Connecticut's House and Senate have voted to repeal capital punishment and replace it with life in prison without the possibility of release. This bill will soon go to Governor Jodi Rell, who has promised to veto the legislation. The six Catholic bishops of Connecticut have urged the Governor to reconsider her decision in this letter posted on the Catholic Conference of Connecticut's website. The Conference is asking you to urge the Governor to sign H.B. 6578.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Connecticut Catholic Bishops Fight Death Penalty
Connecticut's House and Senate have voted to repeal capital punishment and replace it with life in prison without the possibility of release. This bill will soon go to Governor Jodi Rell, who has promised to veto the legislation. The six Catholic bishops of Connecticut have urged the Governor to reconsider her decision in this letter posted on the Catholic Conference of Connecticut's website. The Conference is asking you to urge the Governor to sign H.B. 6578.
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The Catholic Church has serious problems with their error filled positions against the death penalty.
ReplyDeleteDeath Penalty Support: Modern Catholic Scholars
Dudley Sharp
There are thoughtful writings on both sides of this debate, but the pro death penalty side is much stronger. Any Catholic in good standing can call for more executions, if their prudential judgement calls for it.
1) Avery Cardinal Dulles
The Church may return to a "more traditional posture" on the death penalty and just war. " . . . used sparingly and with safeguards to protect the interests of justice, both the death penalty and war have, over the centuries, been recognized by the church as legitimate, sometimes even obligatory, exercises of state power." "An unpublished interview with Avery Dulles", All Things Catholic, John L. Allen, Jr., NCRcafe.org, 12/19/08, http://ncrcafe.org/node/2340
2) Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J., considered one of the most prominent Roman Catholic theologians of the 20th century.
"There are certain moral norms that have always and everywhere been held by the successors of the Apostles in communion with the Bishop of Rome." " . . . they are irreversibly binding on the followers of Christ until the end of the world." "Such moral truths are the grave sinfulness of contraception and direct abortion. Such, too, is the Catholic doctrine which defends the imposition of the death penalty." "Most of the Church's teaching, especially in the moral order, is infallible doctrine because it belongs to what we call her ordinary universal magisterium."
Pope Pius XII insists "that capital punishment is morally defensible in every age and culture of Christianity." " . . . the Church's teaching on 'the coercive power of legitimate human authority' is based on 'the sources of revelation and traditional doctrine.' It is wrong, therefore 'to say that these sources only contain ideas which are conditioned by historical circumstances.' On the contrary, they have 'a general and abiding validity.' (Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 1955, pp 81-2)." "Capital Punishment: New Testament Teaching", Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J., 1998, www.therealpresence.org/archives/Sacred_Scripture/Sacred_Scripture_014.htm
3) Romano Amerio, a Vatican insider, scholar, professor at the Academy of Lugano, consultant to the Preparatory Commission of Vatican II, and a peritus (expert theologian) at the Council.
"The most irreligious aspect of this argument against capital punishment is that it denies its expiatory value which, from a religious point of view, is of the highest importance because it can include a final consent to give up the greatest of all worldly goods. This fits exactly with St. Thomas’s opinion that as well as canceling out any debt that the criminal owes to civil society, capital punishment can cancel all punishment due in the life to come. His thought is . . . Summa, 'Even death inflicted as a punishment for crimes takes away the whole punishment due for those crimes in the next life, or a least part of that punishment, according to the quantities of guilt, resignation and contrition; but a natural death does not." " . . . expiation is primarily a recognition of the divine majesty and lordship, which can be and should be recognized at every moment, in accordance with the principle of the concentration of one’s moral life." ". . . (the death penalty) has the highest expiatory value possible among natural things, precisely because life is the highest good among the relative goods of this world; and it is by consenting to sacrifice that life, that the fullest expiation can be made." "Amerio on capital punishment ", Chapter XXVI, 187. The death penalty, from the book Iota Unum, 5/25/07, www.domid.blogspot.com/2007/05/amerio-on-capital-punishment.html
SEE Pope John Paul II: Prudential Judgement and the death penalty,
http://homicidesurvivors.com/2007/07/23/pope-john-paul-ii-his-death-penalty-errors.aspx