This past weekend I was in Orlando speaking at a tremendous diocesan gathering called a “Day for Life”. In Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), his landmark encyclical on respect life, Pope John Paul II instructed Catholics worldwide to hold such days every year.
“The celebration of this day should be planned and carried out with active participation of all sectors of the local Church [diocesan]. Its primary purpose should be to foster in individual consciences, in families, in the Church and in civil society a recognition of the meaning and value of human life at every stage and in every condition.” [¶85]
In addition to presenting separate workshops for adults and for high-schoolers on Catholic teaching and the death penalty, I was asked to give a keynote address on Evangelium Vitae and capital punishment. How rare such a request is! Perhaps because no one quite knows what to do with Pope John Paul’s emphatic, unnuanced statement in italics in ¶9. After pointing out that the biblical account in Genesis 4:15 reveals that God moved to protect Cain (the murderer) from being killed by those who would avenge the death of his victim (the innocent and righteous man Abel), Pope John Paul makes the following bold assertion:
“Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity.” [Italics in original]
He follows up that absolutely clear, unambiguous statement by quoting St. Ambrose’s (4th c.) commentary on God’s treatment of the murderer Cain:
“…God, who preferred the correction rather than the death of a sinner, did not desire that a homicide be punished by the exaction of another act of homicide.”
Pope John Paul II has thrown this earthquake of a statement into his masterpiece on the value of human life right at the beginning, before he even defines the culture of death (¶12). This brilliant and courageous Supreme Servant of the Catholic Church would not do such a thing by whim or accident. His placement of this statement and his use of italics in the original are all part of his definitive message. And, he is making a dramatic refinement to what eight centuries of Catholics have assumed to be the position of St. Thomas Aquinas, namely:
By sinning man departs from the order of reason, and consequently falls away from the dignity of his manhood…he falls into the slavish state of the beasts, by being disposed of according as he is useful to others. [Citations omitted] Hence, although it be evil in itself to kill a man so long as he preserve his dignity, yet it may be good to kill a man who has sinned, even as it is to kill a beast. [ST IIa IIae q. 64 a. 2]
Has Pope John Paul II overruled Aquinas? For the following reasons, I believe we can say that instead of overruling Aquinas, Pope John Paul II has developed and refined Aquinas, reformulated Aquinas, for our time.
First of all, even when Aquinas was assuming that a murderer loses his human dignity, he did not say that killing the murderer “is” good; rather he said it “may be” good. That leaves open the possibility that in our modern times it may not be good.
Secondly, Aquinas’ Herculean work in the Summa underlies a massive integration of theology and philosophy. The source cited in this subsection for the proposition that human beings lose their human dignity when they commit serious sin is the philosopher Aristotle. (“For a bad man is worse than a beast, and is more harmful, as the Philosopher states (Polit. i, 1 and Ethic. vii, 6).”)
I believe we can safely say that Pope John Paul II is overruling Aristotle in Evangelium Vitae by asserting that “Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity.” I believe we can presume that if Aquinas had this teaching in hand in his day, from a source who is one of the greatest leaders of the Catholic Church in all its history, he would have reached a different conclusion. Pope John Paul’s correction of the premise drives the correction of the result.
My experience of Catholic and non-Catholic Christians all over the country bears out that this correction is not just esoteric fodder for theological types. From the halls of death row and legislatures to the main streets and pews of every state in which I have addressed this issue, Christians look at me and say: “The people who commit those crimes are no different than animals. They are monsters.” That premise, of course, always precedes the justification that killing them is not like killing a human being. After eight hundred years of repetition, this mistaken premise is imbedded in our Christian subconscious.
Pope John Paul II in ¶9 of Evangelium Vitae has corrected our assumption and our error. The murderer has done brutal and horrible things, such acts which are more like those of a beast than of a human being. But the murderer himself, sitting in our custody, is still a human being who has not lost his personal dignity.
That changes everything.
©2012 Dale S. Recinella, Tallahassee, Florida U.S.A. All rights reserved. Used with permission.