Catholic doctrine on torture

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Hi @Vico

Catholics are under no obligation to believe in the “Dantes inferno” type version of hell as a place of physical fire and torment.
Hell is a reality in Catholicism, but I don’t believe in this above version as it is incompatible with Gods nature (even though God is just also).

According to Cardinal Vincent Nichols “The image of fire and brimstone and all that has never been part of Catholic teaching. It’s been part of Catholic iconography, Christian iconography, but it’s never been part of teaching”

 
I am really shocked that any people would still be debating the morality of torture, even more so that it would be Catholics doing so. 😡

A lot of evil things were done by people in the past including by Catholic people. People only had awareness/ignorance according to the era that they were in. Humans have always evolved up to now, and will continue to do so further into the future.
These past evils certainly do not then mean we should look at those actions as being justification to use such “methods” today.

Catholics also used to burn certain people at the stake in the middle ages…should we justify this and go back to doing this now also??!

What sort of logic is this??

There are many reasons why torture (of anyone) is wrong, but if only for the reason that even if 1 innocent person could be wrongly declared guilty and “unjustly” tortured, then that is reason enough why torture is evil & cannot be done.

I will tell you I come from a country where civil war happened with truly horrific actions happen on all sides. Any horror you could imagine happened - tortures, rapes, beheadings…
Everyone in their own minds thinks that they are “they good guys” and that they are the ones justified to do such horror things.

There is no such thing as a “just torture”, not to gain confession, not for any reason.
Engaging in torture -even towards the most evil people like Isis people- purely reduces the torturer to the level of the evil person they are torturing.
It blurs the lines between good and evil.
Torture is a stain on a mans own soul. It desensitizes him and reduces him from man to beast.

There are many men who have long after the fact put gun to head from doing things in war less than what you mention. If that less action, torture their soul to the point that they choose to do this action to silence their dreams, what more would it do so to be involved in something like torture?

When a man tortures another, he tortures himself also. Unless he has become so far than even his own consciense and soul no longer can “sing” to him. From that point, maybe only God can help him.

Jesus did not said “feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned”…and torture the bad people.
 
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Guilherme1 said:
Torture was for centuries a legal practice of the Inquisition, it was approved by popes, it was approved by great theologians like Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Alphonsus Liguori and it was even approved by an ecumenical council (Council of Vienne).

How exactly was torture not infallibly approved as correct by the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium? It’s even possible to reconcile the Church’s old teaching on torture with the current Church’s teaching on torture (CCC 2297 and 2298)?
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Because they live in an era with different perspective. They live so different and think so different from what humans living in the present time would think. Humans evolve as time goes by and so, our way thinking also changes.
 
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Rozellelily said:
Hi @Vico

Catholics are under no obligation to believe in the “Dantes inferno” type version of hell as a place of physical fire and torment.
Hell is a reality in Catholicism, but I don’t believe in this above version as it is incompatible with Gods nature (even though God is just also).

According to Cardinal Vincent Nichols “The image of fire and brimstone and all that has never been part of Catholic teaching. It’s been part of Catholic iconography, Christian iconography, but it’s never been part of teaching”

…
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No conflict since I only mentioned suffering in Hell. Yet with a resurrected body there will be a physical component.
 
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Rozellelily said:
There is no such thing as a “just torture”, not to gain confession, not for any reason.
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In some countries, corporal punishment is the sentence given to those convicted of a crime eg. 10 lashes. Do you regard this as torture?
 
There is A) the teaching and there is B) the tolerated. Problems arise when the gap between the two increases. Our very human nature both teaches and reveals that the gap is ever-present, ever to be combated.
 
Rau said:
In some countries, corporal punishment is the sentence given to those convicted of a crime eg. 10 lashes. Do you regard this as torture?
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It is going to depend on how harsh the lashes are.
Corporal punishment such as stretching someone out on the rack, and then tying him to the stake, putting maggots all around him crawling all over the place and burning him alive while many onlookers are enjoying the spectacle of a man being burned alive, would be, i think, a form of torture.
 
It is a tricky area whether to consider it torture or not, but either way I do not agree with corporate punishment. Why whip people if there are other options?

These methods are primitive and there are other options now in moderns societies, which both retain human dignity, and also don’t result in desentization in the punisher himself.

Why would any modern civilization want to re-adopt the mindset and methods of doing “methods” of people who’s consciousness have not evolved?

These actions do not make the society involved higher, they make it more base and lower.

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

The great irony is that I hesitated even to attach a photo because it might be considered too offensive by some to view it, but yet there are still some Catholics who think it should be done.
It is not ok to view, but still ok to do??!
 
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This great doctor [Saint Augustine] is much less absolute than Tertullian in regard to confession-extracting torture. In the context of highlighting the inevitable woes and unhappiness that attend life in the ‘city of man’ as a result of sin, Augustine draws attention to the plight of the accused under the current procedures of Roman Law. But while he succinctly p(name removed by moderator)oints the basic, horrible incongruities, he condemns neither the judges nor the laws that prescribe and implement such procedures. While he concedes that a man of “profound considerateness and finer feeling” would personally shrink from involvement in torture, his bottom line is that the judge who does agree to accept this terrible responsibility is “guiltless”. Here are Augustine’s key observations:

“[The accused] is tortured to discover whether he is guilty, so that, though innocent, he suffers most undoubted punishment for crime that is still doubtful; not because it is proved that he committed it, but because it is not ascertained that he did not commit it. Thus the ignorance of the judge frequently involves an innocent person in suffering [and even in death, when the accused falsely confesses a capital crime out of sheer terror of unendurable pain]. . . . If such darkness shrouds social life, will a wise judge take his seat on the bench or no? Beyond question he will. For human society, which he thinks it a wickedness to abandon, constrains him and compels him to this duty… These numerous and important evils he does not consider sins; for the wise judge does these things, not with any intention of doing harm, but because his ignorance compels him, and because human society claims him as a judge. And if he is compelled to torture and punish the innocent because his office and his ignorance constrain him, is he a happy as well as a guiltless man?”

Augustine sees this tragic situation arising from the clash of two grim facts of human life after the Fall of man: on the one hand, the need to punish crime justly for the protection of society, and on the other, the frequent great difficulty, or even impossibility, of ascertaining who is guilty and who is innocent.

LT119 - Torture and Corporal Punishment as a Problem in Catholic Theology: Part II. The Witness of Tradition and Magisterium
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Since investigation methods were not so advanced at the time and the codes of law were not so developed, it is understandable that Christians thought that torture to extract confessions was indispensable to punish crime and protect society, and that the state had the authority to apply this kind of torture.

Maybe, then, depending on the context inserted, the use of torture to extract confessions may be morally legitimate, for example in situations where investigative methods or codes of laws are not developed enough to punish crime and protect society effectively without this kind of torture.
 
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Guilherme1 said:
Maybe, then, depending on the context inserted, the use of torture to extract confessions may be morally legitimate, for example in situations where investigative methods or codes of laws are not developed enough to punish crime and protect society effectively without this kind of torture.
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Not according to Pope Francis, Pope Benedict, the Catholic Catechism, and Catholic Bishops. There is no “just torture”. The use of torture to extract confessions (under any circumstance such as US president George Bush waterboarding) is as far away from Catholic life and teaching that one could get:)






2297 … Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity.
 
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From the article:

"Also, Vatican II’s point is well taken: The torturer himself, steeling his soul to the screams of agony he intentionally produces, tends to become brutalized and dehumanized in a way that is scarcely paralleled by, say, firing a rifle or flicking a switch that opens a trapdoor or begins a process of lethal injection."

For anyone that could even contemplate rationalising torture under any circumstance-
remember this point… everyone thinks they are the good guys in a war. America thinks they are the good ones, Iran thinks that they are the good ones, Croatia, Serbia, and so on…

Even Isis for all their evilness probably have a delusional belief that they are doing (their) God’s will. Once you start using a method & mentality of the “bad guys”, you have become one of the bad guys.

There is great irony in saying "this other country or people are evil because they use cruel methods against people, so we will now also use cruel methods to extract confessions out of them".
 
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