Death penalty teaching

As a lifelong opponent of capital punishment and a career-long professor of ethics (including at several Catholic universities), I am nevertheless compelled by experience to regret that Pope Francis’ current teaching was not more qualified. The experience is that of life in tribal communities where access to anything like effective police, honest tribunals and tolerably humane prisons is simply unimaginable. There are still many such places and they are often overlooked in social moralizing that purports to be universalistic. In such communities, criminal justice can only be local and is often more compassionate and conscientious than in our own impersonal agencies. But if such a community is injured and menaced by an intractably murderous individual, it has only two options: execution, or the morally worse alternative of expelling a killer from tribal precincts to pursue a bloody course in some other unwary community. Pope John Paul II’s teaching could accommodate this socio-anthropological reality. Pope Francis’ teaching can only be made to do so by invoking the right of self-defense to justify tribal procedure — a legitimate casuistry but a complication that might so easily have been avoided! It would also have avoided raising the stress level of those who fear (as I do not) that the pope is tampering dangerously with doctrinal tradition.

James Gaffney
St. Matthew, St. Paul

Do Catholic justices matter?

With Scalia, we had six Catholics on the Supreme Court. Those, plus the three liberals (Ginsburg, Kagan and Breyer) could have made the death penalty illegal in this country. Though all professed respect for life, only the liberals were willing to make it law. The Catholic Spirit, in one of their columns (Father Kenneth Doyle in “Seeking Answers,” Oct. 26, 2016), even said that, if anything, the Catholics should recuse themselves from such decisions (not so with abortion decisions, though I don’t know why). In an age where innocent people are on death row for years, or worse, have been executed, why does America still have the death penalty? Yet we are supposed to take comfort that, with Kavanaugh, Catholics will still be in the majority, joining those others who have whittled down health care, defended environmental threats by big industry, dragged their feet on immigrants’ rights when legally applying for asylum, not to mention siding with big business in eliminating arbitration in hostile workplaces. What kind of life do Catholic judges respect?

Elizabeth Rosenwinkel
St. Albert the Great, Minneapolis

Will the abusers pay?

After reading the July 12th article on how payments to the victims of sexual predator priests will be made, I realized one category of contributors is missing. What will the sexual predators contribute to their victims? They are not all deceased and not all are living in poverty. Some own more than one home. Why are they not contributing? Their contributions would show sincere remorse and go a long way to help our Church move forward in a healing manner. These priests have ruined the lives of their victims and have ruined the Catholic congregations, as many parishioners have left our Church due to this issue.

Mary Kremer Manderfeld
St. Dominic, Northfield

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