The first is the recent piece by E.J. Dionne, writing for Commonweal online – Quit the Church? Thanks but no Thanks

The second is Jim Wallis’s piece for Sojourners in support of women religious in the U.S.  – Having the Sisters’ Back

Please take a minute to read both of these.

And then, perhaps, take a minute to thank the sisters who have cultivated a deep love for the Church, for God, for charity and justice, for learning in you.  I’ll start right now.

Thank you Sister Irene Comer, SSND, my principle at St. Michael’s Catholic grade school from kindergarten to eighth grade.  So, maybe we did make fun of you behind your back for referring to us as “honeybubbles” (who uses the word “honeybubbles”?), but you gave your life to educating a bunch of squirrelly kids who, for the most part, have grown up to be pretty good folks.

Thank you, Sister Mary Reuter, OSB, my professor at St. John’s University/College of St. Benedict who taught me my first two theology courses – Theo 101 and “The Benedictine Tradition.”  Little did you know that by introducing me to the beauty of theology, you were derailing a future medical doctor into a lucrative career as a theologian.  You inspired me with the love of wisdom, theology, and a lifelong pursuit of moral truth and beauty.  Thank you to all of the Sisters of St. Benedict’s monastery in St. Joseph, MN.

Thank you to all of the Visitation Sisters of Visitation Monastery in north Minneapolis, and in particular to Sister Mary Virginia Schmidt, VHM, who was my spiritual director for the years in which I contemplated a monastic vocation.  You are a witness to Christ’s peace simply by choosing to locate your home monastery in one of the most violent neighborhoods in Minneapolis.  Simply through prayer and presence, and through inviting neighborhood kids into your home by flying your famous windsock, you are one of the most powerful witnesses to Christ’s love and justice I have ever encountered.

Thank you to all of the sisters that I have never met and never will, but who remind us of the beauty of our faith and our Church, of the call to charity and justice, and who have and will continue to inspire us to love Goodness and to follow Christ.  May the Holy Spirit continue to guide you in your faith and in your work.

Mulling this over, I am still unhappy with this response.  While the question was intended to be jocular, it reflected the cultural assumption that those in theology never get jobs because they are in the humanities, not practical, not valuable like those in STEM, and thus are not only useless but jobless.  This assumption—that you cannot do anything with a theology major—is even more pressing given the high unemployment rates, the need for ever greater salaries just to get by, and the amount of student debt that often accrues to those attending college [See Julie Rubio's post on the high cost of colleges]

When I look over my records of our graduating majors for the past five years (basically since I became chair of the department), I have found an amazingly high employment rate, a diverse set of career paths, and, I think, some insight into what people do with a theology major.

Over these five years, Saint Vincent College has graduated 41 majors, about 8 a year.  Of these, only four have neither found a job nor attended graduate school.  Even though two of these four just graduated and so are still in the job hunt, we have an 88% placement rate for our students.  Of the students who have been placed,

• 3 have gone onto seminary
• 4 have gone on to teach religion in high schools
• 9 have gone into ministry in the church, typically youth ministry
• 6 have pursued MA’s in theology
• 3 did a year of volunteer work, two with the JVC’s and the other with Amate House in the Archdiocese Chicago

All of these fields pertain directly to the field of theology.  The rest of the 12 have done some surprisingly different things.

• 2 are going to medical school
• 1 is attending law school
• 3 are in graduate school for psychology
• 1 is starting his own business
• 2 work in residence life
• 1 is a sales representative
• 1 is an EMT
• 1 is a Fireman

To me, these numbers indicate a few things.  Yes, theology can be a degree that leads to graduate studies.  No doubt about it.

The degree is also a professional one, preparing people for teaching or some form of ministry.  I would have to say that most of our students come in wanting to be youth ministers or high school religion teachers, coming from and understanding the importance of great youth ministry programs or Catholic high schools.

Finally, the degree can be used to complement another major.  Students pick up theology degrees because they want to understand their life or their primary field of study in light of their faith.  To be sure, some become so taken with theology that it becomes their focus.  Still, this is not all of them.  They take their informed faith and become doctors and lawyers, counselors, and administrators.  They enter service fields and seek to become faithful people.  Is there a better expression of Vatican II’s call that

. . . by their competence in secular training and by their activity, elevated from within by the grace of Christ, let [the laity] vigorously contribute their effort, so that created goods may be perfected by human labor, technical skill and civic culture for the benefit of all men according to the design of the Creator and the light of His Word. May the goods of this world be more equitably distributed among all men, and may they in their own way be conducive to universal progress in human and Christian freedom. In this manner, through the members of the Church, will Christ progressively illumine the whole of human society with His saving light. (LG 36)

I think it is important to note these successes of my students, whichever direction they are heading, as they not only represent the emerging Catholic Church in the United States but they are the ones who are challenging the narrowing of education to exclusively technical training and job placement, neglecting questions about the value of one’s work or of one’s own life.  These more substantive questions often get address in theology, and, as the numbers indicate, theology does not necessarily lead to a life of poverty and unemployment.

I said “not necessarily lead to a life of poverty and unemployment”.  One can major in theology and earn money, but, often, those that want to pursue jobs or school in theology do so without regard for the money.  They see themselves as working for the church, the church working for the poor, and the poor having little money.  Increases in salary would come at the cost of those they serve, so they often forgo these financial incentives.  There is a real danger to this way of looking at it (See Stanley Hauerwas point in, “Work as Co-Creation: A Critique of a Remarkably Bad Idea”) but one cannot help but be attracted to a life similar to the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary who advertized, “We offer you no salary, no recompense, no holidays, no pensions. But much hard work, a poor dwelling, few consolations, many disappointments, frequent sickness, a violent or lonely death, an unknown grave.”

Even those majors that have high earning potential, seem to be thinking of more than skills and advancement.  One of my former students is currently in law school.  He came by for a visit after completing his second semester.  He started by saying, “if anyone ever asks, I can vouch that all of the horror stories about law school are pretty much true.”  When I asked how he did, he indicated that he ended up near the top of his class, a 4.0 to be exact, and was “excited beyond belief.”

In the midst of our conversation, he said he was thinking about writing an article on why Christians cannot be lawyers, basically how the profession has a history of marginalizing the poor.  While I am not sure this will earn him a lot of money, I did think that this is one of the best examples of what one can do with a theology degree:  ruin the legal (or really any) profession by challenging it to be more attentive to the needs of the poor.

But now star wide-receiver Chad Ochocinco has weighed in on the controversy in an attempt to help the hapless commissioner.  His advice?  Be honest about what is going on here:

One thing I think can help is killing the NFL PR machine. Y’all do a darn near perfect job at portraying this game as one played by heroes. But let’s be real dad. This is a nasty, dirty and violent game with consequences. Sign up or go get a regular job. Watch it or turn off the TV and go fishing with your kids. It is really that simple. I know there are probably legal and financial implications that prevent this blunt depiction, but am not sure if you have a choice. If you don’t say it now, the mounting evidence being revealed publicly will say it for you very soon.

The NFL narrative–one that has helped it replace baseball as America’s pastime–is unraveling.  I was listening to Mike and Mike on ESPN radio the other day, and he was seriously asking guests if we’d recognize the NFL in 20 years.  I’m not sure that we will, and I think that might be a good thing.

“until we all attain…to the extent of the full stature of Christ” (Eph 4:13).

Yesterday my wife and I went to see the movie “The Avengers.”  In it, a hostile army consisting of demi-gods and alien invaders opens a portal to earth.  From this hole comes forth an invading alien army that wreaks havoc upon the helpless citizens of earth.  The demi-god who leads this army, Loki, tells the humans that freedom is the greatest lie of earthly existence; that they will be happy when they are ruled by a superior being.  (Spoiler: the superheroes win in the end!  And yes, it is as good as the reviewers are saying.)

Both Acts and Mark recall their own version of the story of the resurrected body of Jesus being taken up into the heavens to sit at the right hand of God, and Acts recounts that he “will return in the same way you have seen him going into heaven.”  In a similar manner, Paul writes

what does “he ascended” mean except that he also descended into the lower regions of the earth?

Is there a better way to describe the portal that has been opened up between the divine and the earthly than to consider that the resurrected Christ, still inhabiting his fully divine and fully human body and soul, has descended into the fullness of human existence and then ascended back into the fullness of divine existence? The helpless citizens of earth in “The Avengers” watched with awe and horror as a foreign army of aliens threatened their very existence and sought to rule over them as slaves.  What do we as Christians look for in our portal between the heavens and the earth?

In our story – the Christian story – this portal is effected “through love” (Eph 4:2).  The Being of pure, indescribable love descended once to inhabit a human body, ascended “that he might fill all things” with divine love, and “will come again in glory.”  When that portal opens up between heaven and earth, there will be no hateful invading army, but rather the pure rays of divine love that are sent to enlighten all people.  Moreover, in Jesus’ reign, he “no longer calls [us] slaves…but friends” (Jn 15:15).  Grace does not invade us and enslave against our wills, but frees us and transforms us according to our deepest longings.

Thus, to grow “into the extent of the full stature of Christ” means to bear witness to this hope “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.”  As Paul indicates, each one of us may be called to bear this witness in mundane ways, as evangelists, pastors, or teachers in any number of ways in our daily lives.  Or as Mark indicates, some may even be called to bear witness in miraculous ways – driving out demons, speaking new languages, healing the sick.  Either way, the signs, power, and witness of Christians will be measured by one rule, and one rule only, and that is the rule of love.  One need not be a comic book superhero to appreciate the simplicity of that calling.

With its controversial cover picturing a hip, sexy mom breastfeeding a toddler, Time magazine fanned the fires of the “mommy wars.” That, along with yet another disappointing Mother’s Day sermon, got me thinking again about parenting.

The Time story, “Are You Mom Enough?,” focuses on Dr. Sears (a Catholic from St. Louis), who started the attachment parenting movement in the 1990s in response to the more regimented parenting style recommended by Dr. Spock and sleep training guru Dr. Ferber. Instead, Dr. Sears recommended responding quickly to babies’ cries, co-sleeping, breastfeeding, and baby-carrying.

The article points out that though there is solid research to support the need of infants for secure attachment, there is not nearly enough data to conclude that bottles, strollers, bouncy seats, and cribs will ruin a child for life.  It calls for a bit less self-righteousness and a little more tolerance.

Similarly, a recent article in the New York Daily News, “Call a Truce in the Mommy Wars,” asks working moms and stay at home moms to stop demonizing each other and recognize that, despite the battle ignited by the comments of Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen about Ann Romney, they have more in common than they think.

As a Catholic mother, I appreciate the call for tolerance.  In the mid-1990s when my three boys were young, I was attracted to attachment parenting but I was far from orthodox.  I nursed each boy, but only for about a year.  I worked, but only part-time. My husband and I used baby carriers, but we weren’t opposed to strollers or bouncy seats.  We even tried co-sleeping, though the kicks of our oldest quickly convinced us that this would not be our thing.  Except when it was, like when the kids were sick or afraid. With three boys in five years, we tried everything and embraced what worked.  Looking back, do I worry that we made the wrong choices at some points? Sure. But I have to hope we communicated our love and care the best we could.

In truth, I think the most important things we did came later.  In Familiaris Consortio, Pope John Paul II calls families to raise their children well:

In a society shaken and split by tensions and conflicts caused by the violent clash of various kinds of individualism and selfishness, children must be enriched not only with a sense of true justice, which alone leads to respect for the personal dignity of each individual, but also and more powerfully by a sense of true love, understood as sincere solicitude and disinterested service with regard to others, especially the poorest and those in most need. The family is the first and fundamental school of social living: as a community of love, it finds in self-giving the law that guides it and makes it grow. . . And the communion and sharing that are part of everyday life in the home at times of joy and at times of difficulty are the most concrete and effective pedagogy for the active, responsible and fruitful inclusion of the children in the wider horizon of society. (No. 37)

While the early years of nursing and carrying are hard physically and emotionally, more difficult still  is the ongoing task of rearing. It is no easy thing to make a home a communion of love, a school of virtue.  It involves hundreds of choice made by both parents, about how they approach their work, share household tasks justly, find time for each other and their kids, communicate their love, value their children’s choices, challenge their children when they need to called out, sacrifice time and money for the needy, and humbly accept imperfection in everything and everybody.

Especially on Mother’s Day, it is worth remembering that the most important thing Christian mothers do is parent. On that count, I’m betting my kids will remember our dinner table conversations and the letters I write them every year on their birthdays far more than the years I nursed and held them (though I hope all of that made some difference, too).  And as they begin to make their way into the world without me, I trust that they will carry with them a sense of our family as a community of love as well as a desire to share that love with other human beings. And I pray that I was “mom enough” for them.

Unfortunately, since that time the bishops have lost their focus, and thus complicated things for the active Catholic laity. The USCCB has done what the USCCB always does: muddied the water, by issuing statements on a host of different political issues—including many of which good Catholics have differing opinions, and on which Catholic bishops have no special expertise.

These distracting statements include the opposition to the Ryan budget, an amicus curiae on the immigration law in Arizona, and a call to protect SNAP (which Meghan Clark has been doing a fine job defending on this blog). Lawler distinguishes “germane” issues like religious liberty and the protection of life and the family with “far-flung” issues like . . . healthcare and climate change. One has to wonder how Lawler draws the line between what is germane and what is far-flung and distracting. For example, I am quite sure that if the bishops issued a statement tomorrow opposing the president’s recent support of gay marriage, he would not consider this a distraction from the protect religious liberty campaign. Yet somehow it is a distraction from the campaign on protecting religious liberty to call out Paul Ryan for jilting the poor.

The thing is, I agree with Lawler that religious liberty is threatened today, if for no other reason than that I think our culture doesn’t understand what the church is in the Catholic mentality (or what religion is, for that matter). I, like Lawler, find the compromise on the HHS mandate insufficient. Heck, I even plan to fast and pray during our fortnight of freedom.

Where I disagree with Lawler is that the bishops need to stop making “distracting” comments on other issues in order to protect and promote religious liberty. We are not, nor can we ever be, a single issue church. Faithful Citizenship makes it very clear that the Church’s teaching cannot ever be reduced to a single issue even if there are certain pressing moral issues to tend to:

The Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith made a similar point:

It must be noted also that a well-formed Christian conscience
does not permit one to vote for a political program or an
individual law which contradicts the fundamental contents
of faith and morals. The Christian faith is an integral unity,
and thus it is incoherent to isolate some particular element to
the detriment of the whole of Catholic doctrine. A political
commitment to a single isolated aspect of the Church’s social
doctrine does not exhaust one’s responsibility towards the
common good. (Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the
Participation of Catholics in Political Life, no. 4) (30).

The task of the bishops is, in part, to help form the consciences of the faithful and this means speaking out on a number of issues that impact the common good. Faithful Citizenship also says this explicitly:

We [the bishops] urge Catholics to listen carefully to the Church’s teachers when we apply Catholic social teaching to specific proposals and situations. The judgments and recommendations that we make as bishops on specific issues do not carry the same moral authority as statements of universal moral teachings. Nevertheless, the Church’s guidance on these matters is an essential resource for Catholics as they determine whether their own moral judgments are consistent with the Gospel and with Catholic teaching.

Lawler argues that when the bishops speak, they don’t distinguish between which issues are really important and which issues Catholics can disagree. I suspect Lawler and I would disagree on where to draw the line (for example, I think it a stretch that good Catholics can disagree on cutting programs that serve the poor in order to protect the defense budget) but I do think the bishops make clear which issues are most important, namely, opposing “intrinsically evil actions” that undermine human dignity. But Faithful Citizenship also makes it clear that this primary duty includes both opposing grave evils and promoting the good.

Opposition to intrinsically evil acts that undercut the dignity of the human person should also open our eyes to the good we must do, that is, to our positive duty to contribute to the common good and to act in solidarity with those in need. As Pope John Paul II said, “The fact that only the negative commandments oblige always and under all circumstances does not mean that in the moral life prohibitions are more important than the obligation to do good indicated by the positive commandment” (Veritatis Splendor, no. 52). Both opposing evil and doing good are essential obligations (24).

I suspect that Lawler finds the issues he lists a “distraction” not so much because the bishops are speaking about something other than religious liberty, but because the positions the bishops take might confuse voters about which candidate to support. In fact, a commenter on Lawler’s post writes that the bishops “have a public policy staff, which keeps busy—mostly retyping press releases from the DNC onto USCCB letterhead.” I found this striking because only a few weeks ago, the Commonweal editors said just the opposite:

Religious freedom “ought not to be a partisan issue,” the bishops declare. They are absolutely right. If defending religious freedom becomes a partisan issue or, worse, an electoral ploy, it will engender enormous cynicism in an electorate in which a significant majority of voters already think religion is too politicized. Unfortunately, the bishops’ statement and proposal for public action are likely to increase that possibility. This initiative is being launched during an election year in which one party has assumed the mantle of faith and charges the other with attacking religion. The bishops need to do much more to prevent their national campaign from becoming a not-very-covert rallying point for the Republican Party and its candidates. If that happens, it is the church and the cause of religious freedom that will suffer.

So which is it? Are the bishops covertly supporting the Democrats or the Republicans? Turns out, neither. The conception of the good that the bishops are advocating for–the conception of the good that is integral to the Catholic faith–is discordant with both party platforms. Catholics experience dissonance when the bishops speak because we have been so accustomed to see the world in either Red or Blue, but neither color can represent the full spectrum of reality. In this sense, it is appropriate that the bishops muddy the water as a reminder that the Church’s job is not to support a specific party platform or candidate.

But it is also important that the bishops speak out on many of the issues Lawler lists because these issues are integral to promoting the common good. The fact is that there are threats to the common good coming from both sides of our political spectrum. Religious liberty is incredibly important (as are the issues of abortion, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, and marriage) but so is the protection of the poor and vulnerable including immigrants and hungry kids. The bishops aren’t the ones muddying the water here. The water is already muddy. It’s filthy, actually. The bishops are trying to clear it up a bit. Quite frankly, I think it’s time we start listening a little more attentively to what they have to say–that is, everything they have to say.

In the wake of the financial crisis and recession, we have learned that elements of our safety net work quite well. In his testimony before the House Budget Committee, Robert Greenstein (President of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and former Administrator of the Food and Nutrition Service at USDA),

 the poverty rate stood at 15.5 percent in 2010. Yet under the same measure, the poverty rate without the safety net — that is, the poverty rate based on  household incomes before government assistance is counted — was 29 percent. In  other   words, the safety net cut poverty nearly in half compared to what it otherwise would be.

Looking at the hard data, 4.4 million people were kept out of poverty in 2010 through both the existing law and new expansions and initiatives. Increases in the cost of SNAP is due to three things: the increase in benefits (set to expire in November 2013), increased participation of eligible persons/families, and the increase in eligible persons due to the recession/ unemployment. Some of these increases will automatically go down as the economy recovers and unemployment falls; however, increased benefits and participation by eligible families should be maintained. (I am emphatically stating greater participation by eligible families is a desired goal. SNAP’s success in providing nutritional assistance to low income persons requires participation by those in need).

This 2004 file photo from the Virginia Department of Corrections shows the execution gurney at the Greensville Correctional Center's death row in Jarratt, Va.

Lane acknowledges that opposition to the death penalty is gaining momentum at this time, a trend which E.J. Dionne Jr. has written more positively about recently also in the Washington Post. A similarly more favorable take on the abolition of capital punishment was offered to members of the Sant-Egidio Community by Pope Benedict XVI in November 2011: “I express my hope that your deliberations will encourage the political and legislative initiatives being promoted in a growing number of countries to eliminate the death penalty and to continue the substantive progress made in conforming penal law both to the human dignity of prisoners and the effective maintenance of public order.”

Of course, much of this rethinking of the death penalty is due to growing concerns about (not in any particular order): 1) possible mistakes that may lead to wrongful convictions and the executions of possibly innocent persons; 2) possible unfairness in its application (do race or economics bias the process?); 3) questions concerning whether or not it is an effective deterrent to violent crime (obviously, it doesn’t deter persons like Breivik or Timothy McVeigh or the 9/11 terrorists who are willing to die); and 4) the apparent high costs for states (and therefore for taxpayers) to implement it. Lane writes, “Such practical and moral concerns are at their most understandable in run-of-the-mill convenience-store murder cases, where the risk of error seems relatively high compared with the benefits of punishing murder with death.” However, Lane adds, “But Breivik’s was no ordinary crime. It presents the special case of a cold-blooded massacre of children by a political terrorist whose guilt is unquestionable and who remains utterly unrepentant; indeed, he told the court that he would kill again if given the opportunity.” While Lane expresses some worries that a sentence of life in prison may dangerously allow Breivik to “broadcast his message to receptive audiences” or perhaps even to escape (and, I might add, he may pose a deadly threat in prison to fellow inmates and detention officers), his greatest concern is a moral one.

That is, Lane submits that “one of humanity’s oldest and most persistent moral intuitions [is] that there should be condign retribution for the most monstrous transgressions.” He then provides a link to a statement made by Thomas Indrebo in the immediate aftermath of the bloody rampage: “The death penalty is the only just sentence in this case!!!!!!!!” To be sure, I suspect this indeed is what many, perhaps most, people feel in cases involving crimes of this magnitude. As a former law enforcement officer who worked in a maximum security jail, I sometimes stood face-to-face with murderers, who though not in the same league as Breivik would not, I knew, hesitate to kill me. Society should be protected from such persons, and this is of course one of the responsibilities of government.

Still, even if Lane is right about the moral intuition that most people have about condign retribution for atrocities that persons like Breivik have committed, apparently not everyone has it or at least stays on that level. A significant voice in support of the ban against the death penalty in Connecticut was that of families of murder victims there. There are other similar persons in groups like Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation. Marietta Jaeger, for example, whose seven-year-old daughter, Susie, was kidnapped and murdered during a camping trip in 1973, says in an article in Sojourners magazine (free registration required) that “there are no amount of retaliatory acts that will compensate for the loss of my little girl or restore her to my arms. Even to say that the death of one malfunctioning person is going to be a just retribution is an insult to her immeasurable worth to me.” More recently, in connection with “A Horrific Crime” committed in Connecticut in July 2007 by two men who invaded the Petit family home and brutally murdered a mother and two daughters, Notre Dame law professor and moral theologian Cathleen Kaveny questions whether “a quick, painless execution” actually serves retribution.

In my view, the Catholic Church today has a principled moral stance that no longer accepts the death penalty as a form of retributive punishment. The current official position of the Catholic Church is offered in the Catechism in its section on the fifth commandment, “You shall not kill,” and in the subsection on “legitimate defense” (I provide the full subsection for context, but punishment and the death penalty are addressed directly in paragraphs 2266-2267):

Legitimate defense

2263 The legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. “The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one’s own life; and the killing of the aggressor. . . . The one is intended, the other is not.”

2264 Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow:

‘If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful. . . . Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one’s own life than of another’s.’

2265 Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility.

2266 The efforts of the state to curb the spread of behavior harmful to people’s rights and to the basic rules of civil society correspond to the requirement of safeguarding the common good. Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense. Punishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced by the offense. When it is willingly accepted by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation. Punishment then, in addition to defending public order and protecting people’s safety, has a medicinal purpose: as far as possible, it must contribute to the correction of the guilty party.

2267 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.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, 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” (John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae).

As the Catechism acknowledges, the state has the authority and the responsibility to inflict upon criminals a “punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense” in order to redress “the disorder introduced by the offense.” This is punishment that satisfies retributive justice. In addition, when an offender owns up to their crime and accepts the fitting punishment, it becomes expiatory and thereby medicinally puts the prisoner on the path to correction (hence one of the better names for what I used to do is “corrections officer’–and, believe me, I was called a lot worse…). This appears to be a nod in the direction of punishment that is congruent with restorative justice.

However, and very significantly, the Catechism no longer includes mention of capital punishment in paragraph 2266. It used to, though, in the 1992 version of the Catechism, paragraph 2266, which read: “Preserving the common good of society requires rendering the aggressor unable to inflict harm. For this reason the traditional teaching of the Church has acknowledged as well-founded the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty.“ The line in bold here was omitted, however, when it was revised in 1997 (partly due to the influence of Sister Helen Prejean whose letter about precisely this was delivered to Pope John Paul II on January 22, 1997, seven days before Cardinal Ratzinger announced that a change would be made in the Catechism to reflect recent “progress in doctrine” about the death penalty; see her account of this in her book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions [Random House, 2005], 128-132, where she also writes that the “omission changes everything,” 130).

Accordingly, the death penalty is explicitly mentioned in the 1997 version of the Catechism in paragraph 2267, where an execution is justified “if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.” In other words, the only justification for killing a prisoner (as long as it is certain that he or she is truly guilty and no mistake has been made) is if there is really no other way to protect others–conditions that the Catechism, echoing Pope John Paul II, says are just about practically nonexistent today.

In a careful and detailed study of this subsection of the Catechism, E. Christian Brugger comments, “The principal theoretical implication of the shift for Catholic moral teaching is that the death penalty precisely as punishment is no longer being defended, but rather the death penalty as collective self defense” (“Rejecting the Death Penalty: Continuity and Change in the Tradition,” Heythrop Journal [2008], 388-404, at 388). Brugger argues that this current teaching “against capital punishment derives in the first place from the inherent dignity of the human person” (397) as made in “God’s image” (Gen. 1:26-27) and which is “inviolable”–a term that he notes John Paul II used often throughout his writings, including Evangelium Vitae (398). Brugger hastens to add (I think rightly):

This is not to say that the intentional killing of a murderer by public authority is as gravely wrong as the intentional killing of the innocent…. Most people feel much greater emotional repugnance at the thought of killing the innocent than they do at killing the guilty. This is because the two kinds of killing are different in a very significant respect. It does not follow, however, that the one is wrong and the other legitimate. Both are seriously wrong, though one is more gravely wrong than the other” (399).

I agree that the Catholic Church’s teaching on the death penalty is now a principled, moral-theological stance, and I would add another possible reason for the change that was made in the Catechism. Some fairly recent remarks by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, who is the Preacher to the Papal Household (under both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI), in some of his Lenten homilies in 2004 and 2005, corroborate my interpretation–especially about how the death penalty should no longer serve retributive punishment. In his third Lenten sermon from 2005, Fr. Cantalamessa (explicitly drawing on the work of literary-critic turned anthropologist René Girard) preached that:

Jesus unmasks and tears apart the mechanism of the scapegoat that canonizes violence, making himself innocent, the victim of all violence…. Christ defeated violence, not by opposing it with greater violence, but suffering it and laying bare its injustice and uselessness…. ‘One died for all.’ The believer has another reason–Eucharistic–to oppose the death penalty. How can Christians, in certain countries, approve and rejoice over the news that a criminal has been condemned to death, when we read in the Bible: ‘Do I indeed derive any pleasure from the death of the wicked? says the Lord God. Do I not rather rejoice when he turns from his evil way that he may live?’ (Ezekiel 18:23).”

What Fr. Cantalamessa is getting at is that in the Eucharist we Christians encounter (and hopefully in turn embody) a justice that turns our standard, retributive notion of justice on its head. At the same time, the expiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ, wherein he nonviolently accepted and died a cruel death and, in doing so, exposed the myth of redemptive violence that hides behind the curtain of state-sanctioned executions done in the name of retributive justice.

On the first point, in Responses to 101  Questions on the Mass (Paulist Press, 1999), Kevin W. Irwin similarly holds that the Mass offers an experience and understanding of justice that runs counter to the retributive moral intuitions of most people:

It is this kind of justice [the justice of the Eucharist] that should be the measure of the world’s and the church’s expectations, but so often it is not. All too often, we fall back into something akin to what is really condemned in the gospels—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—whereas God’s justice measures out mercy, not condemnation; grace, not judgment. So, in this sense, it is most helpful that justice and liturgy have been reunited. Hopefully, this will mean that God’s often confounding, always liberating power will break through these rites and ceremonies so that what we experience is an ever more complete identification with God through Christ” (180).

On the second point, in The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Fortress Press, 2001), Mark Lewis Taylor similarly writes:

The state, with its dramatic and awe-inspiring spectacles of execution, with its carefully orchestrated ritualized killings, takes on a kind of religious function.  This is not just because it exercises an ultimate power over life and death, but because it uses and constructs rituals out of this process of killing and dying.  The practice and protocol of execution, we might say, is a kind of human sacrifice, like that maintained in religio-imperial systems of the past” (41).

Finally, one of my teachers, the late Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, wrote that Jesus’ execution on a cross “puts an end to the entire expiatory system, whether it be enforced by priests in Jerusalem or by executioners anywhere else” (H. Wayne House and John Howard Yoder, The Death Penalty Debate: Two Opposing Views of Capital Punishment [Word Publishing, 1991], 128). One of Yoder’s teachers, Karl Barth, put the matter this way: “Now that Jesus Christ has been nailed to the cross for the sins of the world, how can we still use the thought of expiation to establish the death penalty?” (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4, pp. 42f) How are we to understand what they are claiming about Jesus’ crucifixion?

First, I do not think that taking Jesus’ execution as our theological point of departure necessarily entails embracing a traditional satisfaction theory of atonement that might contribute to ongoing support by Christians of the death penalty. Taylor suggests that “Christian scapegoating interpretations of Jesus’ death bear a significant responsibility for today’s theatrics of terror, as we suffer it in the form of prisons, endemic police brutality, and state-sanctioned executions” (108). Sister Helen rightly calls this theology, which she thinks Christians over the centuries have espoused, into question, “Is God vengeful, demanding a death for a death?  Or is God compassionate, luring souls into love so great that no one can be considered ‘enemy’?” (120)

Second, Yoder argued that the execution of murderers (and those guilty of any of the other twenty-some capital offenses mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures) was a form of sacrificial expiation to placate a God who they believed required such practices for atonement. Indeed, according to Dennis Gaertner, in the Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, execution by stoning in the Hebrew Scriptures was “an action conveying a corporate obligation for removing sin from the community” (1253). Glen H. Stassen and Michael L. Westmoreland White make a similar point in their careful study of “Biblical Perspectives on the Death Penalty” (in Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call For Reckoning, eds. Erik C. Owens et al. [Eerdmans, 2004]): “Various crimes in ancient Israel were viewed as so grave that they polluted the people and required some form of ritual cleansing or expiation in order to restore the people’s holiness” (125). They offer several examples where offenders “profaned” themselves and the community, so that the evil needed to be “purged” (note the language). In other words, a serious offense committed by one person could result in God’s punishment upon the entire community; therefore, if known, the perpetrator was executed. Similarly, and focusing specifically on the offense of murder, according to Paul D. Simmons, in the Mercer Dictionary of the Bible, “Killing the murderer was not so much retaliation, punishment or vengeance, as an expression of the belief that innocent blood polluted the land, which belonged to Yahweh (Num 35:33)” (858). I suspect that Fr. Cantalamessa probably had something like all of this in mind when he preached what he did above, and I also wouldn’t be surprised if such theological thinking contributed to the change that was made in the Catechism.

Therefore, if we Catholics believe it is the case that Jesus’ death has done away with the sacrificial system, and if part of that edifice was capital punishment, then just as we no longer practice animal and grain sacrifices to placate God, so too we ought not to perform human sacrifice by executing criminals to satisfy some retributive notion of justice being served. Accordingly, from the Catholic perspective at this time, executions by the state are justified, if at all, only to protect society, but never as a condign retribution or capital punishment.

What is love? Our post-Easter readings have taken us through the winding discourses of the Johannine Gospel and first epistle on the nature of love. This week’s readings deepen the exploration of love and also make more explicit the importance of love in the Christian moral life.

It is often said that John’s Gospel does not have an ethic outside of just “love.” John is missing the distinctive moral teachings of Jesus such as we find in the Sermon on the Mount. This may be true, but in his portrayal of love, John gives us perhaps the most rigorous ethic of all. Love is, first of all, characterized by unity. In last week’s reading, we heard Jesus say that he is the vine and his followers the branches (Jn. 15:5). Jesus will later pray that the church (that is, his community of believers both present and future) will be one with him just as he is one with the Father (Jn. 17:11). What is it that makes such unity possible? Love: “As the Father loves me, so I love you. Remain in my love.” Love is what binds the Father, Son, and Spirit together and it is what also binds the Church.

We see the unifying effects of love in our reading from Acts. Jewish followers of Christ see Gentiles receiving the Holy Spirit and Peter demands that they be baptized. The God revealed in Jesus is the Lord of all (Acts 10:36). As such, there cannot be divisions in the Church among the circumcised and uncircumcised believers. The love that unites the persons of the Trinity unites also the church. And if God is love, the Church too ought to be love. But this is so much easier said than done. How difficult it must have been for the Jews, God’s chosen people from whom came the covenants, the prophets, the Law, and the Messiah to watch the unclean Gentiles receiving the Holy Spirit and to have to now call the Gentiles brothers and sisters in Christ.

In our reading from this week, Jesus further clarifies what love is: “No one has greater love than this than to lay down his life for his friends.” Love is characterized by self-sacrifice, which Jesus, of course, perfectly manifests on the cross. Self-sacrifice is closely related to the first characteristic of love—unity. Unity is only possible by “laying down one’s life.” For the Jews to be one with the Gentiles, they had to sacrifice their pride in the Law and in their ancestry. They had to see themselves as on the same level as the Gentiles. So too with Jesus’ disciples as they watched him dine with prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners. The disciples might not have been asked to literally die in these moments, but it must have felt almost like a fate worse than death to realize that they—Jesus’ chosen—were asked to be united with those who they thought so much less of. This command of love has its parallel in the Sermon on the Mount to forgive one’s enemies, to not resist a wrongdoer, and to go an extra mile when conscripted.

Third, love is characterized by obedience, which again is connected to the characteristics of unity and self-sacrifice. “If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’ s commandments and remain in his love.” Obedience is also a call to put aside pride and concern for one’s own “righteousness” in order to “listen to” (the literal meaning of obedience) a higher authority. Once again, the obedience characteristic of love has as its model the obedience Christ who “learned obedience from what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8).

John tells us that the reward of obedience if friendship with Christ. In other words, if obedience is characteristic of love, obedience also deepens love. We obey because we love Christ, but in obeying, we come to a fuller love of Christ. Moreover, obedience is necessary for unity. The unity of Gentiles and Jews in the early Church is only possible by the Church obeying Peter and Paul in their command to baptize the uncircumcised and to welcome them into the Church.

Obedience is perhaps the most difficult characteristic of love to swallow. The emphasis on obedience has led to many abuses of love, especially within marriages. Nevertheless, John’s Gospel reminds us of how important obedience is. Transformation in Christ is not just an individual experience; it happens primarily through the unity of the Church. The expression of that unity is love, and love is obedience to the demands of Christ. D. Moody Smith writes on this point, “[B]eing a disciple means not only believing in Jesus Christ, but belonging to him, being united with him, and obeying his commands. The Johannine Jesus encourages the reader to abide with Jesus, even to see intimacy with him through believing obedience” (The Theology of the Gospel of John, 154).

This rigorous ethic of love is made possible in the post-resurrection Church by the gift of the Holy Spirit. As Pentecost approaches in a few weeks, let us prepare by seeking unity in our families, workplace, and church by seeking unity through self-sacrifice and obedience.

Why do Christians have a preferential option specifically for the poor?  At least one reason is the fact that sin–social and otherwise–often conspires in a particularly powerful way against the poor such that they cannot flourish and participate in society, and even such that they cannot get their basic needs (like food, education, health care, etc.) met.  We must therefore follow the example of Jesus, who gave special attention to the plight of the poor, in an attempt to push back against the forces which conspire against their flourishing.

But it doing so we should not fail to consider another group to which Jesus paid special attention: the rich.  Indeed, his concern for the poor was often connected to a concern for the rich–though his words for the latter certainly had a different tone when compared to those directed at the former.  Indeed, though Jesus rarely speaks of Hell, when he does so it is often connected to a rich person’s failure of one’s duties to the poor. In recounting a rich man’s refusal to help a poor beggar, for instance, Jesus explains that the rich man ends up in torment in Hell (Luke 16: 19-31). He famously said that a rich person will struggle to enter the Kingdom of God (Matthew 19:24). And in one of the most important stories of the Christian tradition, Jesus famously divides the Heaven-bound from the Hell-bound based on whether or not they fulfilled their duties to ‘the least ones’ in their communities (Matt. 25: 31-46). The early Christian community took this message very seriously, and as a result one could argue that the Church had skepticism even with regard to money-making itself. Pope St. Gregory the Great claimed that it stained one’s soul and Pope St. Leo the Great claimed that it was difficult to avoid sin when buying and selling. The usurious lending of money at interest was even punishable by excommunication and denial of a Christian burial.

This is not about politics: Jesus and the Church didn’t make a distinction between those who are “rich like George Clooney” and those who are “rich like Mitt Romney.”  All the rich, especially insofar as their being rich indicates a failure to use one’s wealth to aid the poor, find their salvation seriously imperiled.

Why don’t we take the vulnerable position of the rich more seriously?  In short, why don’t we have a preferential option for the rich? We should, of course, be concerned with the flourishing of the poor.  But flourishing in this life is only of proximate value, isn’t it?  Our ultimate goal is salvation and ultimate union with God.  And many of the rich among us–and many of us (who are surely rich by any reasonable standard), period–have put our salvation in serious danger.  We abandon the poor in buying luxuries we don’t need.  We abandon them in supporting usurious policies.  We haplessly attempt to serve two masters…despite our true Master telling us that this is impossible.

It is important, even essential, to have a preferential option for the poor.  But isn’t this often connected with having a preferential option for the rich–many of whom, if we take Jesus seriously, imperil their own salvation?