There is no question in my mind but that Zacarias Moussaoui is twisted and evil:
Moussaoui said he had "no regret, no remorse" about the 9/11 attacks. Asked by prosecutor Rob Spencer if he would like to see it happen again, Moussaoui responded: "Every day until we get you." (Link)
But should he put to death?
The best analysis of the morality of the death penalty I've ever read was Avery Cardinal Dulles' April 2001 First Things article Catholicism & Capital Punishment. His careful and nuanced analysis concludes by extracting 10 theses from the Magisterium:
The purpose of punishment in secular courts is fourfold: the rehabilitation of the criminal, the protection of society from the criminal, the deterrence of other potential criminals, and retributive justice.
Just retribution, which seeks to establish the right order of things, should not be confused with vindictiveness, which is reprehensible.
Punishment may and should be administered with respect and love for the person punished.
The person who does evil may deserve death. According to the biblical accounts, God sometimes administers the penalty himself and sometimes directs others to do so.
Individuals and private groups may not take it upon themselves to inflict death as a penalty.
The State has the right, in principle, to inflict capital punishment in cases where there is no doubt about the gravity of the offense and the guilt of the accused.
The death penalty should not be imposed if the purposes of punishment can be equally well or better achieved by bloodless means, such as imprisonment.
The sentence of death may be improper if it has serious negative effects on society, such as miscarriages of justice, the increase of vindictiveness, or disrespect for the value of innocent human life.
Persons who specially represent the Church, such as clergy and religious, in view of their specific vocation, should abstain from pronouncing or executing the sentence of death.
Catholics, in seeking to form their judgment as to whether the death penalty is to be supported as a general policy, or in a given situation, should be attentive to the guidance of the pope and the bishops. Current Catholic teaching should be understood, as I have sought to understand it, in continuity with Scripture and tradition.
I take it that, as applied to Moussaoui, the critical theses are #s 7 and 8. Can the legitimate goals of punishment be accomplished by imprisonment? Executing Moussaoui obviously precludes any chance that he can be rehabilitated and brought to remorse. Conversely, society can be protected from him by locking him up and throwing away the key. So the argument for death must be either that executing Moussaoui is necessary to deter others or to achieve retributive justice. As to the former, wouldn't the prospect of martyrdom encourage Islamic terrorists as opposed to deterring them? As for retribution, was Moussaoui sufficiently closely involved in the 9/11 attack to deserve death in response? I haven't followed the trial closely enough to know the answer to that question, but my impression is that only he knows for sure, and that he may well be deluding even himself.
As for #8, I think the key issues are whether (1) executing Moussaoui will make society more or less vulnerable to terrorism and (2) we are executing him not because of whatever he may have done but as a substitute for the actual 9/11 conspirators who are now beyond human justice.
I'd love to know what Cardinal Dulles thinks. Personally, I think the death penalty always raises tough moral issues and this case is no exception.
Rob posted Joe Knippenberg's criticism of Cardinal Mahony (here). Did anyone else wince at Knippenberg's accusation that Mahony's reliance on "a higher--or natural--law" was a "cheap tactical deployment"? Civil guy, this Knippenberg!
In any event, here's another view, in the form of an editorial in the April 7th issue of the National Catholic Reporter:
Mahony is correct on immigration
There’s a certain irony in the criticism leveled at Los Angeles
Cardinal Roger Mahony regarding his recent statements on the immigration
legislation before Congress.
Referring to a provision of the House-passed immigration legislation,
Mahony wrote in The New York Times March 22, “Providing
humanitarian assistance to those in need should not be made a crime, as the
House bill decrees. As written, the proposed law is so broad that it would
criminalize even minor acts of mercy like offering a meal or administering
first aid.”
Mahony said he would urge his priests to disobey such a provision should
it become law.
The editors of the conservative National Review, in a March 23
editorial titled “Cardinal Errors,” challenged Mahony. “The
cardinal points to a provision of the bill that makes it illegal to
‘assist’ an illegal immigrant to ‘remain in the United
States.’ (The person providing such assistance would have to know, or
recklessly disregard, the assistee’s legal status to have committed an
offense, by the way, not that the cardinal shares that information with his
readers.) That provision is directed at those who traffic in illegal
immigrants.”
Conservatives frequently complain when judges abandon the plain language
of a statute and substitute their own interpretation, or their view of the
legislative history, for the actual words used by the legislators who wrote the
law. But here they accuse Mahony (and by implication all church leaders,
Catholic or otherwise, who have made the same point) of “bearing false
witness” because the cardinal asserts that the House bill actually says
what it says.
Thankfully, the immigration legislation approved March 27 by the Senate
Judiciary Committee explicitly rejects the House’s effort to make
humanitarian assistance a crime.
President Bush, who launched this debate two years ago, is treading
politically treacherous terrain. To his right are the nativists -- the
build-the-wall and Minuteman crowd -- whose passion outweighs their numbers but
who also represent what is in some ways mainstream Republican thinking on
immigration. To his left are the cheap-labor Chamber of Commerce types and,
increasingly, evangelical Christian conservatives who take the biblical
injunction to welcome the stranger seriously.
Perhaps it is his Texas roots, or his sympathy with business’
desire for people who will work cheaply, or his eye on the 40 percent of
Hispanics who voted for him last time around -- the reason doesn’t really
matter -- but the president has demonstrated a surprising level of nuance on
this issue. “It says something about our country that people around the
world are willing to leave their homes and leave their families and risk
everything to come to America.” He’s right. And for his tone, if not
every detail of his approach, the president should be applauded.
Mountains of misinformation and wrong impressions, however, have formed
on either side of the debate. To hear some opponents of immigration reform, the
United States has become downright hostile to any kind of immigration and at
the service of those who want to close the door behind us. The fact is that
immigration numbers have increased not only steadily but by significant
percentages since 1970, when the United States was home to 9.6 million
foreign-born residents. According to figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, the
figure rose to 14.1 million in 1980; to 19.8 million in 1990; to 31.1 million
in 2000; and to 33.5 million in 2003, a figure representing 11.7 percent of the
U.S. population. That number does not include the undocumented.
At the same time, those who follow the lead of Republican Sen. Bill
Frist see the entire matter in terms of security. More guards and guns and
stricter enforcement will cost more, it will make some feel as if we’re
doing something to control immigration and it will placate those who
think we have to be tougher on lawbreakers.
But for the significant cost it will require, it will do nothing to get
at the deeper issues: what Americans are willing to pay for planting and
harvesting and other work now done by migrants; the revenue stream that
Mexicans and other Latin Americans have become for their home countries; the
effects of globalization that are, for instance, forcing people off farms in
their home countries and into cities where there are no jobs.
In the two years since President Bush announced his intention to deal
with immigration issues in a comprehensive fashion, the U.S. bishops and other
members of the religious community have been among the most consistent and
sensible advocates of true reform. Their focus has been threefold: Find a means
to legalize the status of the 10 million to 12 million undocumented persons who
live in the United States; provide a mechanism to allow additional foreign
workers to come to the United States under conditions that protect their
rights; and ease the restrictions on family reunification that currently exist
for foreign-born permanent residents and citizens. The Senate bill, while
imperfect, goes a long way to achieving each of those objectives.
Mahony, as a religious leader, has every right, even obligation, to
raise issues of justice regarding immigrants and to announce that the church
will not cooperate in draconian provisions of a proposed law. He is not telling
people how to vote, nor is he using sacramental blackmail against legislators
who might disagree.
He is using an argument straight from the church’s social justice
tradition. And from the numbers that have turned out to demonstrate and the
support he is receiving from the Catholic community and elsewhere, it seems to
be a rather persuasive argument. _______________ mp
‘Now, it seems, contraception has become the acid test of Catholicity’
Clifford Longley
Judging
by what he has said on the subject, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O¹Connor of
Westminster must agree with the recent statement of Cardinal Godfreid
Daneels of Brussels that a married man with HIV-Aids must use a condom
when he has sexual relations with his wife. Otherwise, Cardinal Daneels
explained, he is putting her life at risk.
This
issue may have reminded Cardinal Murphy-O¹Connor of one of the
arguments put forward against the absolute ban on artificial birth
control that Pope Paul VI announced in his encyclical Humanae Vitae
in 1968. The question was asked: what if doctors had declared that a
woman¹s life would be in danger if she got pregnant again? Wouldn¹t the
use of a condom or some other reliable birth control method be
essential, if the husband was not to put his wife¹s life at risk? The
answer was clear: Pope Paul VI¹s ruling applied even in this extreme
situation. If periodic abstinence from sex was not reliable, they must
abstain altogether.
This
is deep water, about to get deeper. Let us suppose a man and his wife
are patients of a GP in London who has opened an NHS clinic at the
Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth. According to a recent statement
by Cardinal Murphy-O¹Connor, who has responsibility in these matters in
respect of this celebrated Catholic hospital, doctors at St John and St
Elizabeth (whether Catholic or not) treating patients (whether Catholic
or not) must abide by a code of ethics in line with Catholic teaching.
Hence ³referrals for direct abortion, for amniocentesis for purposes
other than safe delivery, and for contraception, and to prescribing
with contraceptive intent, particularly when what is prescribed is or
may be abortifacient (e.g. by impeding implantation)² are not
permitted. (En passant, if something is forbidden in all circumstances, what is added by the phrase ³particularly when ...²?)
If
one partner in a marriage has HIV-Aids and they ask for medical advice,
must they be advised by their GP at St John and St Elizabeth that they
are forbidden to use contraceptives? Or must they be warned that they
have an obligation to do so? And what about the next pair in the
waiting room, a couple who want to know whether they can use
contraceptives because they have been told that another pregnancy would
endanger the woman¹s life? Would it be a good idea for one of them to
go out and get Aids? And what kind of tortuous moral gymnastics does it
take to say yes to the first case, and no to the second?
I
was disappointed to find the reference to contraception in the
cardinal¹s statement concerning the St John and St Elizabeth hospital.
I hoped we had long since got over that hurdle. Indeed, we seemed to
get over it the day in 1968 that Bishop Derek Worlock pronounced his
famous remark: ³birth control is not the acid test of Christianity². He
was trying to calm down a substantial rebellion against Humanae Vitae among the Catholic laity. His secretary at the time was Fr Cormac Murphy-O¹Connor.
As
a result the Catholic community settled into a harmonious ³agreement to
disagree². The laity tacitly agreed not to push too far in one
direction, and the bishops agreed not to push too far in the other.
There were to be no ³acid tests² on the issue, either way. But now, in
order to safeguard St John and St Elizabeth¹s Catholic identity, it
seems contraception has indeed become the acid test of Catholicity.
Let
us put the matter another way. If an intention to dispense birth
control advice is a critical disqualification from practising medicine
in a Catholic context, then certain conclusions follow. It must be a
great evil. If so, it must be dug out root and branch, at whatever
cost. The bishops have to break their tacit silence on the subject and
issue a forthright and unequivocal declaration to the effect that the
use of contraceptives is a mortal sin, leaving the sinner liable to
eternal damnation if unrepentant and requiring both sacramental
confession and a promise never to do it again before the individual may
receive Holy Communion; and order it to be read in all the churches
under their command. And they have to say that priests who are not
prepared to apply the letter of the law have no further place in the
priesthood.
Such
a declaration would of course reduce, at a stroke, the Mass attendance
figures by three-quarters, as Catholics drowned out their bishops¹
words by voting with their feet. But who cares what they think? If
Catholic truth is at stake, what are mere numbers? _______________ mp
Allow me to put in another quick plug for last weekend's prudential judgment conference at St. Thomas. My highlights included John McGreevy's historical overview of the evolving relationship between Catholicism and the political realm on the question of abortion, explaining how Catholic intellectual life has taken on a more sectarian tone, and why fact-based inquiries on issues like abortion rates, gay adoption, and civil unions have less space in the current "hothouse climate." My favorite panel (other than my own, of course) was an interdisciplinary exploration of economic justice. The economic perspective was provided by St. John's prof Charles Clark, the philosophical perspective by Fordham prof Joseph Koterski, S.J., and the political perspective by three-term U.S. Senator David Durenberger. One of the more interesting exchanges was Clark's explanation, in response to an audience member's question, as to why he evaluated the effectiveness of welfare reform by looking at poverty rates, rather than employment rates. The choice of statistical measure, of course, is a function of prudential judgment, and Clark explained that John Paul II's emphasis on the subjective dimension of work should not be translated into a fixation on maximizing the rate of employment in paid positions.
Joe Knippenberg criticizes Cardinal Mahony's public pronouncements on the immigration debate, particularly his call for civil disobedience:
He’s right that, literally, the bill against which he was reacting . . . makes it a crime to “assist, encourage, direct, or induce” a person to enter or remain in the U.S., “knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact” that he or she lacks legal status. While directed principally at smugglers, it could conceivably be enforced against those who provide social services to illegal aliens. But Mahony has to know that this prospect is unlikely in the extreme. Any prosecutor who brought criminal charges against religious charity workers would have to have a death wish. The Cardinal’s flamboyant gesture can serve only to dramatize and publicize his distaste for this particular piece of legislation, a move of which any ordinary political actor would be proud. Look at all the attention he and his cause received!
But a Cardinal ought not to regard himself as an ordinary political actor. Mahony ought to have thought about two other consequences of his gesture. First, by implicitly comparing the Church to those at whom the law is really directed, he gives the brazenly cynical traffickers in humanity moral and political cover. They’re simply humanitarians, they can say, just like their brothers and sisters in the Church. Second, by loudly encouraging defiance of this law, he’s undermining respect for law altogether, as well as for the regular process by which law is made. If in fact he and his colleagues recognize the rights and responsibilities of sovereign nations, then they should be careful to acknowledge and uphold the legitimate role of legislators, as well as the duty of citizens to obey the law.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to deny that there is a higher—or natural—law, in the light of which ordinary legislation can be judged. I’m quarreling with Cardinal Mahony’s cheap tactical deployment of it, and the casual defiance of law that it inevitably encourages.
Apparently CBS Evening News will be doing a story Thursday on this Denver evangelical congregation. The name is explained here, and a service is described here.
I was recently interviewed by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune about a struggle over the admission of a transgendered individual to a government-funded adult day care program run by a Lutheran (Missouri Synod) church. The story has two particularly curious aspects: why would the individual choose a rural, conservative church when apparently there were other options much closer to her home? Second, why would a Christian church exclude a transgendered individual from the reach of its ministry? In any event, the article (registration may be req'd) was today's front-page news.
I've posted an article on LSN (link also to the right) on "The Permissible Scope of Limitations on Freedom of Religion and Belief in the U.S." It's part of a set of articles by European and American scholars on the scope of freedom of religion in their respective countries. My piece is a summary of the free exercise/speech/association issues in the U.S. The whole symposium, in the latest Emory International Law Review (volume 19), is worth a look for anyone interested in these questions, especially their comparative aspect. The articles follow a common format, so that each answers the same set of questions for its subject country and each analyzes a common set of hypothetical cases at the end -- all to facilitate comparisons. A good endeavor led, on the U.S. side, by Jeremy Gunn of the ACLU's Freedom of Religion and Belief project.
More evidence concerning the sincerity of our current government's commitment to helping the poorest and most vulnerable among us:
Almost all of the state's poorest residents will have to show proof of US citizenship to continue getting medical care by July 1, under a little-noticed federal law that could endanger coverage for many, as Massachusetts is trying to expand access to healthcare.
Born out of ongoing efforts in Washington to clamp down on illegal immigration, the new federal requirement compels anyone seeking Medicaid coverage to provide a birth certificate, a passport, or another form of identification in order to sign up for benefits or renew them.
No such proof is required now.
The requirement was tucked into the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which President Bush signed into law earlier this year.
The measure was part of an effort to limit the skyrocketing growth of federal entitlement programs. It has surfaced as Massachusetts begins to implement its sweeping healthcare plan, which aims to bring health coverage to almost all of the state's uninsured, in part by enrolling those in Medicaid who are eligible but who have not signed up.
Healthcare specialists voiced fear that because many Medicaid recipients -- including the homeless and the mentally disabled -- won't be able to easily produce documentation of their citizenship, they will have difficultly receiving care at community health centers, hospitals, or anywhere else.
''So we've got people in nursing homes, people in the [state Department of Mental Retardation] institutions, we've got the homeless, we've got the . . . mentally ill who now will have to come up with some verification to prove that they're citizens," said Victoria Pulos, health law attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. ''It's ironic that this is happening in the state where part of the health reform plan is to make sure that everyone who's eligible for Medicaid is enrolled."
The Murphy-St. Thomas conference on prudential judgments had about 20 papers in concurrent sessions, one of them from Andrew Yuengert (Economics, Pepperdine) on Catholic social teaching and immigration. It did an excellent job of laying out and analyzing the issues. Its basic claim was that the bishops have extended too far into prudential terrain in wedding themselves to particular policy proposals on illegal immigration (see here their endorsement of the earned-legalization Senate bill and their vigorous opposition to the enforcement/detention House bill). However, even if one is generally leery about the bishops taking positions on particular policies or legislation, isn't illegal immigration different for a couple of reasons: (1) Because Catholic institutions are deeply involved in serving illegal immigrants, the Church has experience and expertise on the matter (especially on the real consequences of laws) that it can offer to the broader society. (2) When as here, some aspects of a proposed law (the House bill) threatened to criminalize basic works of mercy like providing food and shelter, bishops (like Cardinal Mahony) had a right to criticize these aspects; and once bishops criticize a proposal, they have a responsibility to suggest or support some better alternative for addressing the problem that the bill was aimed at, rather than just ignoring it.
