in] [circle/surround] [you (plural)] [are].
…or, in slightly less “stilted” language:
“Let your male servant and female servant be [gained for you] from the nations which surround you.”
No mention of the words for “buy”, “purchase”, or anything of the sort, in the first line or any of the others. That’s one of the many reasons why I say the NAB is “fast and loose” in this case, and many others (though, to be fair, it’s far from the only translation which is).
To anticipate the objection that “the NAB [etc.] is from the original Greek, so it’s more accurate, with one less layer of translation error”, I reply: St. Jerome (and assistants) was fluent in Latin and Greek, was familiar with Ancient Hebrew, availed himself of numerous Jewish scholars of the time, was at least 1600 years closer to the source documents than were the (doubtlessly well-intentioned and highly-trained) writers of the NAB, and was more familiar with the culture and idioms of the era (and less likely to commit idiom-related translation blunders–not only for his skill and proximity to source documents, but because his immediate audience was also more-or-less familiar with such idioms… and could have been expected to complain if they spotted significant errors). The most brilliant 20th century linguistic scholar in the world can’t be expected to have the advantages that St. Jerome enjoyed; the passing of 1.5+ millenia has increased the necessary amount of “guesswork” a hundredfold, or more. At very least, the disadvantages of the “extra layer of translation” are counterbalanced by the aforementioned advantages… and since the Vulgate is the “Editio Typica” of the Church’s Scripture, I’ll stick with that, and with translations which harmonize with it.
(As an added exercise: check out the Douay-Rheims’ version of the Book of Tobit, and then compare it with the NAB; not only does it read more like Greek mythology (i.e. burning the fish innards was exclusively what chased away the demon, while the D-R version emphasizes the importance of Tobias’ avoidance of lust with Sara, and continence with her for 3 days, that allowed the demon not to have deadly power over him), but entire *paragraphs* have been excised–paragraphs which are one of the strongest OT teachings of the “Theology of the Body” that I’ve ever seen! (cf. Tobias 6:16-22, which is almost completely gone from the NAB)
Re: the dictionary by Fr. McKenzie, I’ll limit myself to saying that his work suffers from many of the same deficiencies found in the NAB, in addition to an extra dose of professional opinion.
As a final note: I think, at least for the time being, that I’m going to take some time off from posting to (and reading) Vox Nova; there are some good people here (and I was happy to help defend them, when I could), but there’s also so very much sourness, disdain for (and oft-self-serving “nuanced interpretation” of) Church teaching and authority, and even outright hatred and emotional poison here, that I really need a break. My soul would get really sick, if I had a steady diet of this.
If you’d like to continue the chat at my (rather new and meager) blog, or over e-mail, feel free!
Zippy
Yes….with the caveat that recentness does not of itself prove development. In 1252 Ad Extirpandum by Pope Innocent IV bringing back torture after Pope Nicholas I had condemned it in 866…..that was a regression rather than a development even though Pope Innocent IV was modern at his time and Nicholas was ancient relatively.
Romanus Pontifex in 1452 by Nicholas V allowing plunder and perpetual slavery of native groups who refused conversion was the mother of all regressions.
Developments can be aided by the outside world which was against all slavery (Quakers) while our moral theology books still supported the 4 just titles. Calvin had our eventual answer to the usury mystery in 1545 in a letter to a friend. We agreed with him starting in 1830.
Do you not know the tactics of Islamic terror? Or did you never see the shooters fire from within a crowd of protesters to incite soldiers to shoot back? Have you not seen IED emplacement teams operate surrounded by children? Do you think that mortars and rockets aren’t being launched from UN run schools, hospitals, and houses occupied by civilians on purpose?
Or maybe you just think Israel should stand by and do nothing as rockets land in its territory during a ‘ceasefire’. Hamas is a terrorist group who needs to be removed from power. Its obvious the Palestinian Authority has lost all control of Gaza, and someone has to do the job. The UN presently is useless in this regard, much as they were in 2006 with Lebanon (when they allowed Hezbollah to set up rockets near UN manned OPs along a “DMZ”…).
I do believe that Israel does need to be prepared to take more casualties to preserve civilian life, especially in regard to the use of human shields by Hamas. However, they are legally (even if they aren’t morally) protected by the Geneva Conventions to defend themselves from attack when fired upon from normally protected structures.