death penalty – SIMCHA FISHER

Pro-life voters are now entirely free

For almost as long as I can remember, voters who understand the vital importance of the pro-life cause have had their consciences held captive by politics. Every election year, pro-lifers have been bullied, and have bullied each other, into voting for one candidate and shunning the other, with their very souls allegedly on the line.

People who more or less held the same views were invited or outright commanded to denounce each other as the enemy. But now that’s over. It’s done. We’re free.

Oh, folks on both sides are still arguing that it’s crystal clear we absolutely must vote this way or that way if we want to call ourselves pro-life. But now, neither party is willing to even fake an interest in actually being pro-life. The masks have come off entirely.

“But Simcha,” you may say. “I thought Trump and the Republicans were the pro-life party? Sure, Trump isn’t perfect but we’re looking for a politician, not a saint, and he’s clearly the only one who is willing to stand up to protect the unborn. At least compared to the alternative.”

Except that he just said into a reporter’s microphone that six weeks is “too short; there has to be more time … I want more weeks”; ie, the law should give women more time to decide whether or not to get an abortion (or, as often happens, more time to get pressured or coerced into an abortion). He said he would vote for just that in the upcoming Florida election.

Then, when people got upset, his campaign said he didn’t really mean it or really say anything and we’re just dumb for thinking he said anything.

He also said that, if he’s elected, his government will cover the cost of IVF for anyone who wants it, because “we want more babies.” IVF is intrinsically immoral because it replaces a sacred, creative act of love with a mechanised act of production in a lab. But even if that doesn’t bother you, IVF means millions of extra embryos are made, and then either imprisoned in a freezer indefinitely, or thrown away.

There is no IVF that is untainted by this wholesale murder of tiny humans. Babies are good; but cranking out babies like widgets and then throwing most of them away? That’s wrong.

This same Republican party absolutely lost their minds a few years ago when President Barack Obama said he was going to require Catholic employers to include contraception in their insurance coverage for employees. We were told this was a direct violation of religious freedom, and we must vote for Trump so he can liberate us from a government that would spend our tax dollars on the culture of death.

And now here we are. Maybe you will reply, “Well, this is all a shame, but you have to admit, he appointed judges to the supreme court who did what he promised, and they overturned Roe v Wade! Hard to argue with that as a pro-life win!”

Except that since this happened, the numbers of abortions have gone up. Yes, really. Why? My guess is this…

Read the rest of my latest (which I wrote before the debate, but nothing has changed) at The Catholic Weekly.

Image: James Boast Creative Commons

“Well, excuse me if I care more about innocent babies than criminals!”

Catholics who are in dissent from the Church – those who reject Church teaching on contraception, or male priesthood, or whatever — often say that the Church is right about everything else, but regrettably wrong about this one issue.

And those of us who are not in dissent respond incredulously, “How could that be? How could the Church be right about the resurrection, and transubstantiation, and eternal life, but wrong about this one issue? How do you even swallow that idea?”

But it’s just as senseless to say, “I care so deeply about this one important moral issue that I refuse to even acknowledge that there are other important moral issues.” And yet this is exactly what we’re hearing in the wake of the four paper’s joint editorial condemning the death penalty in the U.S. The comboxes are pretty much wall-to-wall reiterations of this argument: “Death penalty for criminals? Who cares? What I care about as a Catholic is ending the slaughter of the innocent unborn!”

This attitude displays a deep and disastrous misunderstanding of the consistency and interconnectedness of Church doctrine. The Church is consistent. Utterly consistent. All of her teachings spring from a unified understanding of what God is like and what human life is for.

So if we are going to pish-tush at some teaching of the Church — like the teaching that the death penalty is only to be used as a last resort when there is no other way of keeping society safe* — calling it “marginal” or “liberal,” or saying that we just can’t get ourselves to care about it? Then we are very close to being in dissent. At very least, we have what I might call a “dissenting mentality”: pretending to submit to the guidance of the Church, but actually only adhering to and defending the doctrines which appeal to us, while ignoring, scorning, or even openly defying the ones which we don’t like.

[the following paragraph added at 11 eastern for clarity:] I’m not talking about people who truly believe that the death penalty is, in some cases, the only way to keep society safe. I believe they are wrong, and that in this country, in this century, there is no compelling reason to execute any prisoner. But who I’m talking about is people who openly reject what the Catechism teaches: who say, “The hell with that. Blood demands blood. Some people are just scum of the earth, and justice demands that we wipe them clean.”

If some doctrine makes us uneasy, and we admit that we don’t like it or understand it? No problem! That’s just being honest, and we all have some catching up to do. So pray, pray, pray, turn it constantly over to God, beg for understanding and the grace to submit, and have passionate arguments with people you respect. That’s fine. God never commands us to be instantly calm and happy about All the Catholic Things.

But for your own soul’s sake, if you have reservations or doubts, don’t be flippant or nasty about them, or, God forbid, proud of them. Belligerently parading around with a “dissenting mentality” is like going to a friend’s house, greeting the host nicely, displaying perfect manners during dinner, — and then going to the bathroom and crapping all over the floor. And then writing a gracious thank-you note for a lovely evening.

Guess what? It’s all one house. If you want to be a good guest, you have to behave yourself in every room.

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*2267 Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm – without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself – the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”⁶⁸

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Four major Catholic journals: End the death penalty

I used to favor the death penalty. It feels right, bracing, and perfectly just. When people commit intolerable crimes, they should be removed from society, cleanly and permanently. It just feels right.

But as civilized people, the powers we grant to the state must be based on facts, not on feelings. Here are the facts about the death penalty in the United States:

It does not decrease crime.
It does not bring closure to the families of victims.
It is not the only way, in this country, to ensure the safety of other citizens.
It is often administered cruelly.
And it is sometimes imposed on the innocent.

A few years ago, my husband Damien Fisher interviewed Kirk Bloodsworth, a man who was convicted of raping a nine-year-old girl, strangling her, and beating her to death with a rock. Five witnesses placed him at the scene, he matched the description of the killer, and he made statements to police which seemed to incriminate him.

He spent nearly nine years in prison, two years on death row. And then, after urgent demands from the defense team, investigators discovered the physical evidence for the murder case, which had gone missing. It was in the bottom of a judge’s closet, inside a paper bag inside a cardboard box, and it had never been tested.

The state did a DNA test, and discovered that Bloodsworth was innocent. Another inmate, who looked nothing like Bloodsworth or the description given by the five witnesses, had raped and murdered the little girl. The case had gone through all the right legal channels, but the conclusions was disastrously, criminally wrong.

In the interview, here reprinted by an anti-death penalty advocacy group, my husband says:

A bad prosecutor, a bad judge, bad police work, bad forensics, shaky witnesses, all contribute to death penalty cases on a regular basis. Bloodsworth said one in every eight death row cases are overturned because the person convicted is innocent, and yet all of those cases went though trial and appeals and were reviewed by investigators, lawyers, and judges. In his case, at least 50 people looked at the supposed facts before he was sentenced to death.

And because of this, an innocent man lost nearly a decade of his life, and almost died at the hands of the state. This is intolerable.

But what about the guilty? Don’t they deserve to die, when they commit heinous crimes?

Not according to Catholic teaching. Today, the National Catholic Register, Our Sunday Visitor, the National Catholic Reporter, and America magazine have simultaneously released a strongly-worded joint editorial statement calling for an end to the death penalty in the United States.

The Catholic Church in this country has fought against the death penalty for decades … The practice is abhorrent and unnecessary. It is also insanely expensive as court battles soak up resources better deployed in preventing crime in the first place and working toward restorative justice for those who commit less heinous crimes.

The editorial quotes Archbishop Chaput’s statement on the reprieve of death row inmates in PA, and challenges us to face our moral responsibility as citizens:

Archbishop Chaput reminds us that when considering the death penalty, we cannot forget that it is we, acting through our government, who are the moral agents in an execution. The prisoner has committed his crime and has answered for it in this life just as he shall answer for it before God. But, it is the government, acting in our name, that orders and perpetrates lethal injection. It is we who add to, instead of heal, the violence.

Note, my fellow Catholics, the significance of the four papers who came together for this project: The National Catholic Register and OSV lean right, and the National Catholic Reporter and America lean left. The clear message is this: opposition to the death penalty should unite Catholics, rather than polarizing them. It is not a political issue; it is a moral one. The teaching of the Catholic Church is that the death penalty in 21st century America is almost never just, nor moral, nor necessary:

2267 Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm – without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself – the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”⁶⁸

This is the teaching of our Faith. If this teaching feels wrong to us, then we are the ones who must come into conformity with the mind of the Church. Because we have the guidance of the Church, Catholics should be at the forefront of the push to end the death penalty in this country.

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Further reading from my fellow Patheos bloggers:

An endorsement from Elizabeth Scalia on behalf of Patheos Catholic: We Are Catholic
Tom Zampino: 3 Reasons Why I No Longer Actively Support the Death Penalty
Dwight Longenecker: C.S. Lewis and the Death Penalty
Kathy Schiffer: Last Meals and Redemptions
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