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In May of 2008 I interviewed Father Frank Pavone the director of Priests for Life on Phyllis Schlafly’s weekly radio program on KSIV. In discussing his 2006 book, Ending Abortion, I noticed that he had substituted the term, A Consistent Life Ethic, for the old Seamless Garment.
The latter was a metaphor employed by the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin that expanded the range of life issues from abortion and euthanasia to a broader horizon that included nuclear war, poverty, labor unions, and the minimum wage.
The Cardinal’s metaphor has always bothered me because its very name implied a moral equivalency among many disparate issues. A priest friend told me years ago that it trivialized abortion opposition. It is a bad garment that the Church should tear to pieces. Otherwise they will never win the battle over abortion.
Over the last many years, the garment has had the unintended consequence of allowing several Catholic politicians to hide their pro-abortion promotion under its mantel. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin ran a poll on its 22 “moral” issues among the 15 Catholics in the Senate in 2004.
The surprising “winner” was pro-choice advocate John Kerry with a score of 64%.
Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, then the only anti-abortion Catholic senator, finished at the back of the pack. Pope John Paul II let the world know that there was a hierarchy of life issues in his encyclical, The Gospel of Life, when he wrote abortion and euthanasia are crimes, which no human law can legitimize.
The issue that has caused the most consternation for those of us who want to concentrate on the primary life issues has been the death penalty.
No other garment issue has distracted more from the energy needed to fight abortion and euthanasia than the death penalty.
Curiously, most of the pro-abortion Catholic Senators in Durbin’s poll were against the death penalty. I find it difficult to understand Catholics who can condone the slaughter of over 43 million unborn children since 1973 and yet protect the lives of convicted murderers.
Since 1930 fewer than 5000 convicted criminals have been executed. This has been usually after having exercised their constitutional rights of due process, including lengthy appeals, a last meal, clergy council, and family visitation. This was far more than they granted their innocent victims.
The Catholic sense of proportionality alone should require us not to exert any undo efforts on this lesser cause when there is still so much to be done in truly ending abortion.
On an intellectual level my main problem with the death penalty is that I have not heard one argument against it that makes any sense. Most opposition focuses on anecdotal stories of emotional hyperbole that in some cases have bordered on a pitted assault on our judicial system.
Other arguments have abused the English language to the extent that words have lost their meaning. They say that the death penalty is vengeance and legalized murder.
If so, than all punishment is revenge and incarceration is legalized kidnapping. When language flies out the window, true justice goes with it.
During Mass years ago, one priest asked us to pray for the end of the intrinsic evils of abortion and the death penalty. Contrary to his moral equation, my college ethics book in the early 1960s, complete with an imprimatur, listed the death penalty as one of the three moral exceptions to the Fifth Commandment. (Sixth Commandment in Protestant Churches)
If the death penalty were intrinsically evil, then the Church is guilty of having taught evil for a 1000 years.
Every so often a salacious murder surfaces underscores the internal weakness of the death penalty abolitionists. I am referring to the brutal slayings in Cheshire, Connecticut in 2007. Joshua Komisarjevsky and Stephen Hayes broke into the home of Dr. William A. Petit, Jr. and his family. They knocked the husband unconscious.
Then they raped and strangled his wife Jennifer and molested his daughters, 11-year old Michaela and Hayley,17, tying them to their beds in the process. They set the house on fire. The father broke free of his restraints and escaped but his daughters died of smoke inhalation.
In defeating the tireless efforts of abolitionist, State Representative Michael Lawlor, a Democrat, out-going Governor, Republican M. Jodi Rell cited only one case–the Cheshire murders.
I know this is an anecdotal example and there is always the issue of ambitious DA’s abusing their power and prosecuting the wrong person but on a whole the only way that justice can be served is with the availability of the death penalty for such heinous, inhumane crimes, such as the Cheshire killings.
As Petit said “My family got the death penalty and you want to give murderers life. That’s not justice!” He could have added that his family perished without any benefit of a trial. I don’t think anyone can argue with this.
The only argument that I have to listen to is the one made by Pope John Paul II in his Gospel of Life. As an addendum to his implicit condemnation of the seamless garment the pope stated that he believed that the cases necessitating the death penalty were very rare, if not practically non-existent because of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system.
Unfortunately he did not illustrate what these improvements were that allowed for his modification of a Church teaching. His statement seems to contradict many other opponents of the death penalty who think that the justice system is in total disarray.
Until I hear a more coherent answer, I will adhere to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which allows for the right and duty of legitimate public authorities to punish malefactors by means of penalties in commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty.
As an after-thought, I wonder how many of you have seen the Sean Penn movie, Dead Man Walking, loosely based on the efforts of Sister Helen Prejean, an ardent opponent of the death penalty? I think it is a great ad FOR the death penalty. Tell me what you think by making a comment
Last year my precocious six and a half-year old granddaughter asked me whom I thought was the worst president. I don’t really know what prompted her to ask me that question but I admire her spirit of curiosity that is fueled by her IQ of 136.
I just hope the American school system does not squelch her ability to ask the important question “Why,” which I believe to be at the root of all learning.
I told her to be truthful I thought our new president was the worst I had ever experienced. I proceeded to give her a few basic reasons for my choice.
I think he has handled the Bush mess as badly as anyone can imagine. His fiscal and monetary policies threaten to send us into another Depression, similar to the one his idol Franklin Roosevelt extended in 1933. His insane Heath Care bill threatens to bankrupt the country.
Candidate Obama promised us his administration would be run on honesty and transparency. Now as we near the end of his 1st year in office, it is clear that this has not been the case. I have written widely on his ideas and policies for the Mindszenty Foundation. (All my articles can be accessed at Mindszenty.org)
For a while I have been trying to capture the essence of his leadership ability or lack of since he tool office last January. It is almost as elusive as trying to assess his character. I have called him the Hawaiian Candidate, my allusion to Richard Condon’s book and the subsequent film adaptations of The Manchurian Candidate.
As much as I like the analogy, I don’t believe it goes far enough. Perhaps President Obama is more like a character from the Bob Fosse play, Chicago. I saw veteran actor, Joel Gray’s perfect rendition of his song, Mr. Cellophane Man on Broadway several years ago.
While Obama is hardly an invisible man–he gets more face time than the gecko in the insurance commercials— he does approximate the lyrics of the song about being unknown by most people who encounter him. He seems to have no essence or what John Kerry called gravitas.
Sure we know he likes basketball, is a die-hard Pale Hose fan, is married to Michelle and they have two little girls. They called him “Barry” in high school in Hawaii.
Like Clinton and George H. W. Bush, he’s a southpaw. (It took Albert Pujos’ catcher’s balk to spare him the painful embarassment of bouncing his 59′ curve ball in the All-Star dirt last July.)
We know that he lived in Chicago where he was a community organizer then he went to Harvard Law School where he was the president of their Law Review.
Even his supporters have to admit that this is a very brief resume for a world leader. I seriously doubt that Sarah Palin was qualified to be president but her credential greatly outweighed those of our current president.
So what do we REALLY know about him?
What religion is he? We know he studied Islam in Indonesia where he lived with his mother and stepfather during his early years. He did attend Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s Church in Chicago, which was ostensibly a Christian Church but since he has been president has he ever set foot in a similar church?
Stories abound that he is a closet Muslim. He is the first president who did not celebrate Christmas since people took notice of that kind of thing. Now I read that he is pushing a 44-cent Muslim stamp. Others say that he had the Gitmo prisoners tried in a criminal court in NYC and not before a military tribunal because he did not want to send a fellow Muslim to the gallows.
Balderdash? Bunk? Maybe–but I would really like to know what his religious beliefs are. An honest president would tell us. Wouldn’t he?
Look for Part II Early Next Week
The Gospel Truth 