Thread by @DouthatNYT

All right, let's attempt a thread on the Catholic Church and the death penalty. The starting point for the current debate is that historically the church has clearly accepted the death penalty as licit. To describe it as an intrinsic evil would therefore reverse past teaching.

There are anti-death penalty Catholic thinkers who argue that past teaching on this question was real but not authoritative/infallible, and therefore a reversal is possible. This is the position taken, for instance, by E. Christian Brugger in this debate:
thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/10/20341/

The approach that the Vatican has taken since John Paul II has not gone this far, however. Instead, the pope and the catechism made a prudential argument for the abolition of the death penalty in modern wealthy societies, on grounds that it was unnecessary for societal safety.

This effectively sidestepped the debate about whether the DP was intrinsically evil by seeking recourse in a kind of consequentialism: It might be okay to use it to protect society in some situations but probably not in modern conditions.

This move never seemed terribly coherent to me, since it didn't really address the fact that past church teaching had implied that the death penalty was retributively *just* and not merely a form of societal self-defense. But it did not amount to a reversal of past teaching.

And the keenest theological minds behind the JPII synthesis worked hard to argue for its prudential quality, and therefore its continuity with past church teaching -- for instance, Ratzinger in his public interventions, and Avery Dulles at length here:
firstthings.com/article/2001/0…

Now we have new language that seems to go further, describing the death penalty as "inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person," and urging its worldwide abolition.
ncregister.com/blog/edward-pe…

That looks more like reversal. And yet -- if you read the preamble to the change, there's still talk about how the change reflects the fact that "more effective systems of detention have been developed." And "inadmissible" is not the same (or is it?) as "intrinsically evil."

So you could argue -- and some will -- that we're still stopping sort of reversal, that the church is still emphasizing modern conditions to make a prudential argument rather than an absolute one -- even though some of its language is absolutizing.

But anyone arguing for continuity has to recognize that at the very least this kind of shift turns the traditional teaching into a sort of hermetic secret, available to ppl who read extremely carefully but invisible in the normal public teaching of the church.

Which is also the effective pattern in other arenas -- like divorce -- where Francis has sought to shift a teaching without formally using the language of reversal. You can argue that constant teaching remains constant, but no normal person listening to popes would think that.

Another way to see this is that on both the death penalty and divorce, the JPII synthesis stretched the claim of continuity -- with a prudential anti-death penalty arg that *sounded* absolute, and a liberal annulment policy -- without making a formal break.

Now Francis is going further, doing something dramatic enough to be described as "development of doctrine" or a "new paradigm" -- but still preserving a touch of deniability on the definitiveness of the change, in which continuitarians can take refuge.

In this case there may be less uproar, because conservative Catholics (see Brugger or Robert George or others) are less certain and more divided about the authoritativeness of past teaching on DP than they are about remarriage.

And speaking only for myself prudential arguments for opposing the death penalty seem more reasonable than prudential arguments for a truce w/the divorce revolution, and the DP seems less central to church teaching than marriage, so this shift is less personally faith-shaking.

But the bottom line is that this is another example of how Pope Francis has consistently exposed the tensions in the post-Vatican II conservative position, and pushed the JPII synthesis into intellectual crisis.

And as I said already at book length, I have no bloody idea how that crisis ends. /fin
amazon.com/Change-Church-…