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Reversing the Conspiracy Against LifeGeorge Weigel’s Witness to Hope is undoubtedly a monumental biography of Pope John Paul II. The author closes with a speculation on how the church in the future will view Pope John Paul II’s role in history. Weigel compares the papal ministry of Pope John Paul II with the roles of Pope Leo the Great (440-461) and Pope Gregory the Great (590-604). The historical link is a time when barbarisms threatened civilization and heroic figures were “called from the church to meet the barbarian threat.” Pope Leo Great faced Attila and the Huns; Gregory the Great withstood the Lombards. At the beginning of a new millennium, Pope John Paul II has challenged the barbarism of a postmodern world – defective humanisms, ideologies which have spawned “barbarous politics.” In the end, the twentieth century has been tragically marked by “a culture of death.” Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago are graphic, haunting nightmares of the new tyrannies which threatened the very roots of Western civilization in the past century. According to Weigel, Pope John Paul II’s prophetic humanism has proposed an alternative by restoring “a spiritual dimension to a history that had become flat, stale, and, as a consequence, brutal.” The opening chapter of the encyclical The Gospel of Life (1995) names the widespread threat and assaults to the sacredness of the human person and the inalienable right to life. The Holy Father refers to a literal culture of death. He attends to new forms of despotism arising within democratic cultures. The impact of moral relativism undermines the sacredness of the human person as the foundation of rights. The basis of rights, then, is not the inherent dignity of the person but the will of the powerful over the claims of the weak and defenseless. Pope John Paul II visits this theme again in the apostolic exhortation The Church in America (1999). The Holy Father speaks of the emergent model of society in which “the powerful predominate, setting aside and even eliminating the powerless.” The categories of persons at risk are the unborn, the elderly, the incurably ill, and the impoverished at the margins of society. Abortion, euthanasia, consumerism, and materialism are dehumanizing assaults on human dignity. (n.63) In this context, Pope John Paul II explicitly treats the issue of the death penalty. Quoting the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the apostolic exhortation raises moral reservations about the “unnecessary recourse to the death penalty.” Recourse to the death penalty cannot be justified when alternative “bloodless means” are adequate to defend human lives from threat and guarantee the public order and public safety. The model of society dominated by the powerful “bears the stamp of the culture of death, and is therefore in opposition to the Gospel message.” Accordingly, the Special Assembly for America of the Synod of Bishops (1997) uncompromisingly confirmed commitment to the “unconditional respect for and total dedication to human life from the moment of conception to that of natural death.” While abortion and euthanasia are dramatically highlighted, it is becoming clearer in light of the The Gospel of Life that a culture of life affirms an unqualified affirmation of “the value of human life and its inviolability.” (n.5) Richard Doerflinger of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities has reasoned that the social teaching of the church has developed a deeper understanding of the inherent dignity of the human person. Since that dignity is inalienable, even a perpetrator of a capital crime does not forfeit it. In addition, the proneness of modern societies to destroy innocent human life by sanctioning abortion and euthanasia demands a renewed societal focus on the meaning of reverence for human life. A message of the Catholic bishops of Maryland discerns the need for this new consciousness and sensitivity in their opposition to the death penalty. They invite the Catholic people to collaborate with them “to promote respect for human life, all human life, every human life, even the life of one who has committed the grievous sin of murder.” The Maryland bishops deny that the taking of life can defend life. They regard the death penalty “as a further manifestation of the culture of death that haunts our county, as a contributor to that lethal culture.” The ramifications are manifest: “ … a culture disposed to destroy its young, abandon its elders and answer violence with violence is a culture in serious moral trouble.” Jean Bethke Elshtain, a political philosopher, presents an interpretation of Pope John Paul II’s stance on the death penalty that complements the analysis of George Weigel. She traces the origins of the pope’s advocacy against capital punishment to the social disorganization of modern societies in the realm of the spiritual. This spiritual void mutates the democratic republics of the West into “morally disordered places.” The state cannot be granted ultimate power over life and death. The headline “America and the death penalty” heralded an extensive editorial published in the Sunday Chicago Tribune on June 10, 2001. In a balanced and carefully reasoned opinion the editors analyzed the execution of Timothy McVeigh. While noting the problematic aspects of the legal process of death penalty cases in general, the editors of the Tribune methodically dismantle such objections in the McVeigh case. The editorial’s argument is dispassionate: “Executing Timothy McVeigh, then, becomes a simple matter of justice.” The Tribune’s position advocates neither deterrence nor vengeance. The bottom line of the issue is “punishment, plain and simple.” Although the editorial reflects no tentativeness about the McVeigh execution, it appears to situate on it within a narrow range of application. The McVeigh execution meets the cannons of “a justifiable response to a small number of extraordinarily vicious crimes.” “America and the death penalty” discloses the catalytic nature of the McVeigh execution in the national debate about capital punishment. Diana Penner, a writer for the Indianapolis Star, viewed this case as reducing that debate to its ultimate implication – “Is the death penalty right or wrong?” Without a doubt, the contemporary pastoral teaching of the Catholic Church does not agree with the judgment that supports the justice of imposing the death penalty. Some theological commentators notice a shift in the state of the question in the revised Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997). If their premise is correct, the Catechism’s reference to the death penalty was deleted from the section on the justification on punishment (n.2266) and restricted to the question of necessary societal defense of human life against unjust attack (n.2267). The change may be subtle but it is not insignificant in revisionary approaches to the ethics of capital punishment. Professor E. Christian Brugger of Loyola University in New Orleans has developed a tentative revision of the typical grounds justifying the imposition of the death penalty. In line with this rationale, punishment addresses crime already perpetrated. By contrast, self-defense entailing justified killing responds to “a crime in progress or being contemplated.” Father James F. Keenan, a Jesuit moral theologian, makes a similar point. The traditional grounds for killing in legitimate self-defense were founded on threat to or the need for rescue of innocent persons. In The Gospel of Life (1995) Pope John Paul II developed a distinction which contributed to the revision of the sections on the death penalty in the 1993 edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The encyclical stated that punishment “ought not go to extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity.” (n.56) The Holy Father judged that developments in modern penal systems make such instances “very rare, if not practically non-existent.” Father John P Langan, S.J., judges Pope John Paul II’s approach in The Gospel of Life to be more empirical and historical in character, not a developed philosophical or theological thesis as such. Yet it has opened fresh grounds for the theological discussion of the death penalty. In the light of this rethinking, provisional questions are being raised about the meaning of intentional killing and the grounding of the inviolability of all human life, not in innocence or guilt but in its intrinsic worth and dignity. When a convicted criminal is no longer a threat, can the death penalty satisfy the norms of just punishment? At this time a fair reading of The Gospel of Life and the Catechism does not find an explicit rejection of the death penalty in principle. With that proviso, however, there are solid indicators that theological analysis is moving beyond a lack of justification for imposing a death penalty to a reinterpretation of the principle itself. Writing in his Ethics Notebook (America June 4-11), Father John F. Kavanaugh drew an insightful paradox out of the execution of Timothy McVeigh. In Kavanaugh’s opinion, Timothy McVeigh’s thinking was misguided. McVeigh was deluded by an imperative dictating killing in order to erase evil. If the moral principle negating any acceptable reason to kill were operative, another scenario might have unfolded. In fact, McVeigh’s unconscionable crime would have been unthinkable. According to Father Kavanaugh, society and public authority play out the same twisted logic – “cold-blooded, rationally justified, premeditated killing for a good cause.” In doing so, the Jesuit philosopher from St. Louis University contends, “(w)e succumb to the delusion that we prove the sacredness of human life by snuffing out another life.” The stark reality of the execution is a replay of the “deadly liturgy” that Timothy McVeigh convened. In the end, the nation confirms McVeigh’s “deadly logic.”
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