I really don’t understand what you are saying. Neither do I think you can say you are in line with Church teaching on the DP, but then reject the conditions the Church gives for the DP to be moral.
“There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty” (Cardinal Ratzinger, 2004)
You are misunderstanding my posts. I agree that the practical application of the Church’s explicit conditions is a matter of prudence and up to individuals to determine. What is not up for discussion are the conditions under which it is acceptable. In other words, you can argue all you want that the death penalty is currently necessary for the protection of the lives of other people. Thats totally fine. What is not ok is to claim that it is moral to use the death penalty when there are other practical ways to protect the lives of others. The universal teaching on morals is not up for debate, rather, its practical application is.
There is serious debate about the nature of the teaching in 2267 and whether it is a new doctrine or a prudential judgment. If it is doctrine then we are obliged to assent to it but if it is prudential we are not.**
Ah I see now where you’re at. You disagree that the CCC is actually stating correct Church teaching.
In that case I don’t think we have anywhere else to go from here. You can believe what you want of course.
Again, the debate is with respect to the application of the death penalty, not the conditions which would make it moral.
Yep.
xt3.com/library/view.php?id=8303
I disagree with this.
This is not my position.
2267 makes the assertion that the Traditional teaching of the church included the caveat that capital punishment was acceptable only when it was necessary to protect society. This claim is incorrect; the church has never had such a restriction.The most reasonable conclusion to draw from this discussion is that, once again, the Catechism is simply wrong from an historical point of view. Traditional Catholic teaching did not contain the restriction enunciated by Pope John Paul II. (Kevin L. Flannery SJ, Prof. Pontifical Gregorian Univ, Rome)
I agree here. It feels as though the core issue is a misunderstanding of the nature of capital punishment. It has been part of the US penal system for so long that its lost definition and fused with the divine nature of ‘punishment’ making them seem one and the same principle. Just my thoughts about the problem.
I don’t reject what the church teaches, or more accurately what she has always believed. Aquinas was absolutely clear on this point:Objection 3: Therefore it seems that the punishment of death should not be inflicted for a sin.
The catechism does not contradict the previous 2000 years of church teaching only because it is not a new doctrine, it is a prudential judgment about what is believed to be in the best interest of modern societies; it is not a moral judgment about the nature of capital punishment.
While St Thomas’ writings are far superior to those of almost any other person they are still not official Church teaching. The CCC, on the other hand, is.
New doctrines (ie the making explicit of things implicitly held in the Catholic faith) are not contradictory to past Church teachings, but complimentary to them. This is how the Marian Dogmas developed, for example. Just because something has never been made explicit in the past does not mean it is contradictory to Church teaching.
Ok, so you do reject the CCC as a source of official Church teaching. I think I’m going to have to agree with Deb on this one, if that is truly the case then there is not much point in discussing this with you. The CCC is the current official source of Catholic teachings. If you reject its teachings you reject the Church’s teachings. Thats all there is to it.
I don’t really know what else to say to someone who believes the CCC is stating incorrect Church teaching lol. Agree to disagree I guess.
More accurately, what has been lost is an understanding of the nature of punishment.The purposes of criminal punishment are rather unanimously delineated in the Catholic tradition. Punishment is held to have a variety of ends that may conveniently be reduced to the following four: rehabilitation, defense against the criminal, deterrence, and retribution. (Cardinal Dulles)
Capital punishment is in fact part of the divine nature of punishment and the church recognized that connection more than a millennium before the New World was even discovered.He who carries out this vengeance is God’s minister (Rm 13:1-4). Why should we condemn a practice that all hold to be permitted by God? We uphold, therefore, what has been observed until now, in order not to alter the discipline and so that we may not appear to act contrary to God’s authority. (Pope St. Innocent I, 405)
So is the Catechism of Trent and what it says is also different than what the new catechism contains. So was the 1992 version of the new catechism as well as the catechisms of Pius X, the Baltimore Catechism, and the catechism of St. Robert Bellarmine. You’ve already dismissed Aquinas so there is no sense in mentioning his catechism. All of them, however, were in fact teachings officially recognized by the church and not a one of them contained the restriction mentioned in the 1997 version.
The problem is that it was not claimed that this caveat is a new teaching but that it was contained in the Traditional teaching. As yet no one has shown exactly where this teaching is to be found … although there are plenty of examples of where it is not found.
This is disingenuous. It should be quite clear that the only objection I have raised is to section 2267, nor am I alone in making that objection.*Catholic teaching on capital punishment is in a state of dangerous ambiguity. The discussion of the death penalty in the Catechism of the Catholic Church is so difficult to interpret that conscientious members of the faithful scarcely know what their Church obliges them to believe. Although the constant teaching of the Church has been that the state has a right to impose the death penalty, the Catechism declares that the actual circumstances in which capital punishment is legitimate are “practically nonexistent.” Moreover, the Catechism weaves doctrine so tightly together with prudential and factual judgments that it is not at all clear how much of its discourse on capital punishment actually is being put forward as binding Catholic teaching. *(R. Michael Dunnigan, JD JCL (canon lawyer))
I am aware of these other catechisms and that they are just as official as the CCC. However the fact that this restriction is not mentioned in the older catechisms does not make it false or any less an official Church teaching.
A statement of a universal condition for the morality of an action is not a prudential judgement. So we can be sure that the claim for this universal condition is neither a matter of prudence or a historical fact, it is instead very clearly a universal official Church teaching. Yes, this teaching is mixed in with matters of prudential and historical fact, but it is pretty clear, once you take it by itself, that it is neither. I am not going to debate this further with you. This is the teaching of the Church. The application can be questioned, but not the universal claim itself.
What I have most difficulty overcoming is that the holy sources you are using are men completely at one with the magisterium during their lifetime, but, here you use them to argue against the magisterium in your own lifetime. I’m all for employing honest reasoning in faith, but fall short of dismissing the Papal guidance in my lifetime as some Joe’s opinion to be taken or left. It goes against the grain for me. I feel concerned that it’s part of the movement to render Vatican II a schism??
The fact that the restriction is not mentioned in any previous church catechism is the evidence needed to support my assertion that the claim made in 2267 is inaccurate.
Says you. Cardinal Dulles, who was arguably the leading US theologian of the 20th century, says otherwise.
Given that the “facts” are debatable and its prudential nature is not it is difficult to see how the teaching is more than the sum of its parts.
From your perspective the best that can be said of Cardinal Ratzinger’s comment is that it is ambiguous on this point
Lol I don’t know if you realize this, but what you posted is exactly what has already been posted here numerous times to you and others - the CCC.Here’s what Catholic Answers says about the death penalty:
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=86823
I hope this settles any more questions about it because it does for me.
I appreciate your acknowledgment that what was taught in the past is different than what is taught now and I reconcile those differences the way that Cardinal Dulles did. If 2267 is a prudential judgment then it does not conflict with Traditional teaching since that teaching has always accepted practical reasons for not applying capital punishment.
I am not being dismissive of it when I disagree with it although I am quite critical of the arguments being made on its behalf.
That is no part of my intention. I base all of my arguments on what the church has said on this topic throughout her entire history. I have raised no concern whatever about Vatican II.
Yep.