More from Fr. Harris and Dr. Costigan on the death penalty

http://www.catholicweekly.com.au/article.php?classID=1&subclassID=2&articleID=5025&class=Latest%20News&subclass=CW%20National

A quite dreadful article appeared on the front page of yesterday’s Sydney Catholic Weekly, in which we heard more from Rev. Fr. Tim Harris on his opposition to the death penalty:

He said the Church’s position is clear: “we are against the death penalty in all cases”.

“We are pro-life in all its forms,” said Fr Harris, parish priest at Corinda Graceville in Brisbane.

“From my perspective I do not support the death penalty for the Bali bombers because I have no intention of stooping as low as they have in terms of their lack of respect for human life.

“I believe that humanity needs to retain its dignity and come up with other ways of punishing people who have done wrong.

“Murderers are individuals who need a punishment that fits the crime. A reciprocal putting to death is not the answer.”

Firstly, Fr. Harris is clearly quite wrong about the Church being “against the death penalty in all cases”; even if one were to concede that the death penalty were only permissible as a kind of lethal defence, the case of the Bali bombers is a good example of an execution justifiable on the grounds of protecting society, since the bombers remained influential while imprisoned and there was a risk of their supporters organising a break-out.

Secondly, ‘pro-life’ is really a shorthand for upholding the right to life, a right which it is possible for one to forfeit by one’s actions, as Pius XII taught in a speech of September 14, 1952.

Thirdly, we see repeated the notion of the death penalty as “stooping as low as [the bombers] have in terms of their lack of respect for human life”. In an earlier post I used a comparison to just war to show the inappropriateness of the notion of the death penalty as ‘reducing oneself’ to the level of the murderer. But an even better comparison might be the case of someone depriving someone else unlawfully of his liberty for a certain period; would anyone deny that imprisonment for an equal period (at least) would be a just sentence? Yet this is (superficially) just what the offender did. The difference, of course, is that the State has the authority to do so, and so it is with the death penalty. Abortion, murder and euthanasia are cases of someone innocent’s life being taken by someone who had no authority to do, whereas execution is the taking of someone guilty’s life by someone who has the authority to do so.

Fourthly, the attempt to imply that the death penalty entails a ‘loss of dignity’ is also false, since nothing can erase man’s ontological dignity, and the offender lost his operative dignity through his actions.

Fr. Harris’ final two sentences illustrate perfectly the illogic of his position: “Murderers are individuals who need a punishment that fits the crime. A reciprocal putting to death is not the answer.” What can one say about such a plain contradiction?

What Dr. Michael Costigan had to say, though, was even more egregious. Let me note firstly that the Weekly lauded Dr. Costigan as a “pro-life champion and former executive secretary of the Bishops’ Committee for Justice, Development, Ecology and Peace”. One wonders, then, why it did not contact the present executive secretary of the Committee. Also, what qualifies one to be a ‘pro-life champion’? I can recall no interventions from Dr. Costigan in the controversies over the Victorian Abortion Law Reform Bill or the abortion drug RU-486.

Now Dr. Costigan

says opposition to the use of the death penalty should be “universal and without reservation”.

“This applies to everyone under sentence of execution,” he said.

This is, again, quite false, even by the standards of John Paul II and the New Catechism. Errors of this sort are to be expected, but I was appalled by the following red-herring:

He added: “Of course, all decent people are outraged by the use of the death penalty in scandalous and utterly barbaric cases like the stoning to death of a young girl accused of adultery in Somalia.

Is this some sort of attempt at guilt by association? What does the persecution of an innocent girl who was the victim of rape have to do with the just punishment of three grown men who committed mass murder? Invoking a tendentious irrelevance like this is beneath the standards of mature discourse. Then Dr. Costigan says that

“It needs to be understood, however, that capital punishment diminishes all who use and defend it, whatever the circumstances.

“It is purely and simply an anti-life act of vengeance …

Capital punishment diminishes all who use and defend it? So Innocent III was ‘diminished’ by teaching that

Concerning secular power we declare that without mortal sin it is possible to exercise a judgment of blood as long as one proceeds to bring punishment not in hatred but in judgment, not incautiously but advisedly.
(Dz. 425, http://www.catecheticsonline.com/SourcesofDogma5.php)

What of the generations of Popes, Bishops and Doctors of the Church who used and defended it? What an insult; what arrogance.

Furthermore, does Dr. Costigan really fail to understand that, just as there is a distinction between righteous and malicious anger, there is a distinction between righteous and malicious vengeance? What of the Divine Vengeance that, for instance, the Catechism of the Council of Trent speaks of in its section on the Sacrament of Penance?

The utterances of Fr. Harris and Dr. Costigan may well represent a new low in the debate over the death penalty.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Andrew Avellino, 2008 A.D.

Mr. Hayes and Dr. Costigan on the death penalty

An article in yesterday’s Sydney Catholic Weekly reported on the plans of Mr. Chris Hayes M.P. (my local Member) for “passing laws making it illegal for states and territories to reintroduce the death penalty.” But what was of more interest to me were the remarks of Dr. Michael Costigan, “former executive secretary of the Bishops’ Committee for Justice, Development, Ecology and Peace”, to whom the Weekly turned for comment. (This is the same Dr. Costigan who recently glibly asserted that the maxim that ‘error has no rights’ has been abandoned.) He said that

such a law, if adopted, could presumably be reversed in the future by a pro-death penalty administration, but one hopes such a return to support for barbarism would be more difficult to achieve after the passage of such legislation than it may be now.

He added: “Those pro-life advocates who are firm in their opposition to capital punishment believe that Australia should be as consistent as the Popes in calling for its abolition everywhere and in all cases, even where heinous crimes are involved.”

The report notes that

[Mr. Hayes’ notice of motion] asks Indonesia to “understand Australia’s principled position in relation to the imposition of the death penalty.”

So here we see several of the usual errors that crop up in discussion on the death penalty. Firstly, the notion that support for it is ‘barbarism’, in contrast, presumably, to the ‘principled position’ of the abolitionists. Secondly, the question of permanently valid Catholic doctrine on the matter. And thirdly, the notion that support for capital punishment is somehow a betrayal of the pro-life cause.

As regards the supposedly unprincipled barbarism of the pro-execution movement, one wonders who is the less principled: those who are so deeply infected with utilitarianism that they can only understand punishment as a means to other ends, or those who understand that punishment is an end in itself, as suggested by the status of justice as a cardinal virtue, to which other ends are subordinate.

And are we really expected to believe that dozens of generations of Catholics, spread over almost two millennia, were really just poor benighted barbarians awaiting the glorious dawn of the 1960s and the revelation that the death penalty is in fact immoral? What arrogance. As for the ‘consistency of the Popes’, presumably Dr. Costigan is not referring to Leo X, who condemned the error

That heretics be burned is against the will of the Spirit.
(http://www.catecheticsonline.com/SourcesofDogma8.php)

Or St. Pius V, whose Catechism of the Council of Trent taught that execution

is an act of paramount obedience to this Commandment which prohibits murder.
(http://www.catecheticsonline.com/Trent3.php)

Or Pius XII, who taught, in a speech of September 14, 1952, that the State does not dispose of the condemned man’s right to life, since the condemned man forfeited it by his actions. And no doubt these Popes would just be the tip of the iceberg, whereas the Popes of the 1960s till now are the iceberg, as far as opposition to the death penalty goes.

As for the notion that support for the death penalty is a betrayal of the pro-life cause, it should be noted that we can only really speak of the innocent as having a right to life, since the duty not to kill does not cover execution. The falseness of the notion that execution is a breach of the right to life is apparent from the teaching of Pius XII that I have cited.

Reginaldvs Cantvar

A couple of interesting observations regarding ‘religious liberty’

(From ‘Religious Liberty Questioned’ by Msgr. Lefebvre; available from the St. Benedict Book Centre or from Angelus Press)

1) As late as 1955, a mere ten years before the promulgation of Dignitatis Humanæ, His late Holiness Pius XII said that

“Historians must not forget that if the Church and the State did have hours or years of struggle there were, from Constantine the Great even to this day, periods of tranquility, often long, in which they cooperated, with full comprehension, in the education of the same persons. The Church does not hide the fact that it [sic] considers, in principle, this cooperation as normal and that it sees as an ideal the unity of the people in the true religion and the unanimity in action between her and the State.”

(Allocution to the tenth International Congress of Historical Sciences, September 7, 1955)

Pius XII also reminds us that “… that which does not correspond to truth or to the norm of morality objectively has no right to exist, to be spread or to be activated” (Allocution 'Ci Riesce' to Italian jurists, December 6, 1953). Perhaps, then, Mr. Michael Costigan was wrong to say, in a book review in the Sydney Catholic Weekly of March 16, 2008 that “It was in the era [shortly before and during Vatican II] of these documents, coinciding with the rising popularity of ecumenism, that the old Catholic saying that ‘error has no rights’ was finally abandoned”?

2) It appears that Bl. Pius IX exercised his Extraordinary Papal Magisterium in condemning the following errors in his encyclical Quanta Cura:

“that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require.”

“liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way.”

In section 6 of Quanta Cura the four criteria for the Extraordinary Papal Magisterium appear to find their satisfaction:

“6. Amidst, therefore, such great perversity of depraved opinions, we, well remembering our Apostolic Office, and very greatly solicitous for our most holy Religion, for sound doctrine and the salvation of souls which is intrusted to us by God, and (solicitous also) for the welfare of human society itself, have thought it right again to raise up our Apostolic voice. Therefore, by our Apostolic authority, we reprobate, proscribe, and condemn all the singular and evil opinions and doctrines severally mentioned in this letter, and will and command that they be thoroughly held by all children of the Catholic Church as reprobated, proscribed and condemned.”

It is issued, therefore, in the Pope’s capacity as Head of the Church Militant (“by our Apostolic authority”), it is clearly a matter of faith or morals, it is definitive (the errors are defined unambiguously and are “reprobated, proscribed and condemned”), and addressed “To Our Venerable Brethren, all Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, and Bishops having favor and Communion of the Holy See” and intended as binding for “all children of the Catholic Church”.

Reginaldvs Cantvar