Gun control is one of those issues where I personally feel some conservative American Catholics on CAF are acting as “
patriots first, Catholics second”, or even maybe further down the pecking order.
The right-wing in America doesn’t do this uniformly: their stances on abortion and religious freedom are, for instance, naturally in accord with Catholic doctrine.
But in this respect, the heresy of
Americanism truly rears its ugly head.
The medieval canonists of our church in the 12th century, beginning with the jurist Gratian’s
Decretum, were the first thinkers in history to conceive of subjective and inviolable “
natural rights”. There were a number of such rights that the medieval church recognized in its canon law, many of them rather modern sounding, as historians of the period explain:
The legal traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have contributed much to the cultivation and violation of religious human rights around the world. In this volume Desmond Tutu, Martin Marty, and twenty leading scholars offer an authoritative assessment of these contributions and...
books.google.co.uk
But the canon lawyers who wrote around 1200 [had] a more humanist, more individualist culture…In their writings, ius naturale was now sometimes defined in a subjective sense as a faculty, power, force, ability inhering in individual persons.
From this initial subjective definition, the canonists went in to develop a considerable array of natural rights.
Around 1250 Pope Innocent VI wrote that ownership of property was a right derived from natural law and that even infidels enjoyed this right, along with a right to form their own governments.24 Other natural rights that were asserted in the thirteenth century included a right to liberty, a right of self-defense, a right of the poor to support from the surplus wealth of the rich.
And again in Roger Ruston’s “Human Rights and the Image of God” p. 43:
This right was considered to derive from the fundamental inclination of all natures to preserve themselves in being. By about 1300, the particular rights that were being defended in terms of natural law included rights to property, rights of consent to government, rights of self-defence, rights of infidels, marriage rights, and procedural rights in a court of law. Canon lawyers argued, for example, 'that the basic rules of legal procedure guaranteeing a fair trial were based on the natural right
So, the canonists and decretalists working for the papacy were likely the first to speak about a “right to self-defense”, among a whole list of other rights that princes, or rather the government, had no power to infringe.
But you don’t find in these texts an inviolable “
right to bear arms”, for civilians to unilaterally own dangerous weapons of their choosing.
This arose from English common law and is a particularly Protestant notion rooted in the
English Civil War (1641-1651) and the Bill of Rights of the English Parliament during the Glorious Revolution (1688-89).
Throughout Catholic history, the papacy has seen it fit to institute different kinds of arms controls. This began in the Middle Ages.
(continued…)
