The Pope’s Un-Catholic Scolding Against The Death Penalty Demeans And Cheapens Innocent Life

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Why is it that we support clubs of people who think they can impose some unjust law upon the whole planet?  How in the world is a collection of subsidized scolders, winers, and diners supposed to impose a worldwide moratorium on anything?  Why does the Pope think they can?

Pope Francis delivered a letter this week to the International Commission against the Death Penalty

With these letters, I wish to have my greeting reach all the members of the International Commission against the Death Penalty, to the group of countries that support it, and to those who collaborate with the organism over which you preside. I wish, in addition, to express my personal gratitude, and also that of men of good will, for your commitment to a world free of the death penalty and for your contribution to the establishment of a universal moratorium of executions worldwide, with a view to abolition of capital punishment.

Plato was clear, “When there is crime in society, there is no justice,” and if you look around you’ll find plenty of crime.  You’ll also find plenty of people teaching that actual justice is unjust or useless.

L.A. Archbishop Jose Gomez rolled out the tired pseudo-Catholic appeal against the death penalty once again this week, arguing that we’re so ‘advanced’ now it’s unnecessary, as if the point of an execution was to keep the convict from hurting anyone else.  If we’re so advanced, why is there so much murder, and why don’t we understand that the point is to keep ‘others’ from killing, not the one already in jail?

The justice of an execution is secondary to the value in it.  Is it just to execute a murderer? Yes.  But the value in that justice is its effect on society.  When criminals are executed swiftly and accurately, other crimes are deterred and the innocent are protected.  It’s not a new formula.  It’s been tried, proven for ages.

Gomez also argued that we are incapable of identifying the guilty parties in the first place so mistakes abound.  Again, if we’re so advanced, why can’t we even capture and convict criminals?  Might as well throw in the towel I suppose.  It’s all pro-life you know, unless you’re an innocent victim.  In that case it’s your business to die cruelly while killers go free or get life in prison in deference to their own ‘dignity’ and in light of other advances.

Everything is pro-life now if you are a Catholic bishop.  In the ‘seamless garment’ world illegal immigration, food stamps, unemployment benefits, government healthcare, and foreign aid are all the same thing as protecting unborn children from murder.  It’s because of ‘human dignity’ and poverty causes crime, you know. (Also, hate speech causes suicides.)

After listing some of the research he has performed, Pope Francis writes:

States can kill by action when they apply the death penalty, when they take their peoples to war or when they carry out extra-judicial or summary executions. They can also kill by omission, when they do not guarantee to their peoples access to the essential means for life. “Just as the Commandment ‘do not kill’ puts a clear limit to ensure the value of human life, today we have to say ‘no to an economy of exclusion and inequality’” (Evangelii gaudium, 53).

It’s eerie and frightening to think that a man who would conflate murder with ‘access’ to essential means for life – meaning free food, shelter, clothing, and healthcare; is the world’s leading moral guide.  If redistributive programs are all pro-life, they must also be murderous to thwart!  What is murder, what is justice, and who is guilty?  Enemies of the state are guilty I suppose.

Life, especially human life, belongs to God alone. Not even the murderer loses his personal dignity and God himself makes himself its guarantor. As Saint Ambrose teaches, God did not want to punish Cain for the murder, as He wants the repentance of the sinner, not his death (Cf. Evangelium vitae, 9).

Are we now expected to believe that since God was merciful to Cain, He was never just?  What about the rest of the Bible? Is he saying that St. Ambrose also crusaded against the death penalty in the name of the Faith, or is this just co-opting a great saint on behalf of his 23rd P.C. cause?  Were they like this back then?

On some occasions it is necessary to repel proportionally an aggression underway to avoid an aggressor causing harm, and the necessity to neutralize him might entail his elimination: it is the case of legitimate defense (Cf. Evangelium vitae, 55). However, the assumptions of legitimate personal defense are not applicable to the social milieu, without risk of distortion. Because when the death penalty is applied, persons are killed not for present aggressions, but for harm caused in the past. Moreover, it is applied to persons whose capacity to harm is not present but has already been neutralized, and who find themselves deprived of their freedom.

John Paul II, cited here, confuses the death penalty with stopping a killer in his tracks before he can do harm. If his argument applies, then it completely undercuts the nature of a just society or punishment; both which result after the fact.  A little hermeneutic of continuity needs to be delivered to contemporary papal expressions.

Today the death penalty is inadmissible, no matter how serious the crime of the condemned. It is an offense against the inviolability of life and the dignity of the human person that contradicts God’s plan for man and society and His merciful justice, and it impedes fulfilling the just end of the punishments. It does no do justice to the victims, but foments vengeance.

This is blather, is it not?  There’s that new MercyJustice I keep reading about, and it’s insidious.  How much wrong will the Pope advocate in the name of God?  Justice is not vengeance.  God is not unjust. He is only ‘also’ merciful.  The Pope’s blatant scolding against the death penalty demeans and cheapens every innocent life.

When an entire society from Pope down to serial killer becomes unjust and murderous, it’s left only to God to apply justice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We Know Where FrancisChurch Is Headed. What Do We Do Now?

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Here, for sacrilege and to your condemnation…for mercy’s sake

At the Remnant Hilary White ask the important question, “What do we do now?”

More people are asking, what are we going to do when Pope Francis or the national bishops’ conference or the local bishop, orders all the priests to formally and publicly declare that they are willing to desecrate the Holy Eucharist? We can dismiss the objection that “this is already being done all over world, so what difference will it make?” Of course it is, and everyone knows that it was by the Church’s leadership making a habit of turning a blind eye to this horrifying abuse that we now find ourselves in this dreadful situation.

But the proposal at hand is qualitatively different. If Kasper and his followers (and his leaders) have their way, the abuse will become a universal norm. A decree, will be issued from the highest authorities that will require all priests everywhere to agree to betray Christ in this manner in a systematic, programmatic way, to formally assent to it as a precondition of their continuing to act as priests. Priests, all priests everywhere, will be required to at least be willing to desecrate the Holy Eucharist, to commit the grave sin of sacrilege.

At what point do we stop and say, “That’s enough.  My obedience to the heretical hierarchy is not required here.  It’s resistance that the Lord wants from me.”

I suppose a lot of people out there have refused to really think unflinchingly, to reason logically, where the Vatican II revolution was going to go, and are now shocked that it has gone where we Traditionalists had always said it would go: to disaster. Global catastrophe. But we seem to be very close to that ultimate conclusion.

“Schism” used to be a word one heard only either in history books or on the websites of the wackier sedevacantists. But now, and in an astonishingly short time, we are seeing some very prominent people using the “S-word” right out loud. So I don’t feel too bad voicing the same fear now that we appear to have moved into Phase II of a clearly deliberately planned and expertly executed revolution.

Why is it that if you see a hand or a plan in some major development, you’re paranoid; a conspiracy theorist?  Is it so irrational that the world’s movements have leaders, that the strong herd the weak, or that singular and unnatural things like gay marriage or euthanasia don’t just pop-up worldwide all at the same time for no reason?

Everything has to have been a normal evolution I suppose, a forward motion?  I don’t agree.  When the leadership of the Catholic Church for the first time in history, begins to share more goals with the powers of the world than they do with their own saints and teachings, working hand in hand either consciously or foolishly; you must assume that they are being leveraged, compromised somehow from the outside.

White sees this latest swing as a fatal blow.  Where will the Church be when this comes to pass?

Once they have overturned the actual words of Christ Himself as recorded plainly in the Gospel, all bets are off, and absolutely anything becomes a target. All the teachings of the Church will automatically, logically and inescapably, be rendered merely deterministic “rules” to be discarded at will. As many others are saying, the entire edifice of the Catholic religion is at stake, starting with the twin pillars of the Eucharist and the priesthood.

In the end, the Church Militant, united in grace, is the only real Church.  The more closely the visible Church approximates that, the more pure and living it will be.  Outside the Faith due to sin or heresy there is no true Church, so we don’t need to consider it so.  If most of the hierarchy is doctrinally heretical or manifested in practice, they’re not Catholic.

We must find a way to let the true Church Militant fight and grow, and let the morbid Church die.

 

Jubilee Year 101: Mercy is Social Justice and Social Justice is Mercy

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Gold Coin

There are two sides to this coin I owe you.

Much is being made of the Pope’s unorthodox, untimely, and frivolous use of the Jubilee Year to continue to ‘re-educate’ the world on ‘true mercy.’ Thankfully there have also been some warnings against a radical misunderstanding of God’s mercy which, if those running things have their way, can lead to widespread presumption and sacrilege.

Fr. Longenecker at Aleteia discusses the Year of Mercy and what it may mean.  Be prepared not to be over-simplistic.

The tradition of a Jubilee year dates back to the Old Testament. Every fifty years a jubilee was celebrated to mark the universal forgiveness of sins and pardon for all. Debts were forgiven and slaves were set free. The Catholic tradition of Jubilee years begins in the year 1300 when Pope Bonfiace VIII established a celebration in which sins would be fully forgiven for those who prayerfully and faithfully visited Rome to pray in the basilicas associated with the apostles.

At first pilgrims had only to visit the Basilica of St. Peter, but later the basilicas of St. Paul Outside the Walls, St. John Lateran and St. Mary Major were added. The Jubilee year was first intended to be only once a century, but because of popularity it began to take place every fifty years, then every thirty three years, then extraordinary jubilees were added for special events. Thus in Pope John Paul II’s pontificate there was the usual thirty three year jubilee in 1983 and an extraordinary “great jubilee” for the celebration of the millennium in 2000.

Then, in the “Time of Mercy”, 15 years later, we had another.

In order to fully appreciate the Jubilee of Mercy we have to fully understand what Pope Francis means by “mercy.” The most common understanding of mercy is being excused for a crime. A criminal stands before a judge and knowing his guilt and realizing that he deserves punishment, he pleads for mercy and a lighter sentence. While this understanding of mercy is not wrong, it is also not complete. Mercy is more than simply letting someone off the hook and not punishing them as severely as they deserve.

So mercy is even more than forgiving those who owe us debts.

In fact mercy and justice must be seen as two sides to the same coin. Justice is fulfilled, not denied when true mercy is exercised. This is because the justice which the law demands is always rightly balanced by the mercy which the human heart demands. Justice is completed by mercy and mercy is fulfilled by justice. In the Christian understanding, our redemption is completed when mercy and justice are both fulfilled by Christ’s death on the cross. There punishment for sin is finished and mercy and redemption are won through Christ’s victory.

Can this possibly make sense?  Mercy isn’t “completed by justice”.  If the heart demands something, does that mean we owe it?  Wouldn’t that be justice then to pay it?  And Jesus did not “finish punishment for sin.”  He just gave us a opportunity to receive His mercy through our repentance and His saving grace.  Punishment isn’t finished.  It’s still available.

Why must these important terms be so conflated and commingled?  I think perhaps it’s so next we can be convinced that mercy is justice and vice versa, so that in the end what we have is something wrong.

I know one group of people who would definitely agree with Fr. Longenecker though: our Bishops.  The American Bishops, who hide behind Prayers of the Faithful, and routinely support Leftist policy in the name of justice; also think mercy is justice.  In fact the entire faux social justice campaign is founded on an idea of justice that is really more akin to mercy, especially if by mercy you mean giving people things they have no right to and acting like you’re relieving them of a debt.

The common idea of Catholic social justice may be something like mercy, but it’s nothing like just.