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Rau
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Yet you know that CP is not the only just punishment for murder, nor is it mandatory.
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adrift
Guest
A person can grow their hair long or a man can grow a beard that changes them but they are still the same person. A moral teaching cannot change our understanding can improve but that does not mean that the teaching has changed. Not one moral teaching in the history of the Church has changed. The teaching of the death penalty is that it was moral to use. The development of that unchangeable teaching is when.
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Rau
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I think you split hairs or worry over semantics of what is “change”. Evolve or Change? I don’t care about the choice of word. That there is not contradiction or repudiation is what matters. For that is what underpins consistent truth.
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Rau
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Because his post as it stood could mislead by leaving off this important information. Not everyone reads as thoroughly as you!
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Tomdstone
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The moral teaching on torture has changed.
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Ender
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It is surely true that consideration is given to the impact a punishment might have on the community, but it is absolutely not true that the measure of the justness of a punishment is determined by “how it serves the good of the community.” Crimes merit punishment, and it is the severity of the crime - not the good of the community - that determines the severity of the punishment. What the criminal deserves is determined by the nature of his crime, not the needs of his community.
Well, there was this one time back with Noah…
First, that citation is from the article being discussed and says nothing more than the church herself states in 2266. As for whether capital punishment has always been accepted as the proportionate punishment for murder, that is a simple statement of fact. Given that the church has always acknowledged a State’s right to execute criminals it must be true that capital punishment is at least proportionate to the crime of murder since that is the most heinous of all crimes.
Finally, I don’t “seem to suggest” things. Either I say them or I don’t; there is no justification for assuming I meant something I didn’t actually say.
This is a consequentialist view of morality. Justice is not measured by the good it produces, it is a measure of good itself.
I don’t think you understand what is being said here. “Medicinal” does not mean what you seem to think it does.…temporal punishment itself serves as "medicine*"** to the extent that the person allows it to challenge him to undertake his own profound conversion.* (JPII)
*For the punishment which one suffers after the forgiveness of sin is necessary to bring the mind to cleave more firmly to good, – punishments being medicines, – *(Augustine)
The medicinal goal is not tantamount merely to stopping future evildoing, but rather entails manifesting the truth of the divine order of justice both to the criminal and to society at large. This means that mere stopping of further disorder is insufficient to constitute* the full medicinal character of justice**, which purpose alike and primarily entails the manifestation of the truth. Thus this foundational sense of the medicinality of penalty is retained even when others drop away. *(Steven A. Long)
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adrift
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Oh, what was the change? Define the moral teaching and where it was propagated.
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adrift
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I am not splitting hairs but being precise. It makes a difference to the authority of the Church which is both infallible and it indefectible. A change would be that capital punishment cannot ever be used. The development is that it should be rarely used. The problem is that many cannot see the difference and they then misstate what the Church’s teaches as evident by some posters in this thread.
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billcu1
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If you’ve ever been before the police they are very deceitful in their “interviews” I call them interrogatories. They start out with the assumption your guilty and you need to go along. Been there, done that. If you don’t know the game, think you could’ve done something and don’t know “magic words” you’re up the creek. I consider that mental torture. Or manipulation.
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billcu1
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Thanks much for the name of that Bull. I don’t know the weight a Bull carries or even an encyclical. You say the church condemned it. That would have to be the Pontiff. Was it Alexander vi that condemned it? WOW
if he would’ve done such a thing. Society seems to have gotten over that craze but nowadays the church is the only ones I see still keeping it alive. A mean protestants too.Bill
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adrift
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Maleficarum also known as The Hammer of Witches was not written by the Pope but by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger .Thanks much for the name of that Bull. I don’t know the weight a Bull carries or even an encyclical. You say the church condemned it. That would have to be the Pontiff. Was it Alexander vi that condemned it? WOW
Bill
Until this was posted here, I had not heard of it. It is interesting here are two links on the subject
Witchcraft
The Marrus Maleficarum
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Rau
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Contrast those statements with Evangelium Vitae (and the Catechism). The gap widens!
Adrift - take note!
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Tomdstone
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The moral teaching on torture has changed.
Torture was allowed under certain restricted conditions during the Inquisition.
Today it is taught that torture is wrong.
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Rau
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What was taught at the time?
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LongingSoul
Guest
In fact, Pope Francis continues to develop the teaching further in a letter of March this year saying…
Today capital punishment is unacceptable, however serious the condemned’s crime may have been. It is an offence to the inviolability of life and to the dignity of the human person which contradicts God’s plan for man and for society and his merciful justice, and it fails to conform to any just purpose of punishment. It does not render justice to the victims, but rather foments revenge.
For a constitutional state the death penalty represents a failure, because it obliges the State to kill in the name of justice. Dostoyevsky wrote: “To kill a murderer is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by a criminal”. Justice is never reached by killing a human being.
w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2015/documents/papa-francesco_20150320_lettera-pena-morte.html
Today the ‘default’ is to save human life from the punishment of death at all costs.
This of course is not calling it ‘intrinsically’ evil but morally evil in our day.
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LongingSoul
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The severity of every crime is determined by the good of the community. How can any crime be measured other than its impact on the common relationship between men? By human reason we know that crime deserves punishment and the severity of that punishment is determined by the authorities charged with safeguarding the common good.
“Punishment is proportionate to sin in point of severity, both in Divine and in human judgments. In no judgment, however, as Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xxi, 11) is it requisite for punishment to equal fault in point of duration. For the fact that adultery or murder is committed in a moment does not call for a momentary punishment: in fact they are punished sometimes by imprisonment or banishment for life–sometimes even by death; wherein account is not taken of the time occupied in killing, but rather of the expediency of removing the murderer from the fellowship of the living, so that this punishment, in its own way, represents the eternity of punishment inflicted by God.” – Summa Theologica.
I’ll repost what I wrote to demonstrate your fave unethical tactic…. quotemining.
“That would make some sense if the Catholic Church had ‘invented’ the institution of capital punishment or even if Noah had begun using it on Gods command to kill every person and beast who kills a human being. However, death as a sentence in human law has existed before and apart from the Jews and the Christian teachings.
It was seen to be ‘deserved’ according to how it served the good of the community who convicted the criminal. There was no direct communication with God with which to measure ‘just desserts’. The ‘common good’, although not fully realised by primitive people, still excerpted influence on justice right from the beginning.”
Now if you could summon the integrity to address what I actually wrote. Outside of the biblical diaspora through the ages, how did human law determine ‘just desserts’?
2266 does not say that just desserts in human law are ordered by divine command. In fact 2266 starts “The efforts of the state to curb the spread of behavior harmful to people’s rights and to the basic rules of civil society correspond to the requirement of safeguarding the common good.”
That conclusion is the result of your limited understanding of the ‘common good’.
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