Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 6, 2020 / 06:00 am (CNA).- In his new encyclical, Pope Francis reiterated that the death penalty is “inadmissible.” Did the pope change centuries of Church teaching with that statement? A leading theologian told CNA that the pope’s teaching was a development, not a rupture with the Church’s past.
In Fratelli Tutti, released on Sunday, Pope Francis cited both Pope St. John Paul II and new language added to the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the death penalty, calling the practice “inadmissible” and urging for its abolition worldwide.
“Saint John Paul II stated clearly and firmly that the death penalty is inadequate from a moral standpoint and no longer necessary from that of penal justice. There can be no stepping back from this position,” Pope Francis wrote in paragraph 263 of the encyclical.
“Today we state clearly that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible’ and the Church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide,” he said.
Some Catholic commenters have claimed that Pope Francis’ statement constituted a “definitive change” in Church teaching.
But the pope’s teaching was a development in line with statements of recent popes, not a rupture from doctrine, theologian Fr. Thomas Petri told CNA.
Fr. Petri is dean and acting president of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C.
“When you talk about the development of teaching, you’re always talking about growing from what has come before, and never sort of a rupture,” he said.
“I definitely think it’s in the line of what previous popes have taught,” Fr. Petri told CNA, pointing to Popes St. John Paul II and St. Paul VI as examples. “There has been an increasing hesitation about the use of the death penalty by the state.”
The Church’s position on the death penalty has always been part of the ordinary magisterium, Petri said, the teaching that “states have the right to inflict the penalty of death.” St. Paul admonished Christians about the legitimate power of the state to “bear the sword,” in chapter 13 of his letter to the Romans, which Pope Francis cites in Fratelli Tutti.
Many saints and popes have upheld this right of the state to punish justly, Petri said, and “no pope can somehow come out and contradict that”—an act which would indeed be a “rupture” in Church teaching, the theologian said.
Pope Francis, he said, did not contradict Catholic teaching. In the 2018 revision to the Catechism, the pope referred to the death penalty as “inadmissible” but did not call it “intrinsically evil”—and this was a significant choice in words.
“There was a clear message of not using that word [intrinsically evil], when I think a lot of people would have liked him to use that word,” Petri said.
Petri told CNA that Pope Francis is speaking in continuity with recent popes including Pope St. John Paul II, who issued “a very strong statement” about capital punishment in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae; he said that the death penalty should only be used “when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society,” but added that because of improved security in prisons, “such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”
Popes John Paul II and Francis have worked with the “prudential application” of the Church’s magisterial teaching on the authority of the state, Fr. Petri said, and not reversed it.
The Church has historically taught that the “primary reason for punishment” is “retribution,” he said, which is not revenge but “the idea that the punishment has to fit the gravity of the crime.” Secondary reasons for punishment included the rehabilitation of the criminal and the protection of society.
John Paul II put “protecting society” at the “front and center” of the Church’s teaching on punishment, Petri said, and Pope Francis has continued this teaching in his magisterium, which reflects a new understanding of punishment.
Many in society view the death penalty now “simply about protecting society from killers and people who are dangerous, being a deterrent, and maybe rehabilitation,” Petri said, and supporters of the death penalty’s continued use should consider if “it cultivates or curries in them emotions of revenge,” which “is not retribution.”
While Popes Francis and John Paul II are making prudential applications of the Church’s teaching in areas of faith and morals, the level of assent required to their teaching is not just “prudential,” Petri explained.
When a cleric takes a profession of faith before becoming a pastor or a dean of a seminary, he said, he must assent to not only divine revelation and definitive propositions of Church teaching on faith and morals, he said, but also the teaching of the pope and bishops exercising the authentic magisterium.
“That’s more than just giving it the benefit of the doubt, it’s basically saying ‘I’m going to subscribe my intellect and will to what you’re teaching even if I don’t understand it, I’m going to try to understand it.’”
For a teaching that has been repeated frequently in statements and high-level documents, including in the Catechism, it’s hard to dismiss assent as merely a matter of prudence, Petri said.
“You can probably disagree with whether or not there should be life prison terms, but not this. I don’t think you can say this about the death penalty issue.”
[…]
About our “understanding of Christian doctrine in its development”–and freeing ourselves of mutant signaling and insinuations during the past decade–in “The Development of Christian Doctrine” Newman appeals, in part, to a biological analogy whereby growth (“development”) is one thing, while corruption is another.
He writes:
“I venture to set down seven notes of varying cogency, independence, and applicability to discriminate healthy developments of an idea from its state of corruption and decay, as follows: “There is no corruption if it retains:
(1) One and the same TYPE [doctrine/natural law v. a disconnected degree of pastoral “accompaniment” devolving into accommodation],
(2) The same PRINCIPLES [the non-demonstrable first principle of non-contradiction v. neo-Hegelian interpretations of the ambivalent “time is greater than space”],
(3) The same ORGANIZATION [the received Barque of Peter as from a supernatural source v. natural religions more as expressions of unaltered human searching]
(4) If its beginnings ANTICIPATE its subsequent phases [the Incarnation/Creed/ Catechism/Veritatis Splendor v. normalization of “choices” in place of moral judgments, as in the homosexual lifestyle, etc.];
(5) Its later phenomena PROTECT and subserve its earlier [Veritatis Splendor/ Familiarus Consortio v. social science (?) as the source of alternative truths];
(6) If it has a power of assimilation and REVIVAL [Evangelization and inculturation v. incongruous amalgamation as with Amazonia/der Synodal Weg], and
(7) A vigorous ACTION from first to last…” [lively steadfastness v. the mess of constant change as the deepest rut of all].
Let us hope it is Newman’s WRITINGS that will inspire the Church Peter.
A great saint and example for non-catholics. Not so sure about his notions concerning “illative”, intuitive knowledge though.
By definition, we cannot prove “illative” knowledge, but it helps make sense of why we know that another person, even the Divine Persons, love us. We know the truth of this interpersonal love on many mysterious levels.
Try reading the Bible and everywhere there is the word “faith” replace it with “relationship.”
Faith or belief in the love of another person is more than math. Think also of the revealed fact that the Holy Angelic Persons love us. Happy Feast!
Thank you for remembering my Feast Day. Certainly faith, and beyond that, mystical knowledge, can provide men with certitude regarding religious matters. But Henry Neman’s illative knowledge was viewed as a natural human faculty.As such, it’s not faith or mysticism. It could be regarded as another human means of strengthening faith, but it would be fatal to the Faith to confuse it with a supernatural thing in itself. I think such ideas had a lot to do with the romantic atmosphere of the nineteenth century which, by confusing natural faculties with the supernatural, risked emptying the latter of its real, very distinct, reality.