Has a politician ever been denied communion because they were pro-torture

[Contarini]

Wait a minute. Are you actually saying it’s okay to inflict pain or discomfort to correct someone or for purpose of retribution, but not to save the lives of others by getting information?

I’m saying that they are separate issues, and that the last is the most clearly wrong. Absolutely. And the Catholic Church appears to agree with me. The reason, as I keep saying, is that torture treats people as a means.

And is there some good reason to think that, say, some Al Quaeda terrorist is “broken”, “shamed” or “dehumanized” if waterboarded? Their very religion teaches that they can sing like canaries if they reach a point where they can’t tolerate it any longer.

Source?

And, seemingly, that’s what they do. Is that really any more dehumanizing than putting some banker in prison for years because he temporarily issued a letter of credit to a friend without putting it on the books of the bank? (I use the example because I knew a banker who got imprisoned for it, and I can assure you he was a broken man from it…far more than these Al Quaeda people seem to be.)

I’m not defending our penal system. I think there’s a good case to be made that prison may be cruel, especially when the person could easily be made to repay what they did in some other way and is not an imminent menace to others, as in the case of your acquaintance. I’m simply saying that inflicting pain with the purpose of breaking down a person’s normal operations of will and reason in order to accomplish some goal that benefits oneself or a third party, with no intrinsic connection either to the good of the person you are inflicting the pain on or to what that person deserves–this is intrinsically evil and rightly condemned by the Church.

You can execute a person and still love them. I don’t see how you can torture a person and still love them, because in torture the pain is the whole point of the exercise.

Edwin