{"id":1335,"date":"2016-08-04T17:49:52","date_gmt":"2016-08-04T16:49:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/?p=1335"},"modified":"2016-08-09T08:40:44","modified_gmt":"2016-08-09T07:40:44","slug":"theologians-appeal-for-clarification-of-apparent-errors-in-amoris-laetitia-death-penalty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/theologians-appeal-for-clarification-of-apparent-errors-in-amoris-laetitia-death-penalty\/","title":{"rendered":"Theologians’ Appeal for Clarification of Apparent Errors in Amoris laetitia – death penalty"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amoris laetitia in n. 83, says that the Church “firmly rejects the death penalty.” The theologians censure a theoretically possible interpretation of this that would understand it “as meaning that the death penalty is always and everywhere unjust in itself and therefore cannot ever be rightly inflicted by the state.” Such a meaning would contradict Church doctrine. Read in context, I don’t see anything\u00a0suggesting that the text would mean\u00a0anything so absolute. As it is speaking about\u00a0the Church’s mission to defend life, the straightforward meaning of\u00a0saying that the Church “firmly rejects the death penalty,” would be that the Church holds with conviction\u00a0that the death penalty should not be employed today.<\/p>\n

Though it is not relevant to what the common Catholic\u00a0would understood the text to mean, evidence for this reading is the way Pope Francis elsewhere describes Pope John Paul II’s and the Catechism’s position on\u00a0capital punishment. E.g., in\u00a0his address to the delegates of the international association of penal law<\/a>, Pope Francis, referring to their statements that the cases where it is necessary to kill an offender are rare, if not practically nonexistent,\u00a0says that “Pope John Paul II condemned the death penalty, as does the Catechism of the Catholic Church.” So the weaker\u00a0language of\u00a0“firmly rejects” is adequately interpreted in this sense of being practically never necessary.<\/p>\n

Pope Francis has\u00a0repeatedly spoke out stronger against the death penalty. One may disagree with the prudence of this. But as there are not real indications that he intends to use the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris laetitia to further opposition to the death penalty or to change Church teaching on it, it would\u00a0seem more well-advised to address those stronger statements, rather than raising concerns about what the statement “firmly rejects the death penalty” could<\/em> be interpreted to mean.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amoris laetitia in n. 83, says that the Church “firmly rejects the death penalty.” The theologians censure a theoretically possible interpretation of this that would understand it “as meaning that the death penalty is always and everywhere unjust in itself and therefore cannot ever be rightly inflicted by the state.” Such a meaning would contradict […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[91,84],"class_list":["post-1335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-amoris-laetitia","tag-pope-francis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1335"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1336,"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335\/revisions\/1336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}