|
|
|
|
Breaking the Cycle of ViolenceThe renewal of Catholic moral theology has enabled contemporary moral theologians to recover a more holistic understanding of moral knowledge. Moral knowledge is more than a conceptual grasp. It is more properly called evaluative knowledge. Evaluative knowledge facilitates being grasped by the meaning. It is self-involving, self-engaging. It cannot be the detached understanding of a textbook. Without denying an indispensable need for discursive reason, an integral moral theology will affirm the crucial role played by affective and intuitive factors. Father Richard M. Gula, a highly regarded moral theologian, has succinctly summarized the relationship of “head” and “heart” in this way: “The moral convictions, the truths we live by, do not come only by way of rational argument.” He points out that lived moral meaning also comes “by way of affective experience.” “Reasons of the heart” trigger affective commitments. The rational argumentation, the “reasons of the head,” often only spell out the rational grounds of insights not gained by logic, analysis, or deduction. In Moral Discernment Father Gula identifies conscience as the place “where head and heart dialogue with each other.” Jean Bethke Elshtain illustrates the interplay of the cognitive and affective dimensions of moral judgment in her Who are We?, a hybrid of “political analysis, cultural criticism, and theological engagement.” The turning point of her convictions about the death penalty was her being captivated by Albert Camus’ essay “Reflections on the Guillotine” when she was a young woman of 18. In retrospect, this now prominent professor of political and social ethics at the University of Chicago admits that she had been reared in a “culture of death: death for death.” After reading Camus’ classic essay she confesses that “… I have never felt the same – at least not on this issue.” Professor Elshtain discovered that the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Pope John Paul II confirmed that original shift in her consciousness about the death penalty. She had been moved by a radical insight, namely, “that the state cannot be the divine taker and giver of life as part of its penal powers.” Jean Bethke Elshtain contends that there is a common link among Camus, Bonhoeffer, and Pope John Paul II insofar as they reject state idolatry. She integrates this rationale with a major theme explored in her work, the flight from finitude. She observes that fear and sloth interact with a cultural project of fleeing finitude. That project, a radical forgetfulness of the doctrine of creation, “not only shakes hands with a technocratic agenda, like cloning, but with a penal agenda, like doling out death.” The paradox of seeking “perfection in one realm, definitive exclusion in the other” places society on the brink of moral despair instead of enlightenment. In In Confronting a Culture of Violence (1994) the Catholic bishops of the United States strongly criticize society’s recourse to violent measures to deal with tough social problems. The statement clearly scores the two pre-eminent threats to human dignity – abortion on demand as a solution to problem pregnancies and euthanasia to eliminate the burdens of age and sickness. But this pastoral statement also objects to the death penalty as a coping mechanism for dealing with crime. The bishops construct a consistent ethic in rejecting violence as a disease of the spirit. They judge such measures as a misguided search for “quick and easy answers to complex human problems.” With a counter-cultural moral wisdom the bishops call for a reality check – “(a) society which destroys its children, abandons its old, and relies on vengeance fails fundamental moral tests.” The bishops conclude: “Violence is not the solution; it is the most clear sign of our failures.” The statement then warns that, in losing respect for human life, the embracing of violence to solve social problems negates efforts to inculcate the curtailing of violence in the youth of the nation. This position was reinforced and highlighted in the bishops’ Living the Gospel of Life (1998). There the bishops note that the “witness to respect life shines most brightly when we demand respect for each and every human life, including those who fail to show that respect for others.” The document concludes: “The antidote to violence is love, not more violence.” In supporting the development of a culture of life rather than a culture of death, the Catholic bishops of the United States have issued a renewed call to end the death penalty. They stand with Pope John Paul II in advocating a society “so committed to human life that it will not sanction the killing of any human person.” In rejecting state-sanctioned violence as a solution to social evils, the advocacy of the Church’s pastoral teachers to renounce state-sponsored violence to solve social evils strives to ground a bright line between a culture of life and a culture of death.
|
|
Catholic Conference of Kentucky 1042 Burlington Lane Frankfort, Kentucky 40601
502-875-4345
Last modified: April, 2008 |
502-875-2841 Fax