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.

Fr. Harris on the death penalty

http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=9899

In today’s edition of CathNews, Rev. Fr. Tim Harris, the Brisbane pastor of Messrs. Scott Rush and Michael Czugaj (two of the ‘Bali Nine’ drug runners), has protested against the death penalty, saying that it “is not the answer for drug traffickers or for the Bali bombers”. But the article provides an illustration of the confusion inherent in the so-called ‘seamless garment’ approach to life issues. The first problem is that it is the innocent who have a right to life, not those guilty of truly execrable crimes, since, as Pius XII taught, murderers forfeit their right to life by their crimes. Fr. Harris says that

"Our government needs to speak consistently on the death penalty for all," Fr Harris told AAP.

"It can't say 'Save Scott and kill the Bali bombers'.

"It is saying this and I believe is putting Scott's life in danger as a result."

Fr Harris said the Bali bombers should face a harsh punishment, but the death penalty was not the answer.

But to speak consistently means to speak consistently of apples and oranges respectively, not to toss them all into the same basket and speak of them without regard to their essential differences. Why ever can’t the Australian Government say “'Save Scott and kill the Bali bombers”, when drug running is manifestly not in the worst category of crimes, while mass murder is clearly about as bad as it gets? The South-East Asian governments tend to use the death penalty for utilitarian reasons, as a means to ends such as deterrence, when capital punishment should only ever be used as an end in itself (i.e. I am talking about capital punishment strictly so called, capital punishment qua punishment, not merely lethal defence of oneself or of others, which few doubt is licit). That is why we should protest against the way they use it, not because it is intrinsically wrong.

And given that Fr. Harris agrees that the Bali bombers ought to face a harsh punishment, how can he reject the death penalty for them, when it would be absurd to deny that there is a due relation between the crime of murder and the punishment of execution?

Furthermore, Fr. Harris says that he has “ the utmost contempt for what the Bali bombers have done but I will never lower myself to their level”. But how is the death penalty ‘lowering oneself to their level’, when the death penalty can be a just and judicious use of the State’s power over its subjects, whereas the Bali bombing was a heinous and utterly unjustified wanton taking of innocent life? If it is by the bare fact that both acts involve the taking of a human life that Fr. Harris thinks of capital punishment as ‘lowering himself to their level’, then is Father also opposed to just wars, in which one takes up arms against an enemy and thereby, superficially at least (as in the case of the death penalty), imitates the enemy?

It seems to me that the so-called ‘seamless garment approach’ that has taken hold among many Churchmen and layfolk is another example of what Prof. Amerio called a ‘loss of essences’ that has spread during the post-Vatican II years, whereby people fail to make the essential distinctions among different things, and is evident in the secular world as well, such as in the following quotation from a Ms. Helen Pitt writing in The Sydney Morning Herod’s Good Weekend magazine of October 11, 2008, on Mrs. Sarah Palin:

[Mrs. Palin's town is] a place where guns and God are treated with equal reverence; where "right to life" applies to a foetus but not to a fawn.

But just because many fail to understand the meaning of justice, retribution and the pro-life cause is no reason to pander to their ignorance. Catholics ought to stand up for the timeless Traditional teaching on the liceity of the death penalty as a just punishment.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
5.XI.2008 A.D.