[I know this is long, but it is undeniably worth reading in full, and I wanted to make it easy to do so.]
Church opposition to execution 'practically' absolute
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All Things
Catholic by John
L. Allen, Jr.
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Friday, Jan. 5, 2007 - Vol. 6, No. 18
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In 1998, Pope John Paul II
issued a document titled Ad Tuendam Fidem, which generated no small
amount of discussion by underlining a second category of infallible teachings,
i.e., doctrines not formally revealed but regarded as necessary to safeguard
and defend revelation. In an accompanying commentary, then-Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger cited the ban on women priests and the invalidity of Anglican
ordinations as examples.
Without entering into the details of that debate, suffice it to say that Ad
Tuendam Fidem signaled an unambiguous stance from the Catholic church on
certain matters previously regarded in some circles as in flux, or at least
open to further review.
In analogous fashion, one could argue that the reaction from the Vatican and
from senior Catholic officials around the world to the Dec. 30 execution of
Saddam Hussein, and its broader opposition to the war in Iraq in the first
place, collectively mark a milestone in the evolution of yet another category
in Catholic teaching: Positions which are not absolute in principle, but which
are increasingly absolute in practice. Opposition to war, unless undertaken in
clear self-defense or with the warrant of the international community, and the
use of capital punishment are the leading cases in point. In effect, recent Vatican interventions on
matters such as the Hussein execution suggest the Catholic church now has two
categories of moral teachings: what we might call "ontic" or
"inherent" absolutes, such as abortion, euthanasia, and the
destruction of embryos in stem cell research, which are considered always and
everywhere immoral because of the nature of the act, and "practical"
absolutes, i.e., acts which might be justified in theory, but which under
present conditions cannot be accepted.
On Dec. 30, Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesperson, issued
the following statement on Hussein's execution:
"Capital punishment is always tragic news, a motive
of sadness, even when it's a case of a person guilty of grave crimes. The
position of the Catholic church against the death penalty has been confirmed
many times. The execution of the guilty party is not a path to reconstruct
justice and to reconcile society. Indeed, there is the risk that, on the
contrary, it may augment the spirit of revenge and sow seeds of new violence.
In this dark time in the life of the Iraqi people, it can only be hoped that
all the responsible parties truly will make every effort so that, in this
dramatic situation, possibilities of reconciliation and peace may finally be
opened."
Other reactions from senior church officials confirmed this judgment.
I spoke to a senior Vatican diplomat on Jan. 2, who
told me that there had not been a private appeal to save Hussein's life from
the pope prior to the execution, largely because there was no time. As late as
Thursday and Friday of last week, this official said, the Vatican still hoped that a 30-day waiting period prior to any use of the death penalty
prescribed in Iraqi law would be observed. In the end, this official said, the
execution happened with "barbaric rapidity."
L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, editorialized that
"making a spectacle" of the execution turned capital punishment into
"an expression of political hubris." Hussein's death, the paper
claimed, "represented, for the ways in which it happened and for the media
attention it received, another example of the violation of the most basic
rights of man."
Church officials offered several motives for opposing the execution.
First, there's the principled argument that the right to life must always be
upheld. This point was made in a Dec. 30 interview in Ansa, the Italian news
agency, with Cardinal Renato Martino, President of the Pontifical Council for
Justice and Peace.
"Man cannot simply dispose of life, and therefore it should be defended
from the moment of conception to natural death," Martino said. "This
position thus excludes abortion, experimentation on embryos, euthanasia and the
death penalty, which are a negation of the transcendent dignity of the human
person created in the image of God."
Note that Martino listed capital punishment on a par with key life issues
long understood to admit of no exceptions.
Martino's comments echoed an appeal made in June by French Cardinal Paul
Poupard, President of the Councils for Culture and for Inter-religious
Dialogue, who asked that Hussein's life be spared on the grounds that
"every person is a creature of God, and no one may regard himself or
herself as owner of the life or death of another except the Creator."
Second, church officials suggested that motives other than application of an
impartial judicial process were at work.
"Justice was obviously not the only factor in this story," said
Archbishop Jean-Marie Sleiman, the Latin Rite archbishop of Baghdad.
Sleiman and others hinted that tribal and political animosities were also part
of the picture, an impression reinforced by images of Shi'ites in the execution
party shouting the name of Muqtada al-Sadr, who heads a powerful Shi'ite
clerical dynasty and commands the loyalty of the insurgent Mahdi Army.
Third, church officials warned that killing Hussein would make the process
of pacification in Iraq more difficult.
"The death of Saddam can without doubt create a new obstacle for the
process of national reconciliation, which was already experiencing serious
difficulty," Sleiman said.
Fourth, some officials hinted that the execution of Hussein could unleash
new violence in Iraq which might fall in disproportionate fashion upon its
small Christianity community, seen by some Islamic radicals as a beachhead of
Western influence (despite the fact that Christianity actually has more ancient
roots in Iraq than Islam).
Iraq's Ambassador
to the Vatican,
Albert Edward Yelda -- who supported Hussein's execution -- gave voice to those
concerns on Saturday.
"In contrast to other ethnic or religious groups, the Christians [inIraq]
are isolated and totally abandoned. They have only themselves, Jesus Christ and
God to whom they can appeal," Yelda said. "The international
community should make every effort to direct attention to them, who form a
peaceful community that has always rejected violence."
Though Pope Benedict XVI did not specifically comment on the Hussein
execution, he delivered a strong appeal for respect of human rights in his Dec.
31 homily in St. Peter's Basilica.
"Every human, without distinction of race, culture or religion, is
created in the image and likeness of God, he is filled with the same dignity of
person," the pope said.
Nowhere in Vatican commentary was there a concession that the church's position on the death
penalty is not absolute, nor any indication that it's up to the secular
authorities rather than religious leaders to make this sort of decision in
concrete circumstances. Instead, the tone was of clear moral condemnation,
suggesting that as a practical matter, the execution of Hussein -- or of anyone
in this day and age -- is unambiguously wrong.
* * *
None of this means, of course, that the emerging category of "practical
absolutes" is uncontroversial.
The church's teaching on both the death penalty and on war is rooted in its
doctrine on self-defense: If someone intends to kill you, you're entitled to
defend yourself, including lethal force if that's the only option. By way of
extension, if the only way to protect innocent people in society from
aggressors, whether criminals or invading armies, is to use lethal force, then
that does not constitute "murder." In paragraph 2267, the Catechism
of the Catholic church offers the following on capital punishment, reflecting
this position:
"Assuming that the guilty party's identity and
responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the
church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only
possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust
aggressor."
Yet the Catechism also immediately adds what the Italians call a sfumatura,
meaning a nuance, which effectively renders the "self-defense"
argument null under prevailing circumstances:
If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend
and protect people's safety, authority will limit itself to such means, as
these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and
more in conformity to the dignity of the human person. Today, in fact, as a
consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing
crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm --
without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself --
the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity ‘are
very rare, if not practically nonexistent.'"
The citation at the end is from Pope John Paul II's 1995 encyclical Evangelium
vitae, "The Gospel of Life," which was issued in 1995, three
years after the original publication of the Catechism in French in 1992. When
an official Latin text of the Catechism was issued five years later, the
inclusion of this citation was among the few substantive revisions.
The fact that neither the death penalty nor war (for reasons other than what
John Paul called "humanitarian intervention") are considered
"ontic" evils probably means there will always be room for differing
opinions in the church about the extent to which existing circumstances render
them justifiable.
For example, in a recent interview with me, Cardinal Avery Dulles said he
would prefer a more "traditional" position on the death penalty than
that espoused by John Paul II. (Dulles laughed that the pope's record on such
issues, among other things, illustrates the emptiness of media labels of John
Paul as a "conservative.") While Dulles said capital punishment
should be used "sparingly" and only "with absolute certainty of
guilt," he argued that in some cases it's justified, and that such a
permissive stance is more consistent with the church's tradition. Dulles added
that he would say much the same thing about "just war" theory.
The Community of Sant'Egidio, meanwhile, one of the "new
movements" in the Catholic church, on Tuesday reaffirmed its call for a
global moratorium on capital punishment.
"It's not a deterrent, it does not reduce the number of crimes, but it
lowers the state to the level of those who kill, and it affirms a culture of
death at the highest level," said Mario Marazitti, a Sant'Egidio
spokesperson. "In totalitarian regimes, it's a terrible instrument of
oppression that strikes the cultural, political, religious, social and ethnic opposition.
In democratic countries, it's stained by terrible social discrimination,
striking in a disproportionate manner ethnic and social minorities, the most
marginal elements of the population."
The nature of a "practical absolute," which rests on a reading of
social conditions rather than the pristine purity of abstract logic, means that
such divergent positions can likely never be reconciled at the level of
theological theory. Those fractures are likely to run especially deep in the
Catholic community in the United States,
one of the few developed nations which use capital punishment, and the country
that has taken the lead role in the war against terrorism.
Nevertheless, indications from the Vatican and from a wide swath of Catholic
officialdom suggest that in practice, it's unlikely there will ever again be a
war (defined as the initiation of hostilities without international warrant) or
an execution the church does not officially oppose.
At the level of application, at least, it would seem the debate is almost
over, and the abolitionists are winning.
The Tablet
January 6, 2007
A life too burdensome
John Paris
Last
month the Italian poet and muscular dystrophy sufferer Piergiorgio
Welby was granted his wish when a doctor turned off the ventilator that
had been keeping him alive. The Church refused Welby a Catholic
funeral. But did this refusal accord with the Church's teaching on when
a person can be allowed to die?
What, if any, is the
difference between killing a patient and letting him die? Or euthanasia
and the withdrawal of life-sustaining medical interventions?
These
issues once again captured the world's attention when Piergiorgio
Welby, an Italian poet and a long-time advocate for euthanasia,
composed an eloquent letter to the President of Italy pleading to be
allowed to die. "I love life, Mr President," he wrote. But after 40
years of battling muscular dystrophy and nine years attached to a
ventilator, Welby was losing his capacity to speak or to eat. He
concluded his letter with the words: "What is left to me is no longer a
life. It is an unbearable torture." He then asked to be allowed to have
his ventilator removed. That request, honoured on a regular basis in
hospitals across the world, caused uproar in Italy. His plea was
denounced by critics as a demand for suicide or euthanasia. After a
doctor defied an Italian court ruling and switched off the ventilator
the Diocese of Rome denied Welby a Catholic funeral. Church officials
said his "will to end his life was known, as it had been repeated and
publicly affirmed, in contrast to Catholic doctrine".
Earlier,
the judge ruled that while Welby had a constitutional right to be free
of unwanted medical treatment, Italy's medical code "requires doctors
to maintain the life of a patient". "Physicians", she wrote, "even when
faced with the request of the patient, must not carry out ...
treatments aimed at causing death." The judge concluded her opinion
with the observation that Italy's penal code outlaws the "homicide of a
consenting person and helping [someone] to commit suicide".
How
in Catholic Italy did such confusion arise over the distinction between
withdrawal of burdensome medical interventions and suicide/killing? In
America, the courts and the American Medical Association have
categorised both artificially supplied nutrition and fluids and the use
of ventilators as medical interventions. The Church's teaching has in
the main agreed with this. A notable exception was John Paul II's
"Allocation" in 2004 to the Pontifical Council for Life in which he was
quoted as saying, "artificial nutrition and fluids are natural means
and thus always obligatory". But this statement was a one-off,
delivered to a private audience, and had no theological basis. It was
never repeated by Pope John Paul, nor has it been by his successor,
Pope Benedict.
Much more reliable is the Vatican's 1980
Declaration on Euthanasia, which states: "One cannot impose on anyone
the obligation to have recourse to a technique which is already in use
but which carries a risk or is burdensome. Such a refusal is not the
equivalent of suicide [or euthanasia]; on the contrary, it should be
considered as an acceptance of the human condition, or a wish to avoid
the application of a medical procedure disproportionate to the results
that can be expected."
And yet when faced with highly publicised
decisions on the withdrawing of life-prolonging medical treatment from
patients, the Church's view as expressed locally has not been
consistent. The reasons for this can best be understood by tracing the
history of the Church's teaching that one need not employ
"extraordinary" measures to prolong life. This goes back to the
distinction first proposed in 1595 by Domingo Bañez between
"extraordinary" and "ordinary" means - by which was meant measures
proportionate to one's condition or state in life. When discussing what
one must do to sustain life, theologians were referring not to hardware
or techniques, but to "moral" obligation, i.e. what one must do to
avoid sinning. The penalty for failure to fulfil such a duty was, of
course, eternal damnation.
Given the context of one's eternal
salvation, the question immediately arose as to the limits, if any, of
the obligation to sustain life. The clearest statement of the limits is
found in the Relationes Theologiae (1587) by the sixteenth- century
Dominican moralist Francisco de Vitoria. In a commentary on the
obligation to use food to preserve life De Vitoria asks: "Would a sick
person who does not eat because of some disgust for food be guilty of a
sin equivalent to suicide?" His reply: "If a patient is so depressed or
has lost his appetite so that it is only with the greatest effort that
he can eat food, this right away ought to be reckoned as creating a
kind of impossibility, and the patient is excused, at least from moral
sin, especially if there is little or no hope of life."
That De
Vitoria's views were neither unique nor subsequently abandoned is best
seen in a 1950 Theological Studies essay on "The Duty of Using
Artificial Means of Preserving Life" by the widely respected Jesuit
moralist Gerald Kelly. After a thorough review of prior teachings on
the topic, Kelly finds that the authors hold that "no remedy is
obligatory unless it offers a reasonable hope of checking or curing a
disease [Nemo ad inutile tenatur]." From this Kelly concludes that no
one is obliged to use any means - natural or artificial - if it does
not offer a reasonable hope of success in overcoming the patient's
condition.
How, then, did the idea arise that life-prolonging
medical treatments once in place may not legitimately be removed? The
answer is found further on in Kelly's own essay where he writes: "I
frankly hesitate to give a practical answer allowing the physician to
discontinue the intravenous feeding as a means to end suffering. I fear
the abrupt ceasing of nourishment to a conscious patient might appear
to be a sort of ‘Catholic euthanasia' to many who cannot appreciate the
fine distinction between omitting an ordinary means and omitting a
useless ordinary means."
That reluctance was intensified in
Charles McFadden's widely used Medical Ethics first published in 1961.
McFadden wrote that while the long-term use of artificial feedings
could constitute a grave and non-obligatory burden, as a matter of
practical medical advice he would never propose the removal of
intravenous feeding once it had been instituted. The danger is that of
scandal, guilt on the part of the family and misuse by insensitive or
unscrupulous physicians. Those not familiar with nuanced distinctions,
he argued, might believe that the patient had been deliberately killed
to alleviate his suffering. Others then might all too readily terminate
nourishment for anyone whose life was considered "useless".
The
issue of withdrawal of life-prolonging treatment fairly much dropped
from the literature from the 1960s until in 1976 the case of Karen Ann
Quinlan once again thrust the topic back into public attention. Karen
was 21 when she fell unconscious after coming home from a party. She
was taken to hospital and put on a ventilator but never regained
consciousness. Some months later her family embarked on a legal battle
to oblige doctors to discontinue active care. In testimony before the
President's Commission on Ethical Problems in Medicine, Richard A.
McCormick SJ, a professor of moral theology at Georgetown University,
was asked whether there was any moral difference between removing a
respirator, antibiotics or artificial feeding from Karen Ann Quinlan.
His reply was that from the Catholic tradition the answer was clearly
"No". However McCormick, aware of the danger of misinterpretation and
misuse of the Catholic principle - as well as the forces in American
society that would welcome the highly publicised withdrawal of
nutrition from Quinlan as an invitation to active euthanasia -
cautioned that it might be imprudent to withdraw artificial feeding in
her particular well-publicised case. The court gave authorisation to
the family's request for the ventilator to be switched off. Artificial
feeding in this case continued at the family's request and Karen
survived for almost a decade in a coma until she succumbed to
pneumonia.
A whole spate of similar cases soon followed in the
United States. In one of these, that of Nancy Ellen Jobes (1987), a New
Jersey court authorised the withdrawal of artificial nutrition and
fluids from a woman in a well-defined persistent vegetative state. In a
submission to the New Jersey Supreme Court, the New Jersey Catholic
Conference of Bishops issued a plea not to allow "euthanasia" and not
to lessen the respect for the human life of patients who are seriously
ill or dying. In their brief the bishops reminded the court that a
person, so long as he or she exists - regardless of condition,
regardless of stated wishes, regardless of suffering and the burden of
continued life - must not be allowed to remove life-sustaining
artificial nutrition and fluids.
Some Catholic commentators
said the same about the case of Tony Bland in Britain and Terri Schiavo
in America, two other high-profile cases concerned with the removal of
artificial feeding and hydration. That they should also criticise as
"euthanasia" what happened with Piergiorgio Welby is more than
perplexing since he was on a ventilator and well able to articulate his
wishes.
However, Archbishop Mario Conti of Glasgow recognised
that a ventilator does constitute medical intervention in his comment
on the case of Miss B. which occurred in London in 2002. Miss B. was a
43-year-old woman who became paralysed from the neck down after a blood
vessel ruptured in her neck. She successfully petitioned the High Court
to have her ventilator switched off after doctors refused to comply
with her request. Archbishop Conti commented: "The principle here [the
request for the withdrawal of a ventilator] is quite different from
euthanasia. The request in this case is not for assisted suicide,
rather it is for the discontinuation of a medical procedure which is
burdensome to the patient."
Richard McCormick, who understood
both the Church's tradition as well as the danger of the Catholic
teaching being misunderstood or misused by proponents of active
euthanasia, insisted that the bedrock teaching of theology on the
meaning of life and death - and not a misplaced debate on "the
casuistry of means" - should guide our judgements on the difficult and
sometimes trying issues cast up by modern medical technology. As he put
it in an article McCormick and I co-authored on "The Catholic Tradition
on the Use of Nutrition and Fluids" (America, 1987): "It is that
tradition, developed over centuries of living out the gospel message on
the meaning of life and death - not some immediate political ‘pro-life'
agenda - that ought to be the source of our advice and guidance to
courts."
The rich, nuanced and highly developed Catholic teaching
that there is no duty to use medical measures artificially to prolong
life is clear. "The problem" in the Welby case, notes Cardinal Javier
Lozano Barragán, the Vatican's top official for health, in a recent
interview in La Repubblica, "is to know if we find ourselves truly in
front of a case of artificially prolonging life." Piergiorgio Welby
responded to that question in his letter to the Italian President:
"What is natural about a hole in the windpipe and a pump that blows air
into the lungs? What is natural about a body kept biologically
functional with the help of artificial respirators, artificial feed,
artificial hydration, artificial intestinal emptying, of death
artificially postponed?"
At the end of his long journey towards
death Pope John Paul II declined the option of returning to Gemelli
Hospital, where earlier his failing breathing was assisted by a
respirator and his nutrition supplied through a feeding tube. Rather
than return to those mechanisms that might have extended his earthly
life John Paul II's parting plea was, "Let me go to the house of the
Father." No one confused the Pope's action with suicide. Nor should
they do so with Welby's refusal to endure what he described as "the
unbearable torture" of being attached to a respirator.
Friday, January 5, 2007
To say that Saddam's execution would be justified under certain circumstances is not to say that his execution was justiified under the circumstances that obtained, right? Consider this, from a New York Times blog:
January 5, 2007, 9:59 am
Tags: Iraq
Signs that Charles Krauthammer was souring on the Iraq war began to
appear in the spring, when Krauthammer wrote in his Washington Post
column that there is only “one hope for success in Iraq”:
“an effective, broad-based national unity government that, during its
mandatory four-year term, presides over an American withdrawal.” Now,
the manner in which Saddam Hussein was executed has led Krauthammer to
conclude that the current Iraq government is not worth defending. “We should not be surging American troops in defense of such a government,” he argues in The Washington Post. Krauthammer writes:
It is quite a distinction to be the preeminent monster on the planet.
If the death penalty was ever deserved, no one was more richly
deserving than Saddam Hussein.
For the Iraqi government to have botched both his trial and
execution, therefore, and turned monster into victim, is not just a
tragedy but a crime – against the new Iraq that Americans are dying for
and against justice itself.
Saddam’s execution “turned what was an act of national justice into
a scene of sectarian vengeance,” Krauthammer continues. He adds:
The world saw Hussein falling through the trapdoor, executed not in the
name of a new and democratic Iraq but in the name of Moqtada al-Sadr,
whose death squads have learned much from Hussein.
The whole sorry affair illustrates not just incompetence but also
the ingrained intolerance and sectarianism of the Maliki government. It
stands for Shiite unity and Shiite dominance above all else.
