The Catholic Weekly 26 July 2020

19 26, July, 2020 catholicweekly.com.au COMMENT could be regarded as criticism of the Chinese communist re- gime. In The Next Pope: The Of- fice of Peter and a Church in Mission (recently published by Ignatius Press), I suggest that the institutional default positions in Vatican diploma- cy do not reflect two lessons taught by the late 20th centu- ry: the only authority the Holy See has in world politics today is moral authority; that mor- al authority is depleted when the Church fails to speak the truth to power, especially to- talitarian and authoritarian power. The truth can be spoken prudently and in charity; but it must be spoken. If the truth is not spoken, the Vatican tacitly confesses its weak- ness and is always playing defence on a field defined by the enemies of Christ and the Church. Recent papal diplomacy has constantly stressed the importance of “dialogue.” And yes, “Jaw, jaw is better than war, war,” as Winston Chur- chill famously said. But Vat- ican efforts at dialogue that do not begin from the under- standing that authoritarian and totalitarian regimes re- gard “dialogue” as a tactic for maintaining their power are not going to get very far. The current Chinese re- gime, for example, is not in- terested in “dialogue” about or within Hong Kong; it is in- Are we really pacifists? Time to revise Vatican policy D uring a short papal flight from Boston to New York on Oc- tober 2, 1979, Fa- ther Jan Schotte (later a car- dinal but then a low-ranking curial official) discovered that Cardinal Agostino Casaro- li, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, had done some serious editing of the speech Pope John Paul II would give at the United Nations later that day. Schotte, who had helped develop the text, found to his dismay that Cardinal Casaro- li had cut just about every- thing the Soviet Union and its communist bloc satellites might find offensive – such as a robust papal defence of reli- gious freedom and other hu- man rights. Schotte took the cut text to John Paul II and explained why he thought Casaroli, the architect of the Vatican’s at- tempt at a rapprochement with communist regimes in the late 1960s and 1970s, was wrong to dumb down the speech. John Paul looked over the marked-up text, thought a bit, and then took Schotte’s ad- vice. Speaking at what the world imagined to be its greatest rostrum, he would make a strong, principled defence of human rights. And if tyran- nical regimes were upset by that, too bad. They were indeed upset, and their unease was palpa- ble to all of us in the General Assembly Hall that day. But embattled Catholics behind the iron curtain were remind- ed that they had a champion in Rome who was not going to play world politics by the world’s rules. The Pope was going to play by evangelical rules. Cardinal Schotte’s recollec- tions of that incident, which he recounted to me in 1997, have taken on a new salience, for Vatican diplomacy seems to be reverting to a Casaro- li-style accommodation of thuggish regimes. Earlier this month, for ex- ample, a Sunday Angelus ad- dress in which Pope Francis would express, in the mild- est possible way, concerns about the new National Se- curity Law in Hong Kong and its chilling effect on human rights was distributed to re- porters an hour before the noontime Angelus. Then, shortly before the Pope appeared, reporters were told that the remarks on China and Hong Kong would not be made after all. It is not difficult to imag- ine what happened: a disciple of the late Cardinal Casaro- li likely persuaded the Pope to avoid saying anything that terested in crushing the lib- erties it swore it would honor after the city reverted to Chi- nese sovereignty in 1997. To pretend otherwise makes the situation worse. The same cautionary rubric applies to Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Russia, and other systemic violators of human rights. In The Next Pope , I under- score that truth-telling in Vat- ican diplomacy is also essen- tial for evangelical reasons. In countries that systemati- cally abuse their people, the Church’s mission to proclaim the Gospel is impaired when those people do not perceive the Catholic Church as their defender. Thus the next pope, I pro- pose, should mandate a wholesale re-evaluation of Vatican diplomacy in the post-World War II period, bringing qualified lay experts into the discussion. That study must include a thorough, unblinkered eval- uation of the Casaroli lega- cy, which remains a force in the papal diplomatic service and the curial bureaucra- cy – despite incontrovertible, documented evidence that Cardinal Casaroli’s approach to communist powers failed, and in fact made matters worse. The Holy See’s moral authority, and the Church’s evangelical mission, are at stake. George Weigel is the Distin- guished Senior Fellow and William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Centre in Washington L ast week in Terre Haute prison, Indi- ana, three men were given lethal injec- tions. Convicted murderers Daniel Lewis Lee, Wesley Ira Purkey and Dustin Lee Honk- en were the first US federal inmates to be put to death in 17 years. The Trump administra- tion’s resumption of capi- tal punishment in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis has shocked and angered many Americans, including many men and women of faith. The archbishop of India- napolis, Charles Thompson, issued a statement a month ago in which he forthrightly condemned the executions that were shortly to take place in his diocese, citing para- graph 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church . As revised by Pope Francis ... embattled Catholics behind the iron curtain were reminded that they had a champion in Rome who was not going to play world politics by the world’s rules. The Pope was going to play by evangelical rules.” The resumption of federal executions in the US raises questions about whether capital punishment is ever justified in 2018, this paragraph de- clares that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolabili- ty and dignity of the person.” Thompson took the term “in- admissible”, in this context, to mean “morally inadmissible.” When Pope Francis first announced this revision, some were quick to decry (or applaud) the amendment as a reversal of Church teaching. Was it so? The resumption of federal executions in the US is an appropriate occasion to reopen this question. The revision’s prima fa- cie inconsistency with long- standing Catholic teaching is difficult to deny. St Paul says in Romans 13 that sec- ular rulers do not “bear the sword” in vain but are rather ministers of God’s vengeance against wrongdoers, which seems a Scriptural endorse- ment of capital punishment for at least some crimes. (The sword is, after all, an instru- ment of violent death.) Most Church Fathers and scholastics, including St Au- gustine and St Thomas, ap- proved the death penalty for serious crimes, as did St Al- phonsus Liguori, widely con- sidered the Church’s greatest moral theologian. The Roman Catechism and the Catechism of St Pius X both approved it. Numerous popes, including Pope St Pius V and Blessed Pope Pius IX, personally or- dered executions. ArchbishopThompson averred that the 2018 revi- sion to the Catechism was at any rate consistent with the teachings of Francis’ immedi- ate predecessors. Yet this too is questionable. True, both Pope St John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI wished to see an end to the death penalty and urged governments around the world to discontinue it. But John Paul acknowledged in Evangelium Vitae (§56) that, in extremely rare cases, capi- tal punishment might be jus- tified. The older version of paragraph 2267 of the Cate- chism accordingly stated that the Church “does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending hu- man lives against the unjust aggressor”. Pope Benedict never ex- pressed any disagreement with this statement, let alone any wish to revise or delete it. St Paul warns that we must not do evil that good may come. If, as per Thompson’s reading of the revised para- graph, capital punishment is intrinsically immoral (“mor- ally impermissible”), it could surely not be justified even in cases when it is the only possible means of defending human lives against unjust aggression. (In a somewhat similar way, abortion is not justified even in the merciful- ly rare cases when saving the mother’s life depends on it.) If capital punishment for even the worst of crimes is “an attack on the inviolabili- ty and dignity of the person,” and hence immoral, it surely follows that intentional killing of any kind, under any cir- cumstances, is immoral. Should Catholics then demand that their nation’s armed forces be disbanded? Should the police be deprived of their right to use lethal force in extreme situations like the 2014 Lindt Café siege? The reasoning of the revised paragraph 2267 seems im- plicitly pacifist, if not anar- chist. Inclusion in the Catechism does not guarantee a state- ment’s infallibility, else the Catechism could never be re- vised. While Catholics must not lightly refuse their assent to any papal teaching, both the strength of prior magisterial support for capital punish- ment and the disturbing im- plications of the revised para- graph 2267 make it at least questionable whether we are bound, on pain of sin, to as- sent to it. We may still believe that the death penalty is unnec- essary under modern con- ditions, or objectionable on extrinsic grounds such as the danger of occasional wrong- ful convictions in capital cas- es. But let us not be too hasty to condemn it as intrinsically immoral. Dr Jeremy Bell lectures in philosophy, theology, litera- ture and history at Campion College Australia. Jeremy Bell St John Paul II greets Poles during his historic 1979 trip to Poland. PHOTO: CNS PHOTO/CHRIS NIEDENTHAL If capital punishment for even the worst of crimes is ‘an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,’ and hence immoral, it surely follows that intentional killing of any kind, under any circumstances, is immoral.” George Weigel Columnist