What leads you to the conclusion that:
Capital Punishment and the death penalty are still fair game in the Church, both being intrenched in Aqunias and Augustine’s theologies.
What is insufficient in the Church’s current teaching, or in its grounding of this teaching in Aquinas, Augustine and others (including St. John Paul II), to merit its re-assessment?
Aquinas wrote on the divine nature of Christ and the extension of that divine nature to we who are partakers of the Body of Christ - the Catechism even cites his writings several times on this. Does that mean the nature of Christ is up for discussion, merely because Aquinas contributed to it? The Church revisits questions as it needs to, when the teaching is found to be wrong or incomplete (say, Limbo). The Church revisits the pastoral approach - the how of its teaching - as it needs to. The point of being relevant isn’t to acquiesce to the world’s desires, especially for license in sin, forgiveness without repentance, or the disrespecting of vulnerable life. The point of being relevant is to approach people where they are and call them out of sin. This is why Jesus ate with the tax collectors, not to give approval to their overcharging, but to show them God’s love for them and call them to repentance. We ought to emulate the same approach.
I believe slavery was forbidden during Vatican II, and while there were a few pronouncements during the 1800’s against slavery they were actually against speaking favorably of the slave trade, not against actually participating in it (The pre-schism church had stated firmly that to speak for abolition was anathama).
Couple errors here. The Catechism in its brief treatment of actual slavery (CCC 2414) references the text of Philemon, in which Paul urges Onesimus to free Philemon from slavery, thus stating that the intention of the Church in history is against slavery, even while individual pronouncements have not always lurched monolithically towards this end. But the abolition movement has always been strong in the Church. The Mercedarian order, founded in the 13th century, had the initial intent of ransoming and freeing Christian slave. The 16th century Pope Paul III forbade enslaving Native Americans in
Sublimus Dei. Even where slavery remained allowed, it was refined and restricted over time - disallowing enslavement of people taken in unjust wars, or maltreatment of slaves - with the most notable exceptions being slavery allowed for purposes of punishment (such as of heretics, schismatics, and pointedly Henry VIII). However, institutional slavery for economic gain (such as chattel slavery as practiced in the US until the mid-19th century) was utterly abolished in 1839 by
In Supremo Apostolatus, issued by Pope Gregory XVI. So while the US was still allowing the sale of men and women as property, the Church had already forbidden it.
It does change (like in 1945 when it decided that women having the vote wasn’t a sin), but only when it personally benefits from doing so (in that case, a huge percentage of female voters were practicing Catholics moreso than the male population in Italy especially.
I find no references to the Church declaring in 1945 it to not be a sin for women to vote. I do see that Italy allowed women’s suffrage in 1946 - during a time when the Vatican exerted very little political authority over the country. That said, I do see the Catholic Encyclopedia’s very confusing article on women’s rights somehow calling women’s suffrage an assault on marriage as well as declaring that “Catholic women will know what to do with the right to vote”. The Church’s record on women’s suffrage straddles both sides, with notably vehement comments by Pope Pius IX and Pius X, but by the time suffrage was largely won in the mid-20th century, the Church had already moved to expressing profound support. Writing in 1963’s
Pacem in Terris, Pope John XXIII described women’s political involvement as “the rights and duties which belong to them as human persons” and praised such advances as “increasing awareness of their natural dignity.” I see this as learning by the Church - the fears that were expressed (disruption of the familial structure with the rejection of male headship, the drive towards contraception and sexual license, the displacement of religion from public life) remain fears but unconnected with the good brought by universal suffrage. The loss of male leadership in the home is largely the fault of the males, and acknowledging the blessing that a politically active, culturally-involved, educated and talented woman can contribute to her family, her community and her nation has been quickly embraced (ie, 1965’s
Gaudium et Spes and 1988’s
Mulieris Dignitatem). Even where Pope Paul VI calls attention to such rapid change, he calls for examining and understanding the disruption that it causes and prayerfully approaching a response that embraces the good while mitigating the ill.
To be fair, there’s not that much history where voting was a question, relatively speaking. For the first 1700 years of the Church’s existence, few nations allowed elections of any sort and power was retained by the monarchy. At one point, “universal suffrage” meant that land-owning wealthy men of good background could vote, not just this small blue-blooded group with landed titles who swooned about the monarch. Women’s suffrage moved very quickly in the United States, taking just 70 years from the start of the movement in 1848 to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919 (unless you count MIssissippi, which only ratified it in 1984). So the distance from Pope Pius IX to Pope Paul VI is actually quite minimal compared with the distance from proscriptions against artificial birth control to a lifting of its restriction.
…I’m just being facetious.