Romans 13:1 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, 4 for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer.
“Thou shall not Murder” .... and the Godly response to MURDER is to Kill the murderer....at least that’s what I THINK.
...except for child molestation?
What about lifers who escape and murder? It happened in AZ some years back; more innocent people murdered because the murderer was allowed to live.
Why didn't they call for an end to murder?
Well, hopefully the citizens of Ohio will give the Bishops an answer ..... a resounding NO!
In the 1700s, a death sentence was handed down WITH an altar call for the criminal to make peace with Christ, before they leave the earth.
Funny, I’m not even a BISHOP, and I know this.
In this Great Republic, "We, the People" are the governing authorities, and "We, the People" reserve certain rights against the government which is our creature. One of those rights is the freedom of speech, another is to petition the government for redress of grievances, yet another is to choose our representative as we see fit. "We, the People" includes these bishops.
Do you have some sort of problem with your fellow citizens of this Great Republic exercising their right of free speech? Do you have a problem with your fellow citizens carrying out their duties as the "governing authorities" in a republic? Is there some category of Citizens that you wish to silence? Do you wish to employ force to silence them?
Solution: Send all those sentenced to the death penalty to the homes of the bishops of Ohio. There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?
People can’t forgive and get past murder without believing real justice has taken place.
That justice has both a temporal and eternal timeline to it. There are temporal and eternal consequences that need to be administered.
Genesis 9:5-6 (New King James Version)
5 Surely for your lifeblood I will demand a reckoning; from the hand of every beast I will require it, and from the hand of man.
From the hand of every man’s brother I will require the life of man.
6 “ Whoever sheds man’s blood,
By man his blood shall be shed;
For in the image of God
He made man.
As a former Ohioan, I wonder if those same Bishops have issued a position on Catholic politicians and the withholding of Communion for those that vote(d) for abortion.
If you take, thou shalt not kill and translate that into Hebrew, it doesn’t say kill, it says murder. So the 6th commandment should read: Thou shalt not murder. The death penalty is not murder, it is by the law of God a justifiable killing.
This is a post Vatican II progressivist teaching (= it's not Catholic). The Catholic Church for 1960 years prior has not considered the death penalty "to be wrong". This hippy priest idiocy can be disproven by anyone versed in history. These bishops should begin saving the souls of their dumb down flock who are falling to perdition like leaves off a tree in the Fall, instead of getting involved with saving a handful of justly condemned criminals.
"Why God would allow these "ambiguities" to occur in Vatican II. (and other magisterial documents)?
Considering all that I have said thus far, especially concerning the ulterior motives of the liberal prelates and their virtual hijacking of Vatican II, I think Scripture has an answer as to why God would allow these "ambiguities" to occur. In short, there is an interesting working principle in Scripture. As a punishment for your sin, God will allow you to pursue, and be condemned by, what you sinfully desire. This is what I believe happened at Vatican II. The progressivist bishops and theologians sought for a way to push their heterodox ideas into the Church, so God allowed them to do so, as a witness and judgment against them. He would allow the Council to have its "ambiguities" so that those who would interpret them contrary to nineteen centuries of established Catholic dogma, would lead themselves into sin, and ultimately into God's judgment. Unfortunately, as is always the case, the sheep suffer for what the shepherds do wrong, and as a result, we have all been wandering in the spiritual desert of liberal theology for the past 40 years. (Article from Catholic Family News, Feb 2003, by Robert Sungenis)(1)
(1) In fact, the bad shepherds may be a chastisement for the sins of the sheep. Saint John Eudes, basing his words on Sacred Scripture, says that when God wants to punish his people, he sends them bad priests. See The Priest, His Dignity and Obligations, by Saint John Eudes, Chapter 2, "Qualities of a Holy Priest". (New York: P.J. Kenedy and Sons, 1947).
Question: If the death penalty is wrong and should be abolished, then was the Roman Catholic Church wrong to execute people for serious crimes ranging from blasphemy and idolotry to translating the Bible into English?
Why then was this man appointed to the Vatican's Academy of Sciences?
Defender of pro-abortion and homosexualist policies appointed to Vatican's Academy of Sciences
Snip: January 6, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian neuroscientist who was appointed yesterday to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, is an open defender of the pro-abortion and homosexualist ideology of Brazil’s new president…..
I’m not persuaded in the slightest by someone quoting scripture against (or in defense of) the death penalty. I simply want murderers removed from the gene pool.
The Council of Trent:
>> The power of life and death is permitted to certain civil magistrates because theirs is the responsibility under law to punish the guilty and protect the innocent. Far from being guilty of breaking this commandment [Thy shall not kill], such an execution of justice is precisely an act of obedience to it. For the purpose of the law is to protect and foster human life. This purpose is fulfilled when the legitimate authority of the State is exercised by taking the guilty lives of those who have taken innocent lives.
In the Psalms we find a vindication of this right: “Morning by morning I will destroy all the wicked in the land, cutting off all evildoers from the city of the Lord” (Ps. 101:8). <<
Our Bishops have spoken and God bless them. I will begin calling my state reps tomorrow.
St. Thomas Aquinas:
It is written: “Wizards thou shalt not suffer to live” (Ex. 22:18); and: “In the morning I put to death all the wicked of the land” (Ps. 100:8). …
Every part is directed to the whole, as imperfect to perfect, wherefore every part exists naturally for the sake of the whole. For this reason we see that if the health of the whole human body demands the excision of a member, because it became putrid or infectious to the other members, it would be both praiseworthy and healthful to have it cut away. Now every individual person is related to the entire society as a part to the whole. Therefore if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and healthful that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good, since “a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump” (1 Cor. 5:6).
(Summa Theologiae, II, II, q. 64, art. 2)
The fact that the evil ones, as long as they live, can be corrected from their errors does not prohibit that they may be justly executed, for the danger which threatens from their way of life is greater and more certain than the good which may be expected from their improvement.
They also have at that critical point of death the opportunity to be converted to God through repentance. And if they are so obstinate that even at the point of death their heart does not draw back from malice, it is possible to make a quite probable judgment that they would never come away from evil.”
(Summa contra gentiles, Book III, chapter 146)
Pope John Paul II opposed the death penalty in practice in Europe and the United States. But he was very clear to state that his opposition was a matter of prudence, and he was motivated by a desire to counter the “culture of death” that decided when lives were not worth defending; he believed that if we decided killing was justifiable in one circumstance, it would be easier to decide killing was justified in other circumstances.
As is my right to do so, according to John Paul, himself on this very issue, I respectfully disagree. I believe his spirit was too gravely informed by his experiences countering the Soviets and the Nazis, and he did not properly grasp the extent to which the moral equivalence of abortion and the death penalty would be used to undermine opposition to abortion.
Bishops in America have been, I believe, to no small extent motivated not by such a charity, but by evil, a subversiveness which refuses to acknowledge the horrific crime of abortion and socialism, and instead justifies its refusal to stand with opposition to abortion by the most intellectually tortured moral equivalence, and therefore bears a greater accountability for the evils of abortion and socialism than their misguided flock which they fail to correct, and so, I keep my tagline.
Yet I am deeply puzzed why, as the vast, vast majority of Presbyterian and Reformed churches in the United States lapse into outright apostasy, being not only moral cowards on the issue of abortion, but leading protagonists for it, such Christians as yourself neither stand with those who seek to purify Catholicism of such miserable cowards, nor fight the unfathomable iniquity in their own denominational families, but rather train their weaponry on those who would willingly stand with Presbyterian heroes such as Ronald Reagan in opposing our common enemy so as to weary these noble Catholic crusaders for justice by splitting their forces, having to fight on two fronts, against the insidious treachery of the leftists within the Church, and against those Christians who use such traitors to defame and insult the Church.