Scholars raise concerns over Pope Francis remarks on how doctrine develops

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Robert_Sock said:
Obviously, it means that setting the example of forgiveness and love by abolishing the death penalty will reduce people’s, including criminals, perception that vengeance is justifiable. What’s more important as a Christian: Love and forgiveness or a false sense of justice?
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Setting “the example of forgiveness and love” to such a point that justice will have its teeth removed, shouldn’t exactly be what is sought either. If no further consequences will accrue to criminals besides a severe gumming that barely breaks the skin, that will certainly not make criminals LESS likely to commit crimes.

So it isn’t so much that the “perception that vengeance is justifiable” will be reduced, there is an even more likely and pernicious outcome: that people will come to believe that justice is inconsequential.
 
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May the will of God be done! Who’s in a better position to know God’s will than the Pope?
 
HarryStotle said:
Capital punishment could not be inherently wrong if God permitted it in the OT. So “inherently wrong” is off the table and cannot be used as the justification for why it shouldn’t be used today.
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Yes, on this and a few other topics some seem to be drifting into Marcionism. It would in fact be the only way to square the contradiction.
 
HarryStotle said:
Church teaching for the past 2000 years hasn’t ruled it out either, and can’t in fact without undermining its own claims to infallibility with respect to faith and morals.
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This is important. I really don’t get the push to make capital punishment an intrinsic evil. Isn’t it enough to say that we moderns don’t have need for it? Anything more actually undermines the credibility of the Church.

Really not just undermines but destroys it. It would destroy my faith in the Church because it so obviously would be a change. I could not believe in the constancy of doctrine because it would have been disproved.
 
Robert_Sock said:
May the will of God be done! Who’s in a better position to know God’s will than the Pope?
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Read the histories of the popes. Being in that lofty position isn’t necessarily a guarantee that the current holder of that position will be impeccable or always have the correct opinion.

Neither of those are assumed in the authority of the office of the pope, ex Cathedra and all that.
Some ask how popes can be infallible if some of them lived scandalously. This objection of course, illustrates the common confusion between infallibility and impeccability. There is no guarantee that popes won’t sin or give bad example. (The truly remarkable thing is the great degree of sanctity found in the papacy throughout history; the “bad popes” stand out precisely because they are so rare.)

Other people wonder how infallibility could exist if some popes disagreed with others. This, too, shows an inaccurate understanding of infallibility, which applies only to solemn, official teachings on faith and morals, not to disciplinary decisions or even to unofficial comments on faith and morals. A pope’s private theological opinions are not infallible, only what he solemnly defines is considered to be infallible teaching.
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I stand by the teachings of Christ which Pope Francis is also doing. Any social policy that breeds vengeance in society is so obviously against the teachings of Christianity that we must protest it as true Christians!
 
Justice isn’t vengeance. Execution can be a just punishment. Execution certainly isn’t always vengeance.
 
Rau said:
So that is what “redressing the disorder caused by the offence means”?
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As with all Christian endeavors, we are to proceed with mercy in mind. So “redressing the disorder” in part means going to the source of the injury, the condition of the perpetrator of the crime, but first of all addressing those hurt. For those hurt, we are called to comfort them, help them/give them space/ to grieve, etc. For those who perpetrate crime, we are called to means of correcting the person’s misperceptions and lack of self-control, etc.

Killing a murderer does nothing to redress his disorder.
 
HarryStotle said:
What you need to demonstrate is that something relevant changed and that change is sufficient to make capital punishment no longer ever admissible, in practice.
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The relevant change happened centuries ago when murderers could be subdued rather than killed. If a murderer is killed in the process of apprehension, such is not an application of the DP.
HarryStotle said:
Unfortunately for you there are far better arguments for capital punishment, and vengeance, as far as I know, has never been seriously offered by any serious debater.
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What are your better arguments?
HarryStotle said:
…but clearly you do have no sympathy for victims of crime…
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I’m not sure how you came to that conclusion, Harry.
 
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I’m not implying that capital punishment is always vengeance, but that it provides society fuel for becoming more vengeful.
 
Robert_Sock said:
I’m not implying that capital punishment is always vengeance, but that it provides society fuel for becoming more vengeful.
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It could equally be true that ending capital punishment provides those who are willing and able to murder others with the social “fuel” to do so. Your argument cuts both ways.
 
I honestly believe that the majority of prisoners with a life sentence with no chance of parole would actually prefer the death penalty! I would like to see some statistics on this.
 
Not when life imprisonment is now available.
So modern CP is intrinsically evil.

That sounds reasonable to me.
 
It will break his heart that F1 is going further than the innovations of the last three Popes.

Mind you its easy to join their dots and see this is inevitable trajectory.
Others here have predicted the teaching would increasingly solidify against the allegedly traditional eye for eye view at its height in Kingly medieval times.
 
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Robert_Sock said:
I honestly believe that the majority of prisoners with a life sentence with no chance of parole would actually prefer the death penalty! I would like to see some statistics on this.
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If true, the first question is why would that be preferable to them?

Is it because they don’t truly grasp the value of the life which is in their hands to live? And that would go a long way to explaining why they so easily took another person’s life away from them.

In that case, perhaps keeping them alive provides a wider window of opportunity to allow them to grasp that value. On the other hand, prison may or may not be the ideal classroom.

The second question would be: Then why would you advocate prolonged torture in prison as opposed to a painless departure at a scheduled time? You aren’t being vengeful are you? Unconscious motivations and all that?
 
BlackFriar said:
So modern CP is intrinsically evil.
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By Using the qualifier “modern”, are you really saying “in modern times” ? To combine this expression with “intrinsically evil” seems to be a contradiction in terms.
 
BlackFriar said:
I too would agree that modern CP is therefore intrinsically evil.
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I don’t think you understand the meaning of “intrinsically evil.”

It means there are NO POSSIBLE conditions under which the act is permissible.

If you permit that conditions for allowing capital punishment to be carried out have actually existed in the past, then there are POSSIBLE, indeed actual, conditions under which capital punishment is allowed.

Hence it IS PERMISSIBLE under certain conditions and CANNOT BE intrinsically evil.
 
It’s a sorry state where murders are victims too, I think. But I believe that God should determine everyone’s life in this often pitiful world. Again, a lot of it has to do with the message we are sending society at large, in this case, that every life is sacred.
 
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