I very much hope that this execution does not go ahead in China, although I fully expect that it will. But those shouting loudest against the Yellow Peril have no compunction about the execution of the mentally ill, among others, in America, and would cheerfully reintroduce the loathsome practice of capital punishment here, including for those who merely happen to be their political opponents.
They certainly would not see whatever "bipolar disorder" is (there was no such thing less than a decade ago, and it is so limiting that Stephen Fry has it) as a mitigating circumstance here. Nor would it be so regarded in the country to which they feel their patriotic allegiance even though it is in no sense their own. Never mind in certain others places to which they are almost as loyal, such as Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
"They certainly would not see whatever "bipolar disorder" is (there was no such thing less than a decade ago..."
ReplyDeleteThere most certainly was. It was called 'manic depression' then and was just as seriously debilitating and life threatening as it is today under its 'new' name.
Try watching a loved one suffer from this AWFUL, hideous illness and then doubt its capacity to wreck lives.
Oh, is that what it is? Well, again, you wouldn't be let off the death penalty for that in America, nor in Britain if those shrieking against the slitty-eyed rice-pickers had their way.
ReplyDeleteAnd again, is Stephen Fry not responsible for his actions? This poor man may have other things wrong with him, but bipolar disorder is the one being cited.
Why was the name changed? There will be a reason and it will matter.
ReplyDeleteMr Lindsay, did not Aquinas and the Church Fathers in general support capital punishment in certain (limited) circumstances? Did not every catechism before the CCC's eventual revision do so? If there was across-the-board anti-death-penalty sentiment in any major branch of Christianity before JP2, I don't know about it.
ReplyDeleteIt's tarring your critics with a very broad brush indeed to maintain that every reader who wants to bring back capital punishment (in preference to, say, forcing the taxpayer to subsidize Myra Hindley's or Josef Fritzl's existence for decades on end) is some sort of sadist getting his jollies from offing either the mentally ill or political opponents, n'est-ce pas?
Not every such reader, no.
ReplyDeleteThe promulgation of the final text of the CCC was an exercise of the infallibility of the whole Episcopal College under and including the Pope.
Ah, Mr Lindsay, not so fast there! The Catechism of the Catholic Church's eventual opposition to the death penalty an infallible part of Catholic doctrine? Not so, according to the definition of infallibility propounded at the First Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution. There, we read:
ReplyDelete"For the Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not that they should manifest a new doctrine by his revelation, but rather that with his assistance, they should religiously safeguard and faithfully teach the revelation that was handed down through the Apostles - the deposit of faith."
Opposition to the death penalty is, whichever way you look at it, "a new doctrine". Not the faintest suggestion of such a doctrine marked the utterances of any Catholic authority before John Paul II. (Quite the contrary.) Therefore, I fail to comprehend how such opposition can be "infallible" in the slightest degree, particularly since in the CCC's own first edition it did not exist. (If it were infallible, the Vatican would punish open and public dissenters from it, such as the pro-death-penalty traditional Catholic Judge Scalia in the USA.)
And even if per impossibile it could be demonstrated that opposition to capital punishment was obligatory for Catholics, what of non-Catholics, who, after all, are still a majority in the UK? I am unaware of a single Protestant church leader - for as long as Protestantism has been around - who has condemned the death penalty. Ditto with the Eastern Orthodox. Why, even Our Blessed Lord Himself did not oppose execution as such!
Then there is the purely prudential consideration. Peter Hitchens has made it clear again and again that any social conservatism which does not include reinstating the gallows is, in Britain (and, I would argue, in Australia also), politically doomed. Such a failure would be the final triumph of Roy Jenkins from the grave.
I wish Mr Lindsay well in 2010, but I am convinced that he is damaging himself on this topic.
"Opposition to the death penalty is, whichever way you look at it, "a new doctrine"."
ReplyDeleteOh, not at all. It has been implicit from the start, in the way that opposition to slavery was. It took the Church a long time to understand and apply properly, but when She did, She became the most important voice on the subject. The same thing is rapidly becoming the case with the death penalty: the Church is rapidly becoming the world's leading voice against it.
As with opposition to slavery, the Church had never condemned outright opposition to the death penalty. And now, as with opposition to slavery, She actively teaches it as a making explicit of that which has always been implicit. Likewise the apparently changed attitude to absolute pacifism, which is not my own position: absolute pacificism has never been condemned, so the Teaching of the Church has not changed.
Every "mainline" Protestant leader in Britain and most Evangelical leaders have condemned capital punishment for a generation, and in at least the former case for that long again or longer. The churches were key players in securing abolition. If a motion condemning it were now put before the General Synod of the Church of England, or the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, or the Methodist Conference, then it would almost certainly pass unanimously, and near (if near)-unanimously at the Baptist Union or the Evangelical Alliance.
But such a motion is inconceivable. As is any Commons Bill or amendment to restore the practice. Proposed by whom? Even the few remaining Tories who say that they would vote for it say that strictly on the unspoken (but thus all the stronger) understanding that someone else would have to propose it, which no one ever will now.
Far from being essential to a conservative revival, this is the cause, probably more than any other, association with which would scupper any such movement from the start.
I shan't pester Mr Lindsay again after this. But I would merely point out - in response to his most recent comment - the following:
ReplyDelete(a) How does anyone reconcile an "implicit" Catholic hatred towards slavery with the teachings of St Paul, which, on the topic of slaves, say the precise opposite? (Or with Pius IX's support of Jefferson Davis?) St Paul made it absolutely clear that slaves should be treated properly, not that slaves should ipso facto be freed.
(b) Along with millions of others, I was taught in Catholic catechism classes that nothing new has been added to the deposit of Catholic faith since the death of the last Apostle. (This rather puts a banana skin under the whole "development of doctrine" shebang, whether on the death penalty or on anything else.)
(c) All mainline Protestant denominations' leaders (whether in Britain, in Australia, in Canada, or in the States) are so notoriously unrepresentative of what the average Protestant in the pews actually wants, that their views - as a guide to political feasibility - are worse than worthless. (Nobody supposes that there was ever a huge grassroots demand for Lutheran "gay marriage", or Anglican priestesses, or whatever. Protestants got these phenomena, and similar horrors, simply because ruthless minorities seized their churches' commanding heights.)
If mainline Protestant leaders had the faintest interest in what their congregations desired, they would be attracting followers. Instead, they are losing them to Rome and, much more, to the Pentecostal megachurches. There is a reason why their churches are closing down, why their organs are being sold off via the Internet at bargain-basement rates, and so forth.
So: even if Mr Lindsay were correct in his statement that "Every 'mainline' Protestant leader in Britain and most Evangelical leaders have condemned capital punishment for a generation" (and I continue to maintain that Mr Lindsay is wrong: were not Roy Jenkins, Sydney Silverman, and Ludovic Kennedy far more important?), it would prove nothing, either about these leaders' ability to reflect their congregations' wants, or about the extent to which we should take such leaders' anti-hanging exhortations seriously. As for Catholicism, I say again: the pro-capital-punishment Judge Scalia goes unreprimanded, which indicates that even if Mr Lindsay supposes anti-capital-punishment sentiments to be de fide the Vatican itself doesn't. (And Aquinas didn't either.)
Aquinas didn't believe in Our Lady's Immaculate Conception, either. I once heard someone suggest that he was therefore still in Purgatory. But that was from a Jesuit novice. He'll learn.
ReplyDeleteNor do I subscribe to the "development of doctrine" theory. But the Church has never infallibly condemned total opposition to slavery (to which I subscribe), or total opposition to the death penalty (to which I subscribe), or absolute pacifism (to which I do not subscribe). Therefore, She has changed nothing by explictly teaching the first, nor by explicitly teaching the second, nor by explicitly teaching the permissability (not the requirement) of the third.
If the churches had not supported the abolition of the death penalty in the Sixties (and we must remember that it was that long ago), then it is extremely unlikely that it would have happened, so great was the public hostility that did not quite apply in the same way to abortion, divorce or homosexuality.
The C of E, in particular, also supported the first (wrongly, although when pro-life motions are put before the General Synod then they are always passed by huge majorities), the second (wrongly), and the third (righly, since the idea that homosexuality could be cured by sending them to prison had not been properly thought through). But the Protestant bodies were all much less liberal in those days than they are now, mistakenly believing that abortion and divorce would apply only in certain extreme circumstances; and of course in those days the homosexualist political movement had not yet emerged, since the Stonewall Riots still lay in the future.
Please keep pestering me.