Mr. Quayle and Ms Parke on the death penalty

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24575376-2702,00.html
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,24573604-5001021,00.html

Mr. Quayle gets it; Ms Parke doesn’t. In an article in today’s Sydney Daily Telegraph, a Mr. Simon Quayle, who lost seven team-mates in the Bali bombing, said that

I don't have any anger or need for revenge […] I'm more about the signs of justice. If justice would've (meant) a sentence of life imprisonment and it was carried out, I would've been satisfied. But I still think terrorists should get the death penalty.

So Mr. Quayle sees that the death penalty is not a matter of revenge, but of justice. If a non-lethal punishment could balance the scales of justice then let it be imposed. But the case of the Bali bombers is clearly not such a case. And there is not even a shadow of a doubt that the right men have been convicted, so there is no chance of wrongful execution.

Meanwhile, Ms Melissa Parke, a Federal Labor backbencher, fails to understand that imposing the death penalty is not a violation of human dignity. The Australian mentioned the

recent furore over WA Labor MP Melissa Parke's warning that the execution of the Bali bombers "will only decrease our human dignity" - a claim that angered victims' families.

We need firstly to distinguish between human ontological dignity and human operative dignity. The former is man’s orientation towards a transcendent goal, namely God, and cannot be extinguished, not even in the damned, so there can be no question of this being ‘decreased’. Man’s operative dignity, though, increases or decreases according to what he does. Clearly the Bali bombers lost their operative dignity through their heinous crime, by which they also forfeited their right to life, but a just executioner will suffer no loss of operative dignity for carrying out the death penalty, since he acts on behalf of the civil authorities, “to whom is entrusted power of life and death” (Catechism of the Council of Trent, http://www.catecheticsonline.com/Trent3.php).

Reginaldvs Cantvar
30.X.2008 A.D.