Catholic Sensibility

I am writing this on the evening of the Pope’s funeral. Perhaps it is time that we looked a bit closer at his teachings. Why did John Paul II take surprising positions on capital punishment and warfare? He declared that “War is never just another means that one can choose to employ for settling differences between nations,” and, during his papacy, the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace even said, "Modern society has to have, and it has, the means to avoid war." In suggesting that just war theory was practically outmoded, Archbishop Renato Martino compared the just war to the death penalty. Regarding capital punishment, John Paul II had already limited its legitimate use to the “absolute necessity” of self-defense, and, as Evangelium Vitae claims, “such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.” These developments, Thomas Rourke tells us, have to do with the realization that human beings, analogous to the divine persons in the Holy Trinity, are defined by their relationships to one another. Sin destroyed these relationships – in Maximus the Confessor’s words, “man’s tempter … had separated him in his will from God, had separated men from each other” – but we are reunited with God and each other through the Incarnation. As John Paul II wrote, “The Incarnation of God the Son signifies the taking up into unity with God not only of human nature, but in this human nature, in a sense, of everything that is ‘flesh’: the whole of humanity, the entire visible and material world” (Dominum et Vivificantem), and we all become brothers and sisters in a restored solidarity who can look at the entire cosmos with wisdom and love. This “taking up into unity” of “the whole of humanity” means that we are to touch Jesus in every single person – “For I was hungry and you gave me food …” (Mt 25:40). In fact, we cannot do otherwise. Seeing the presence of Jesus in other people is not merely an especially “graced,” ecclesiastical supplement to the “natural” way we may see others in, say, the secular courtroom. “Jesus shows that the commandments must not be understood as a minimum limit not to be gone beyond, but rather as a path involving a moral and spiritual journey towards perfection, at the heart of which is love” (Veritatis Splendor). And this rigorous “path” meant that the pope simply had to remove the death penalty from discussions of just retribution, limiting it to the “rare, if not practically non-existent” cases of self-defense. As Thomas Rourke writes about the Pope’s thought, “the practice of putting to death criminals who are no longer a threat to society weakens the intrinsic link between person and community and thereby helps to diminish the respect that we must have for the life of all human beings, even that of sinners, with whom we are bound both in time and in eternity.” This sort of “respect” is a lot to ask, but, then again, Jesus does not call us toward a “minimum limit.” And who can deny that there are aspects to the death penalty that “diminish the respect that we must have for the life of all human beings, even that of sinners”? The anthropologists Elizabeth D. Purdam and J. Anthony Paredes have written, "Just as Aztec ripping out of human hearts was couched in mystical terms of maintaining universal order and well-being of the state . . . capital punishment in the United States serves to assure many that society is not out of control after all, that the majesty of the Law reigns, and that God is indeed in his heaven." To the Pope, no order or assurance is worth more than the life of a human being, even a sinner, with whom we are “taken up into unity” in the Incarnation. And war? In Evangelium Vitae, the Pope noted, as “signs of hope,” both “a growing public opposition to the death penalty” and “a new sensitivity ever more opposed to war as an instrument for the resolution of conflicts between people.” William Portier says that, even if the Pope was not an absolute pacifist, his claim that morality is not a minimum, but a “journey towards perfection,” centered on love, “avoids a modern rights-oriented insistence on the legitimacy of self-defense and shifts emphasis to the kind of concern to minimize bloodshed” that we saw earlier with the Pope’s thought on the death penalty. The Church’s prayers for peace “so that the divine Goodness may free us from the ancient bondage of war” (CCC 2307) are not then merely an especially “graced,” ecclesiastical supplement to the “natural” way we are allowed to see others in the realm of politics. When we look at other nations, we really must try to see the presence of Christ, remembering that “Naturam in se universae carnis adsumpsit” (He assumed in himself the nature of all flesh). Even when the Pope did call for a limited “humanitarian intervention” in Bosnia in 1993, it was because, as he said days earlier in Assisi, “In the tormented land of the peoples and nations of the Balkans, Christ is present among all those who suffer and are undergoing a senseless violation of their human rights.” Why did the Pope take surprising stances on war and the death penalty? In a word, Christology. Are we willing to follow him?