Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Cardinal Dulles On Capital Punishment

Seemingly none of the recent obituaries of Avery Dulles, a renowned theologian and Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, has mentioned his crisp, theoretical defense of capital punishment. The Cardinal's careful explanation of his church's teaching responded to the popular impression of blanket Catholic opposition to the death penalty.

Liberal Catholic politicians, even when opposing their church's stance on abortion, have sometimes boasted of their supposed conformity with Catholic teaching on capital punishment. "Self-defense of society continues to justify the death penalty,""One could conceive of a situation where if justice were not done by executing an offender it would throw society into moral confusion," he said. "I don't know whether that requires any more than that it remain on the books, symbolically, that it be there for society to have recourse to." Dulles told a symposium in 2002. Dulles emphasized that Pope John Paul II and the bishops in recent years have upheld the classical Catholic tradition about capital punishment, affirming its theoretical validity, while warning against its potential for "miscarriages of justice, the increase of vindictiveness, or disrespect for the value of innocent human life."
Although ignoring his stance on capital punishment, Dulles' obituaries have rightly described his distinguished family heritage. He was the great grandson, nephew and son of U.S. Secretaries of State. His father, John Foster Dulles, as Eisenhower's chief diplomat, was often caricatured as a Christian anti-communist warrior. The elder Dulles, a New York lawyer, was indeed anti-Soviet. And he had had an extensive ecclesial lay career

Link (here) to the full article in the Weekly Standard by Mark Tooley

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