Time To Admit It

When The Catechism of the Catholic Church was being compiled, the then Pope and his eventual successor still needed the American Catholic Right for certain purposes. 

So they did not shy away from writing in de facto condemnations of its economic theories or what were increasingly becoming its views on geopolitics, because they knew that the people in question already just ignored everything that the Church said on those issues, anyway.

But they hedged about the condemnation of capital punishment, which everyone else had long simply assumed to be the Church's line, with caveats about "admissibility" that were designed to be impossible to implement in practice.

Perhaps they hoped that it would keep the door open to bringing the target readers round on everything else, at which point the penny would also drop about the death penalty. If so, then they were to be thoroughly disappointed.

Well, yesterday Pope Francis decided that he could no longer be bothered to play that game. Not being from the North Atlantic milieu, he does not see why there should always be whatever the United States happens to want.

Nor does he feel any need of an alliance with the figures who have turned Catholicism into a mere baptism of the presuppositions of one very particular, largely and culturally Protestant, section of American society and politics.

Those are only about half of weekly Mass-goers in the United States, who are in turn a fairly small minority of American Catholics in general, a very small minority of Americans in general, and a tiny minority of Catholics in general.

They need to get over themselves, and to tell people to get over themselves is a very important part of why there is a Pope at all.

Next, he can tell them that they also have to start listening on wealth and poverty, war and peace. He can, and he will. 

Again, he will be saying nothing new, nor anything surprising to the rest of the Church or to the rest of the world. The novelty will be his insistence on being heard.

Of course, as with slavery, and as still with the lending at interest that will recur as an issue even if it did not do so until we were all dead, the Church has really, eventually, inescapably been opposed to capital punishment by virtue of everything else for which She stood.

And of course, and as the American experience fully bears out, it is impossible to argue to any practical effect that the State is entitled to put to death those whom it deems guilty even if they are not morally so, but that it is not entitled to define that legal guilt in such terms as to include anyone whom it might wish to euthanise or to abort.

No sizeable body of Catholics has done anything other than presuppose all of this for quite some time now. Except in one country, where they have felt entitled to do so.

They have felt entitled to do so on the grounds that they themselves were tremendously important, which they no longer are if they ever were, and that their political ideology trumped the Gospel, which it does not.

Indeed, they need to consider their own vulnerability. The political party to which they have attached themselves has never nominated a Catholic for President, and it never will. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, was terrifyingly enthusiastic about the death penalty.

And, as a comment on a post here yesterday put it, "Bill Clinton enthusiastically signed death warrants, Barack Obama rarely commuted death sentences. An increasingly frightened liberal elite would send traditional conservatives and the Left to the gallows together."

Indeed it would. And by no mean only in the United States.