ComplicitClergy

“Rome Has Spoken, Logic Is Finished”

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“Rome Has Spoken, Logic Is Finished”

There is a passage from Book Gamma of the Metaphysics that one always rereads with a rather uncharitable smile. Aristotle, weary of those who denied the principle of non-contradiction, decrees that there is no point in arguing with them: whoever claims that something can both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect resembles, he says, a plant. Not a fool, nor even a sophist: a vegetable. One likes to think that twenty centuries of theology took the warning seriously. God does not contradict Himself, truth does not contradict itself, and a Church assisted by the Spirit cannot teach on Monday the opposite of what it solemnly and universally taught until Sunday afternoon. All of this, of course, was before August 2, 2018. That day the Holy See published a rescript, approved in May and signed on August 1, that rewrote number 2267 of the Catechism. The 1997 text, drafted under John Paul II—who was hardly an enthusiast of the scaffold—admitted capital punishment only if it were …

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Ave Crux

So God violated human dignity when He Himself prescribed the penalty of death for certain crimes in Scripture? Have they even read Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy....?

Sally Dorman shares this

The article argues that the Catholic Church’s 2018 declaration that the death penalty is “inadmissible” contradicts centuries of previous Church teaching and cannot simply be called a “development of doctrine.”
Historically, Catholic teaching allowed capital punishment in principle when imposed by legitimate authority. Even the 1997 Catechism permitted it in extremely rare circumstances. Under Pope Francis, however, the Catechism was changed to say that capital punishment violates human dignity and that the Church seeks its worldwide abolition.
The author sees a logical dilemma: if human dignity makes execution inherently unacceptable, then it was always unacceptable and the Church taught error for centuries. If only modern circumstances—such as better prisons—have changed, then capital punishment is merely unnecessary today, not inherently wrong.
The Vatican maintains that the new position is an authentic development rather than a contradiction. The author rejects this, arguing that …More