Have Leo & Francis "partake[n] of humanitarian...assumptions incompatible with a Christian anthropology...[unlike] Benedict XVI [who] never ceased to insist, Christianity is never reducible to a humanitarian moral & political message"?
... As for the death penalty, Pope Francis believes that those who advocate it are simply succumbing to vengeance and thus deny the dignity of the one to be punished by execution, even for a truly heinous crime. But Kant believed that such a punishment reflected deep respect for the moral agency and responsibility of a murderer, for example. And St. Paul, St. Thomas, and almost every previous pope denied that capital punishment is always and everywhere “inadmissible” (#263). Pope Francis gives the game away when he comes out against life imprisonment which he calls “a secret death penalty” (#268).
With all due respect to the Holy Father, he has confused our religion with what C.S. Lewis called in God in the Dock “the humanitarian theory of punishment.” C. S. Lewis says very well what half-humanitarian Christians have forgotten: “(T)he Humanitarian theory wants simply to abolish Justice and to substitute Mercy for it.” Whatever this replacement is, it entails a radical and disturbing departure from age-old, sober Christian teaching which knows that mercy and justice “must meet and kiss.”
I make no apology for responding respectfully but critically to those parts of Fratelli Tutti that partake of humanitarian categories and assumptions incompatible with a Christian anthropology and conception of natural justice. Our Holy Father is a good man and bishop, a precious witness to the Gospel, who rightfully reminds us of the priority of neighborly love and “social friendship” for all Christians and men of good will. But when he departs from a specifically Catholic-Christian understanding of these imperatives he relies more on “private judgment” than the “truth about man” that is the source of the Church’s exquisite expertise about how human beings ought to live together. As his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI never ceased to insist, Christianity is never reducible to a humanitarian moral and political message. To do so is to “falsify the Good,” in the pregnant words of Vladimir Soloviev.
Comments