There is a passage from Book Gamma of the Metaphysics that one always rereads with a rather uncharitable smile. Aristotle, weary of those who denied the principle of non-contradiction, decrees that there is no point in arguing with them: whoever claims that something can both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect resembles, he says, a plant. Not a fool, nor even a sophist: a vegetable. One likes to think that twenty centuries of theology took the warning seriously. God does not contradict Himself, truth does not contradict itself, and a Church assisted by the Spirit cannot teach on Monday the opposite of what it solemnly and universally taught until Sunday afternoon. All of this, of course, was before August 2, 2018.
That day the Holy See published a rescript, approved in May and signed on August 1, that rewrote number 2267 of the Catechism. The 1997 text, drafted under John Paul II—who was hardly an enthusiast of the scaffold—admitted capital punishment only if it were “the only possible way of effectively defending… human lives,” and added that such cases were already extremely rare, perhaps nonexistent. The new text teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that the death penalty “is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” and commits the Church to its universal abolition. As its sole source, the footnote refers to a speech by Francis himself, from October 2017. The Catechism citing the Pope who corrects it by citing himself: Tradition as a self-portrait.
It is worth recalling what this is written against. In 1208, Innocent III imposed on the Waldensians who wished to be reconciled with Rome a profession of faith declaring that the secular power “can, without mortal sin, exercise judgment of blood”; Denzinger files it under 795, for those who care to check. The Roman Catechism of St. Pius V taught that the execution of a criminal by legitimate authority, far from violating the fifth commandment, was an eminent obedience to it. Pius XII—a pope with a telephone, radio, and microfilm, not a Carolingian bishop—explained in 1952, before a congress of neuropathology, that the condemned person has, by his crime, forfeited the right to life, whose deprivation is then reserved to the public power; the neurologists, one must suppose, took note. And in 2004 Cardinal Ratzinger clarified to the American bishops that on abortion and euthanasia there is no room among Catholics for “legitimate diversity of opinion,” but on war and the death penalty, there is. Eight centuries, a single line. The light of the Gospel, it seems, took all that time to reach the desk lamp.
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