Newsletter #130
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
It is FALSE to say that just as Catholics must oppose abortion and euthanasia, so Catholics must also oppose the death penalty, for in all 3 cases a human life is taken. Again, to repeat using similar words: it is FALSE teaching and reasoning to say that we must oppose abortion and euthanasia, just like we must oppose the death penalty, since in all 3 cases a human being is killed.
The counterfeit church of Vatican II has “developed” and accepted this false teaching since the 2018 changes to their 1992 Catechism (which already contains many heresies and erroneous teachings). The Catechism formerly stated that capital punishment was “acceptable.” The 2018 rewrite says it is “inadmissible.”)
If the execution of a convicted criminal is always “inadmissible,” does that not amount to saying that the right to life is absolute? As one Catholic writer put it, are we to forget society’s right to punish criminals according to the gravity of their crime and only remember our hope that punishment of some kind will assist their rehabilitation? The new catechetical language says that it is according to an “an increasing awareness” that the execution of convicted murderers is now “inadmissible”. Well, whose “increasing awareness”?
What about all the Catholic Popes, Fathers and Doctors of the Church, great saints, theologians and philosophers who have found capital punishment “acceptable” for two thousand years? If their “awareness” was so limited on account of their living before the modern age that they were wrong on this question, are we to be sure they got everything else right? How is it possible for men to be so much wiser and learned — so much more “aware” — in modern secularized liberal society than they were when Christendom existed? Has there been progress? The “progress” of a 50% divorce rate, same-sex “marriage” and millions killed by legal abortion?
Consequently, the modernist theology of the counterfeit church of Vatican II refuses to acknowledge the difference between guilt and innocence and declares all human life equally worth of protection, equal in dignity, when this has NEVER been True Catholic teaching. In addition, it places its opposition to abortion and euthanasia on a completely false basis, a naturalist-humanist basis (instead of the Law of God) from which it also deduces the impermissibility of capital punishment.
NOTA BENE
Notice that the 2018 change does not say that the death penalty is against the law of God, but that it is against human dignity. He says: “Consequently, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person’, and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”
No reference is given to the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Probably, because there is none to be found. In fact, Our Lord upholds the Old Testament Law requiring the death penalty for adultery when He says, in the case of the woman caught in adultery: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” If He had wished to abolish the death penalty, as He abolished other parts of the Old Testament Law, He would have clearly said so.
In this new modernist teaching against the death penalty, the false church of Vatican II has declared several of the Catholic Popes, as well as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Thomas More (who prosecuted heretics in an England where that was a capital offense), a papal decree, an apostolic constitution, and also St. Paul’s own divinely-inspired writing in the New Testament to be in error.
HOLY SCRIPTURE
I. “If then I am a wrongdoer, and have committed anything for which I deserve to die, I do not seek to escape death.” (Acts 25:11)
II. “Let every soul be subject to higher powers. For there is no power but from God: and those that are ordained of God. Therefore, he that resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist purchase to themselves damnation. For princes are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good: and thou shalt have praise from the same. For he is God’s minister to thee, for good. But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God’s minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil” (Romans 13:1-4).
CATHOLIC POPES
I. “It must be remembered that power was granted by God [to the magistrates], and to avenge crime by the sword was permitted. He who carries out this vengeance is God’s minister (Romans 13:1-4). Why should we condemn a practice that all hold to be permitted by God? We uphold, therefore, what has been observed until now, in order not to alter the discipline and so that we may not appear to act contrary to God’s authority.” (Pope Innocent I, Epist. 6, C. 3. 8, ad Exsuperium, Episcopum Tolosanum, 20 February 405, PL 20,495)
II. Condemned as an error: “That heretics be burned is against the will of the Spirit.” – Pope Leo X, Exsurge Domine (1520)
III. In his apostolic constitution, Horrendum illud scelus, Pope St. Pius V even decreed that actively homosexual clerics were to be stripped of their office and handed over to the civil authorities, who at that time held sodomy as a capital offense. He wrote: “We determine that clerics guilty of this execrable crime are to be quite gravely punished, so that whoever does not abhor the ruination of the soul, the avenging secular sword of civil laws will certainly deter.”
IV. “Even in the case of the death penalty the State does not dispose of the individual’s right to life. Rather public authority limits itself to depriving the offender of the good of life in expiation for his guilt, after he, through his crime, deprived himself of his own right to life.” (Pope Pius XII, Address to the First International Congress of Histopathology of the Nervous System, 14 September 1952, XIV, 328)
DOCTORS OF THE CHURCH
I. “The same divine authority that forbids the killing of a human being establishes certain exceptions, as when God authorizes killing by a general law or when He gives an explicit commission to an individual for a limited time. The agent who executes the killing does not commit homicide; he is an instrument as is the sword with which he cuts. Therefore, it is in no way contrary to the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ to wage war at God’s bidding, or for the representatives of public authority to put criminals to death, according to the law, that is, the will of the most just reason.” – (St. Augustine, The City of God, Book 1, chapter 21)
II. It is written: “Wizards thou shalt not suffer to live” (Ex. 22:18); and: “In the morning I put to death all the wicked of the land” (Ps. 100:8). …Every part is directed to the whole, as imperfect to perfect, wherefore every part exists naturally for the sake of the whole. For this reason we see that if the health of the whole human body demands the excision of a member, because it became putrid or infectious to the other members, it would be both praiseworthy and healthful to have it cut away. Now every individual person is related to the entire society as a part to the whole. Therefore if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and healthful that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good, since “a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump” (1 Cor. 5:6). – (St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae, II, II, q. 64, art. 2)
St. Thomas also explains the expiatory nature of accepting a death sentence:
“Even death inflicted as a punishment for crimes takes away the whole punishment for those crimes in the next life, or at least part of that punishment, according to the quantities of guilt, resignation, and contrition; but a natural death does not.”
CATHOLIC CATECHISMS
I. The Baltimore Catechism, which was the standard Catholic Catechism used in the United States as an education tool for adult catechists, explained the necessity of the Fifth Commandment, which forbids killing, while outlining the three exemptions to when it is permissible to kill:
“A. Human life may be lawfully taken:
1. In self-defense, when we are unjustly attacked and have no other means of saving our own lives;
2. In a just war, when the safety or rights of the nation require it;
3. By the lawful execution of a criminal, fairly tried and found guilty of a crime punishable by death when the preservation of law and order and the good of the community require such execution.”
II. The Roman Catechism, designated as the universal catechism during the Council of Trent to address Protestant heresies, officially taught that the execution of criminals was lawful:
“Another kind of lawful slaying belongs to the civil authorities, to whom is entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent. The just use of this power, far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to this Commandment which prohibits murder. The end of the Commandment is the preservation and security of human life. Now the punishments inflicted by the civil authority, which is the legitimate avenger of crime, naturally tend to this end, since they give security to life by repressing outrage and violence. Hence these words of David: In the morning I put to death all the wicked of the land, that I might cut off all the workers of iniquity from the city of the Lord.”
WHY OPPOSITION TO THE DEATH PENALTY?
Until recently, the death penalty was philosophically defended, as Romano Amerio explains, and used in practice by all countries as the ultimate penalty society imposes on evildoers, with the threefold aim of righting the balance of justice, defending society against attack, and dissuading others from wrongdoing.
Opposition to the death penalty stems from two diverse and incompatible sets of reasons, and can only be evaluated in the light of the moral assumptions on which it is based. Horror at a crime can coexist with sympathy for human weakness, and with a sense of the human freedom that renders a man capable of rising from any fall as long as his life lasts; hence opposition to the death penalty. But opposition can also stem from the notion that every person is inviolable inasmuch as he is a self-conscious subject living out his life in the world; as if temporal life were an end in itself that could not be suppressed without frustrating the purpose of human existence.
Although often thought of as religiously inspired, this second type of reason for rejecting capital punishment is in fact irreligious. It overlooks the fact that from a Christian point of view earthly life is not an end in itself, but a means to life’s moral goal, a goal that transcends the whole order of subordinate worldly goods. Therefore, to take away a man’s life is by no means to take away the transcendent end for which he was born and which guarantees his true dignity. A man can “propter vitam vivendi perdere causas” (for the sake of life, loose the causes of life) that is, he can make himself unworthy of life by taking temporal life as being itself the supreme good instead of a means to that good.
DEPRIVED OF THEIR GOAL?
There is therefore a mistake implicit in the second sort of objection to capital punishment, inasmuch as it assumes that in putting someone to death, other men or the state are cutting a criminal off from his destined goal, or depriving him of his last human end or taking away the possibility of his fulfilling his role as a human being. NO, Just the OPPOSITE in fact. The condemned man is deprived of his earthly existence, but not of his goal. Naturally, a society that denies there is any future life and supposes there is a fundamental right to happiness in this world, must reject the death penalty as an injustice depriving man of his capacity to be happy.
Paradoxically, those who oppose capital punishment on these grounds are assuming the state has a sort of totalitarian capacity which it does not in fact possess, a power to frustrate the whole of one’s existence. Since a death imposed by one man on another can remove neither the latter’s moral goal nor his human worth, it is still more incapable of preventing the operation of God’s justice, which sits in judgment on all our adjudications.
LORD GOD, THOU ART THE JUDGE
The meaning of the motto engraved on the town executioner’s sword in Fribourg in Switzerland: “Seigneur Dieu, tu es le juge” (Lord God, Thou art the Judge), was not that human and divine justice were identical; it signified a recognition of that highest justice which sits in judgment on us all.
USELESS AS A DETERRENT?
Another argument advanced is that capital punishment is useless as a deterrent; as witnessed by Caesar’s famous remark during the trial of the Cataline conspirators, to the effect that a death which put an end to the shame and misery of the criminals would be a lesser punishment than their remaining alive to bear them. This argument flies in the face of the juridical practice of pardoning people under sentence of death, as a favor, and is also refuted by the fact that even infamous criminals sometimes make pacts between themselves with death as the penalty for breaking the agreement. They thereby give a very apposite witness to the fact that capital punishment is an effective deterrent.
CHANGES IN THE NEW CHURCH OF VATICAN II
An important change has occurred in the novus ordo church regarding the theology of punishment. Before the 1992 Catechism was published, we could cite the French bishops’ document that asserted in 1979 that the death penalty ought to be abolished in France as it was incompatible with the Gospel, the Canadian and American bishop’s statements on the matter, and the articles in the ‘Ossevatore Romano’ calling for the abolition of the death penalty, as injurious to human dignity and contrary to the Gospel.
As to the biblical argument; even without accepting Baudelaire’s celebration of capital punishment as a supremely sacred and religious proceeding, once cannot cancel out the Old Testament’s decrees regarding the death penalty, by a mere stroke of the pen. Nor can canon law, still less the teaching of the New Testament, be can canceled out at a stroke. We should be well aware that the famous passage in Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (13:4) giving princes the “ius gladii” (the right use of the sword), and calling them the ministers of God to punish the wicked, has been EMPTIED of meaning by the canons of the new hermeneutic (i.e. the new theology of the modernists), on the grounds that it is the product of a past set of historical circumstances.
POPE PIUS XII REJECTS MODERN VIEW
Pope Pius XII however explicitly rejected that view, in a speech to Catholic jurists on 5 February 1955, and said that the passage of St. Paul was of permanent and universal value, because it refers to the essential foundation of penal authority and to its inherent purpose. In the Gospel, Christ indirectly sanctions capital punishment when he says it would be better for a man to be condemned to death by drowning than to commit the sin of scandal (Saint Matthew 18:6). From the Book of Acts of the Apostles (Acts 5:1-11) it seems the primitive Christian community had no objection to the death penalty, as Ananias and Sapphira are struck down when they appear before St. Peter guilty of fraud and lying at the expense of the brethren. Biblical commentaries tell us that the early Christians’ enemies though this sentence was harsh at the time.
NEW THEOLOGY OF PUNISHMENT
The change in teaching is obvious on two points. In the new theology of punishment, justice is not considered, and the whole matter is made to turn on the usefulness of the penalty and its aptitude for bringing the guilty person back into society, as the saying goes. On this point, as on others, the new fangled view coincides with the utilitarianism preached by the Jacobins. The individual is held to be essentially independent; the state defends itself against a miscreant, but cannot punish him for breaking a moral law, that is, for being morally guilty.
This guiltlessness of the guilty goes on to manifest itself in a reduced consideration for the victim and even in giving preference to the guilty over the innocent. In Sweden, people who have been imprisoned are given preferential treatment in examinations for public employment, as compared with other, unconvicted, members of the public. Consideration for the victim is eclipsed by mercy for the wrongdoer. Mounting the steps to the guillotine, the borderer Buffet shouted his hope that he would “be the last man guillotined in France.” He should have shouted he hoped he would be the last murderer.
REDEMPTION OF THE GUILTY
The penalty for the offense seems more objectionable than the crime, and the victim is forgotten. The restoration of a moral order that has been violated by wrongdoing is rejected as if it were an act of vendetta. In fact, it is something that justice demands and which must be pursued even if the harm done cannot be reversed and if the rehabilitation of the guilty party is impossible. The modern view also attacks even the validity of divine justice, which punishes the damned without there being any hope or possibility of amendment. The very idea of the redemption of the guilty is reduced to a piece of social engineering.
According to the ‘Osservatore Romano’ (6 Sept 1978), redemption consists in the awareness of a return to being useful to one’s fellows” and not, as the Catholic system would have it, in the detestation of one’s fault and a redirecting of the will back into conformity with the absolutes of the moral law.
IGNORING THE TRUTH THAT CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS EXPIATORY
To go on to assert that a life should not be ended because that would remove the possibility of making expiation, is to ignore the great truth that capital punishment is itself expiatory. In a humanistic religion expiation would of course be primarily the converting of a man to other men. On that view, time is needed to effect a reformation, and the time available should not be shortened. In God’s religion, on the other hand, expiation is primarily a recognition of the divine majesty and lordship, which can be and should be recognized at every moment, in accordance with the principle of the concentration of one’s moral life.
Attacking capital punishment, the ‘Osservatore Romano’ (22 Jan 1977) asserts that where the wrongdoer is concerned “the community must allow him the possibility of purifying himself, of expiating his guilt, or freeing himself from evil; and capital punishment does not allow for this.” In so saying, the paper denies the expiatory value of death; death which has the highest expiatory value possible among natural things, precisely because life is the highest good among the relative goods of this world; and it is by consenting to sacrifice that life, that the fullest expiation can be made.
And again, the expiation that the innocent Christ made for the sins of mankind was itself effected through his being condemned to death. Remember, too, the conversion of condemned men at the hands of St. Joseph Carfasso; remember some of the letters of people condemned to death in the Resistance. Thanks to the ministry of the priest, stepping in between the judge and the executioner, the death penalty has often brought about wonderful moral changes, such as those of Niccolo de Tuldo, comforted by St. Catherine of Sienna who left an account of what happened in a famous letter of hers; or Felice Robol, assisted on the scaffold by Antonio Rosmini; or Martin Merino who tried to kill the Queen of Spain in 1852; or Jacques Fesch guillotined in 1957, whose letters from prison are a moving testimony to the spiritual perfection of one of God’s elect.
MODERN MAN DENIES EXPIATORY VALUE OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
The most irreligious aspect of this argument against capital punishment is that it denies its expiatory value which, from a religious point of view, is of the highest importance because it can include a final consent to give up the greatest of all worldly goods. This fits exactly with St. Thomas’s opinion that as well as canceling out any debt that the criminal owes to civil society, capital punishment can cancel all punishment due in the life to come.
Saint Thomas Aquinas’ thought expressed in the Summa is: “Even death inflicted as a punishment for crimes takes away the whole punishment due for those crimes in the next life, or at least part of that punishment, according to the quantities of guilt, resignation and contrition; but a natural death does not.”
The moral importance of wanting to make expiation also explains the indefatigable efforts of the Confraternity of St. John the Baptist Beheaded, the members of which used to accompany men to their deaths, all the while suggesting, begging and providing help to get them to repent and accept their deaths, so ensuring that they would die in the grace of God, as the saying went.
INVIOLABILITY OF LIFE?
The leading argument in the new theology of punishment is however the one that asserts an inviolable and imprescriptible right to life, that is alleged allegedly infringed when the state imposes capital punishment. The article we have cited says: “To the modern conscience, which is open, and aware of human values and man’s centrality and primacy in the universe, and of his dignity and his inalienable and inviolable rights, the death penalty is repugnant as being an anti-human and barbarous measure”
Some facts might be helpful in replying to this article, which sums up in itself all the abolitionists’ arguments. The prominence the ‘Osservatore Romano’ gives to the “modern conscience” is similar to the position accorded it by the French bishops’ document, which says “le refus de la peine de mort correspond chez nos contemporains à un progrès accompli dans le respect de la vie humaine” (“the rejection of the death penalty is an indication that our contemporaries have an increased respect for human life”).
A remark of that sort is born of the bad mental habit of going along with fashionable ideas and of letting the wish become father to the thought; a crude rebuttal of such unrealistic assertions is provided by the atrocious slaughter of innocents perpetrated in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the widespread use of physical violence by despotic regimes as an ordinary means of government, the legitimation and imposition of abortion by changes to the law, and the increasing cruelty of delinquents and terrorists, who are only feebly resisted by governments.
RIGHTS OF INNOCENT VS. GUILTY IGNORED
In discussions on the death penalty, the difference between the rights of an innocent and a guilty man are generally ignored. The right to life is considered as if it were inherent in man’s mere existence when, in fact, it derives from his ordination to values that transcend temporal life, and this goal is built into his spirit inasmuch as it is an image of God.
Although the goal is absolute and the image indelible, man’s freedom means that by a fault he can descend from that dignity and turn aside from his goal. The philosophical justification for penal law is precisely an axiological diminution, or shrinking in worth, on the part of a person who violates the moral order and who, by his fault, arouses society to some coercive action designed to repair the disorder. Those who base the imposition of penalties merely on the damage done to society, deprive penal law of any ethical character and turn it into a set of precautions against those who harm society, irrespective of whether they are acting freely or compulsively, rationally or irrationally.
TRUE CATHOLIC TEACHING
In the Catholic view, the penal system exists to ensure that the crime by which the delinquent sought some satisfaction or other in defiance of the moral law, is punished by some corresponding diminution of well-being, enjoyment or satisfaction. Without this moral retaliation, a punishment is merely a utilitarian reaction which indeed neglects the dignity of man and reduces justice to a purely materialistic level; such was the case in Greece when recourse was had to the Prytaneum, or city council, to pass sentence against rocks, trees or animals that had caused some damage.
HUMAN DIGNITY
Human dignity is something built into the natural structure of rational creatures but which is elicited and mace conscious by the activity of a good or bad will, and which increases or decreases within that order of being. No right thinking person would want to equate the human worth of the Jew in Auschwitz with that of his killer Eichmann, or St. Catherine of Alexandria with Thias the Alexandrian courtesan.
A person’s worth can only be reduced by actions within the moral realm; and therefore, contrary to popular opinion, it cannot be measured by some level of participation in the benefits of technological progress: by a quote of economic welfare, by a level of literacy, by a better health service, by an abundance of the pleasures that life provided or by the stamping out of diseases. Let there be no confusion between an increase in a person’s dignity or worth, which is a moral quality, and an increase in the possessions of those utilitarian benefits which unworthy men also enjoy.
POPE PIUS XII
The death penalty, and any other form of punishment, if they are not to descend to the level of pure defense and a sort of selective slaughter, always presuppose a moral diminution in the person punished: there is therefore no infringement of an inviolable or imprescriptible right involved. Society is not depriving the guilty person of his rights; rather, as Pius XII taught in his speech of 14 Sept 1952:
“même quand I s’agit de l’exécution d’un condamné à mort, l’Etat ne dispose pas du droit de l’individu à la vie. Il est reserve alors au pouvoir public de priver le condamné du bien de la vie en expiation de sa faute après que par son crime il s’est déjà dépossedé de son droit à la vie” (A.A.S., 1952, pp.779ff. “Even when it is a question of someone condemned to death, the state does not dispose of an individual’s right to life. It is then the task of public authority to deprive the condemned man of the good of life, in expiation of his fault, after he has already deprived himself of the right to life by his crime.”).
If one considers the parallel with one’s right to freedom, it becomes obvious that an innocent man’s right to life is indeed inviolable, whereas a guilty person has diminished his rights by the actions of his depraved will: the right to freedom is innate, inviolable and imprescriptible, but penal codes nonetheless recognize the legitimacy of depriving people of their liberty, even for life, as a punishment for crime, and all nations in fact adopt this practice. There is in fact no unconditional right to any of the goods of earthly life; the only truly inviolable right is the right to seek one’s ultimate goal, that is truth, virtue and eternal happiness, and the means necessary to acquire these. This right remains untouched even by the death penalty.
SUMMARY
In conclusion, the death penalty, and indeed any kind of punishment, is illegitimate if one posits that the individual is independent of the moral law and ultimately of the civil law as well, thanks to the protection afforded by his own subjective moral code. Capital punishment comes to be regarded as barbarous in an IRRELIGIOUS or SECULAR or GODLESS society (like nowadays), that is shut within earthly horizons and which feels it has no right to deprive a man of the only good there is.
JUAN DONOSO CORTES
Some words of the great nineteenth-century Spanish Catholic political thinker Juan Donoso Cortes merit quotation again. His subject is capital punishment:
“Governments seem to be endowed with an unerring instinct that teaches them they can only be just or strong in the Name of God. Thus, it happens that whenever they commence to secularize, that is to say, separate themselves from God, they always begin to relax the severity of penalties, as if conscious that their right has weakened. The loose modern theories regarding criminal law are contemporaneous with the decadence of religion, and they have prevailed in the code wherever the complete secularization of political power was established….
“Those who would have the world believe that this earth can be converted into a paradise, have not more readily made it believe it ought to be a paradise where blood is never shed. The end is not in the illusion, but in the very day and hour that this fallacy is everywhere accepted; blood will then gush from the rocks and the earth will become a hell. Man cannot aspire to an impossible felicity in this obscure valley of our dark passage without losing the little happiness he already possesses.”
AVE MARIA!
Father Joseph Poisson
Consecration of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel to Immaculate Heart of Mary
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Given By His Excellency Bishop Pfeiffer