UNITED STATES
First Things
by Aaron Taylor
11 . 5 . 14
ope Francis recently gave a speech to the International Association of Penal Law advocating for the improvement of prison conditions and reiterating pleas made by his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI for an end to the death penalty.
Francis, however, went further than either of his predecessors by extending Catholic critiques of capital punishment to life sentences, which he condemned as the “death penalty in disguise.” His comments have reopened debates in Italy about life sentences (nearby countries such as Spain and Portugal have abolished them) and prompted Catholic bishops in the Philippines to denounce life sentencing as “inhuman.”
Those of us who lean conservatively where criminal justice is concerned would do well to take to heart the Pope’s critique of the “vengeful trend which permeates society” and reflect on how our attitudes toward convicts line up with the teaching of Scripture. “Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them,” the author of the Letter to the Hebrews exhorts us (Heb 13:3). …
In his Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland, Pope Benedict XVI highlighted—among the causes of the sexual abuse crisis in the Irish Church—a loss of respect for the role that punishment plays in safeguarding the common good:
In particular, there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations. It is in this overall context that we must try to understand the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse, which has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of faith and the loss of respect for the Church and her teachings.
Time and again, extremely serious sex crimes committed by clergy went unpunished. The prevailing attitude in the 1970s was that as long as clergy went through therapy programs that were believed to counteract the physical threat they might pose to the safety of children, expiatory punishment such as turning them over to civil authorities, removing them from the clerical state, or banishing them to monasteries, served no useful purpose.
One of the reasons that isolated cases of sex abuse eventually turned into full-blown national crises was that although ecclesiastical authorities did have some (largely inadequate) regard to the need to defend children from abuse, they had no regard for the need to punish those who perpetrated the abuse. For the 1970s generation, the entire concept of “punishment”—whether relating to the theology of the atonement, the concept of the Eucharist as a propitiatory Sacrifice, or to holding clergy accountable for violations of moral and canon law—was something to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Catholics should think very carefully before we ask the civil community to apply to itself a philosophy of punishment that has borne such bitter fruit within the Church.
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