Indeed,
though the Doctors of the Church are not individually infallible, it would be
absurd to suppose that they could all
be wrong on some theological issue about which they are in agreement. For given their high degree of sanctity, how
could all of them be wrong about some
matter of Christian morality? Given their
eminence in learning, how could all
of them fall into error on some point of doctrine or scriptural interpretation?
Given that they are formally recognized
by the Church as exemplary guides to faith and morals, how could they all collectively lead the faithful into
grave moral or theological error?
Consistency
with the consensus of the Doctors has, accordingly, been regarded by the Church
as a mark of orthodoxy in doctrine. For
example, in 1312 the Council of Vienne defended a point of doctrine by
appealing to “the common opinion of
apostolic reflection of the Holy Fathers and
the Doctors” (Denzinger section 480).
Also relevant is Tuas Libenter,
in which Pope Pius IX stated:
[T]hat subjection which is to be manifested by an act of
divine faith… would not have to be limited to those matters which have been
defined by express decrees of the ecumenical Councils, or of the Roman Pontiffs
and of this See, but would have to be extended also to those matters which are
handed down as divinely revealed by the ordinary teaching power of the whole
Church spread throughout the world, and
therefore, by universal and common consent are held by Catholic theologians to
belong to faith…
[I]t is not sufficient for learned Catholics to accept and
revere the aforesaid dogmas of the Church, but… it is also necessary to subject themselves… to those forms of doctrine
which are held by the common and constant
consent of Catholics as theological truths and conclusions, so certain that
opinions opposed to these same forms of doctrine, although they cannot be
called heretical, nevertheless deserve some theological censure. (Denzinger
sections 1683-1684, emphasis added)
Here Pius IX
held the consensus opinion of Catholic theologians to have such a high status
that even if opposed views are not strictly heretical, they nevertheless “deserve
some theological censure.” Now, the
Doctors of the Church are the theologians on whom the Church has placed a
special stamp of approval, putting them forward as models. It stands to reason that if there is a
consensus among them on some thesis
of faith or morals, that is powerful evidence that it must be correct.
Now,
consider the topic of capital punishment.
Even if we just confined ourselves to scripture, or to the consensus of
the Fathers of the Church, or to the consistent teaching of the popes down to
Benedict XVI, there can be no question whatsoever that the Church has taught
irreformably that capital punishment can be licit in principle. That is not to deny that some of the Fathers
and some of these popes have recommended against using it in practice, but the point is that even they
acknowledged that it is not intrinsically
wrong to inflict the death penalty.
Joseph Bessette and I demonstrate this at length in our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic
Defense of Capital Punishment.
I have also done so elsewhere, such as in my Catholic World Report article “Capital
Punishment and the Infallibility of the Ordinary Magisterium.”
All the
same, it is useful to consider what the Doctors of the Church have said on the
matter, because they too are in agreement that the death penalty can in
principle be a legitimate punishment.
This would be a powerful argument for the liceity of capital punishment
even if we didn’t already have scripture, the Fathers, and two millennia of
papal teaching. Adding the Doctors to
the witnesses on this matter puts icing on the cake, as it were, highlighting
the futility of thinking that this is a teaching the Church could reverse. The Doctors who have addressed the topic of
capital punishment include St. Ephraem, St. Hilary, St. Gregory of Nazianzus,
St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Bernard of
Clairvaux, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Peter Canisius, St. Robert Bellarmine, and
St. Alphonsus Liguori. (The earliest of
these thinkers are, of course, Fathers as well.) All of them agree that it can be morally
legitimate in principle, even those among them who recommend against using it
in practice. (See the book and article
referred to above for the details.)
We can now
add St. John Henry Newman to this consensus.
The death penalty was not a topic Newman said a great deal about, but
what he did say is important. For
example, in Lecture 8
of Lectures on the Present Position of
Catholics in England, Newman cites the following example of the way a
practice can be embodied in the tradition of a nation like England rather than in
explicit law: “There is no explicit written law, for instance, simply declaring
murder to be a capital offence, unless, indeed, we have recourse to the divine
command in the ninth chapter of the book of Genesis.” (This statement is from a longer passage
first written when Newman was a Protestant, which he quotes in order to comment
on it. As he immediately goes on to say
about the passage, “I see nothing to alter in these remarks, written many years
before I became a Catholic.”)
Newman’s
reference here is to Genesis 9:5-6, which states:
For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of
every beast I will require it and of man; of every man’s brother I will require
the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood
of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image.
Newman
understands this passage to be an “explicit written law… declaring murder to be
a capital offence,” and one that holds of “divine command.” Note that this is diametrically opposed to modern
attempts to reinterpret this passage as merely a divine prediction that murder
would as a matter of fact lead to
retaliation. For Newman, God is not
merely predicting but indeed commanding that murderers should be
slain, and as a matter of punishment. And here he is, of course, simply reiterating
what the traditional understanding always said.
In a series
of letters to his nephew, Newman addressed questions about whether
the Church has behaved in an immoral way over the centuries. Among the points he makes are that one must
distinguish between, on the one hand, the state’s having the power justly to
punish offenders with death, and on the other hand, specific cases where this
power was used in a cruel manner. He
writes:
It is on the Inquisition that you mainly dwell; the question
is whether such enormity of cruelty, as is commonly ascribed to it, is to be
considered the act of the Church. As to
Dr. Ward in the Dublin Review, his
point (I think) was not the question of cruelty,
but whether persecution, such as in Spain, was unjust; and with the capital punishment prescribed in the Mosaic
law for idolatry, blasphemy, and witchcraft, and St. Paul's transferring the
power of the sword to Christian magistrates, it seems difficult to call
persecution (commonly so called) unjust.
I suppose in like manner he would not
deny, but condemn, the craft and cruelty, and the wholesale character of
St. Bartholomew's Massacre; but still would argue in the abstract in defence of
the magistrate's bearing the sword, and of the Church's sanctioning its use, in
the aspect of justice, as Moses, Joshua, and Samuel might use it, against
heretics, rebels, and cruel and crafty enemies.
Note first
that Newman says that capital punishment is “prescribed” in the Mosaic law for
various offenses, and that such killing is to be understood “in the aspect of
justice.” This should, of course, be obvious
enough to anyone who reads the first five books of the Old Testament, but
occasionally people will suggest that the Old Testament merely permits the death penalty without
actually commending it. Clearly, Newman
would have no truck with such sophistry.
The second
thing to note is Newman’s allusion here to Romans 13: 3-4, which says:
For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is in
authority? Then do what is good, and you
will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does
not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on
the wrongdoer.
This has
traditionally been understood as sanctioning capital punishment, and Newman
clearly has this interpretation in mind when he refers to “St. Paul's
transferring the power of the sword” and “the magistrate's bearing the sword,
and of the Church's sanctioning its use.”
With this passage too, death penalty opponents sometimes propose
strained reinterpretations, but Newman would not agree with them.
But there is
more to be said. For note that Newman
refers, specifically, to “St. Paul's transferring the power of the sword to Christian magistrates.” This too is part of the traditional
understanding, and yet another thing that modern day abolitionists sometimes
resist. For it is sometimes proposed
that, even if the death penalty is licit as a matter of natural law, its use is
not compatible with the higher demands of specifically Christian morality. Newman would clearly reject this claim as
well. Again, he holds that St. Paul’s
teaching authorizes the use of capital punishment for Christian rulers in particular, not merely for states governed
only by natural law.
In short, we
now have the testimony of yet another Doctor of the Church that the liceity of
the death penalty is the teaching of Genesis 9 and Romans 13, and that this
teaching is a matter of Christian morality no less than of natural law. This directly contradicts those who claim
that the Church could teach that capital punishment is intrinsically wrong, or
that scripture merely tolerates rather than sanctions it, or that it is
contrary to the higher demands of the Gospel even if it is consistent with
natural law.
Now, Newman
is best known for his theology of the development of doctrine. Could claims like the ones we’ve just seen
him reject nevertheless be justified by Newman’s own criteria as “developments”
of Church teaching on the death penalty?
Clearly not, because Newman, like St. Vincent of Lerins (the other great
theologian of doctrinal development), insists that a genuine development can
never contradict past teaching. Newman writes:
A true development [of doctrine], then, may be described as
one which is conservative of the course of antecedent developments being really
those antecedents and something besides them: it is an addition which
illustrates, not obscures, corroborates, not corrects, the body of thought from
which it proceeds; and this is its characteristic as contrasted with a
corruption… A developed doctrine which reverses the course of development which
has preceded it, is no true development but a corruption. (An
Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Chapter 5)
Suppose you
say “All men are mortal, and Socrates is a man.” If I add “So, Socrates is mortal,” I have
said something that can be said to be a development
of what you said, because it follows logically from what you said. It adds
something, insofar as it says something you did not yourself say. But nevertheless, what it adds was already
implicitly there in what you said, and I have simply drawn it out.
By contrast,
if I added something like “So, all men are redheads,” I could not be said to have developed what you
said, because my addition in no way follows from what you said, and indeed has
nothing at all to do with what you said.
Even more obviously, if I added either “Some men are immortal” or
“Socrates is immortal,” I would not only not have “developed” what you said,
but, on the contrary, I would have reversed
and contradicted what you said. For
the claim that “Some men are immortal” directly contradicts your statement that
“All men are mortal.” And the statement
“Socrates is immortal,” though it does not explicitly contradict what you said,
does contradict what was implicit in
your remarks.
Similarly,
to say that the death penalty is intrinsically wrong, or that it is not
sanctioned by scripture, or that it is never permitted by the higher standards
of Christian morality, would contradict
and reverse what scripture and tradition have consistently said. Hence to teach such things would, by Newman’s
criteria, not count as a development of doctrine, but rather as what he calls a
“corruption” of doctrine that attempts to “correct” rather than corroborate it,
and which “obscures” rather than illuminates it.
Newman, then, gives no aid and comfort whatsoever to Catholics who would like a doctrinal reversal on this matter. On the contrary, his words clearly condemn them.
Excellent, Thank you!
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