Death Penalty not against CC?

[Debora123]

I have read a number of documents from the USCCB and from individual bishops and I have yet to find a sustainable argument for their position based on Church teaching. If you can think of some, please, make them and let’s see how valid they are.

Ender

I have made a few. You just didn’t like them.

 

[Hastrman]

Again, maybe you should say that to the vast majority of bishops in this country who voted against it. I’m in agreement with them, so I have no complaints.

In our time, the fear of death is a grotesque fetish. I see precious few bishops preaching “do not fear most that which destroys the body, but that which destroys the spirit”. I do see lots and lots of them preaching “death is the worst possible thing you can do to someone, whether they repent and accept it as a punishment or no—almost as if salvation is a complete non-factor, and cannot enter into accounts”. Of course, not a word from them about the blood of the innocent victims of the heinous crimes for which death sentences are handed down—but all too seldom carried out.

The USCCB are no more supernaturally protected from being utter sellouts than were the bunch of atheist hypocrites who were the reason the French Revolution was anti-clerical (although, all the clergy that believed in God supported the Revolution, because of how disgusting the hierarchy in France had become). They’re no more protected than the bishops of England who, with few exceptions, sold out the faith to Henry VIII.

Here’s a hint: when the hierarchy of the Church shares the “enlightened” opinion of any age it is not itself enlightening, that is never a good sign. I find opposition to capital punishment in secular thinkers long before I find it in the Church. Churchmen’s arguments against it are never (because, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, they cannot be) that it is an intrinsic evil; since that would contradict the deposit of faith. They are merely that, on the basis of various facts, it is not necessary. Which facts, they overwhelmingly get from people who do believe it to be intrinsically evil.

Therefore, the hierarchy’s opposition to the death penalty is just another political concession, like that Pope who excommunicated my great-grandfather merely for advocating Bohemia’s independence from the Austrian Empire. I think my great-grandfather was wrong; the Empire had a holy and ancient tradition and a number of objectively good policies; also nationalism is mostly built on fallacies—but that cannot possibly justify prostituting the power of binding and loosing to a secular state.

Popes are not impeccable, and they are only infallible on faith and morals: not in applying faith and morals to the public sphere.