I certainly concede that you are far more the scholar than am I and I never claimed to be a scholar, just a street-fighting elk from the wrong side of the tracks by comparison with the many more scholarly posters here such as you.
I am not being sarcastic toward you (now or ever) and I do value your every post. Occasionally (verrrrrry occasionally) I may disagree with a nuance here and/or a suggestion there but you have my sincere respect regardless.
Some Catholics, such as the late JP II, have shown a genuine opposition to capital punishment in our time. That is one of the few topics with time sensitivity. John Paul II argued that we no longer need capital punishment because we are capable of incarcerating miscreants for life with no reasonable possibility of parole. At one time or another, I have wavered on capital punishment between for and against and as to the extent of its applicability. However, I do not much trust the civil government. I do trust the Church. At this point and for fifteen or twenty years I have felt that capital punishment is morally legitimate. I have had some periods when I felt we could do without it. It is a civil question on which, given the proven guilt of defendants, the entire society may rule as opposed to abortion which cannot be morally justified by anyone or anything (in the absence of a genuine choice of lives) since the primary victim is unquestionably an innocent human being.
Heretics are not innocent. Schismatics are not innocent. The civil murderer engages in the gross injustice of depriving his/her victim of a legitimate right to temporal life here on earth. The victim may well be welcomed eternally into the presence of the Beatific Vision in which case, the victim is speeded into an ultimate destination that we all ought to seek. On the other hand, the victim who is spiritually unprepared for death and not in a state of grace has usually been deprived of the opportunity (after the murderous action) to repent and be received by God eternally. God may act in ways not familiar to us, but that would seem to be the likely outcome. What is the outcome for the unbaptized but aborted unborn????
The schismatic who makes it his or her business to seduce the poorly catechized or otherwise vulnerable Catholic into schism commits not only the sin of adherence to schism, but, if successful in that seduction, may well cause the eternal damnation of his/her victim and also the sin of scandal. I find it hard to imagine that the result of apostasizing into schism is eternal bliss or that those who seduce others into schism receive eternal reward. If I am wrong, I am wrong. At my moral blackjack table, my chips are placed on the Vatican spaces in reliance upon the promises of Christ.
I respectfully disagree with your suggestion that disturbance of the civil order may somehow be more serious than disturbance of the Faith of somewhat uninformed Catholics susceptible to the seduction that if they will just rebel against papal authority they will be as gods.
As Catholics, we believe in God, in good and evil, in temporal punishment on earth, in an afterlife with eternal punishment and eternal reward based upon how each person used the gift of free will given him or her by God. It may well be that the auto-da-fe and subsequent executions had the effect of focusing the mind of the condemned on a perfect act of contrition and eternal salvation. The eternal life and where it is lived are (objectively) infinitely more important than the conditions of temporal life. One hundred years of unbroken success in every way on earth plus eternity in hell as the consequence or`one hundred years of great temporal misery on earth ande the littel shack by the river in heaven? No brainer, give me the temporal misery and heaven. I suspect you agree.
All of that having been said, and again underlining that I am no scholar, I will rely on George Weigel who is a scholar as to your Vatican II question. I believe (and I may well be wrong) that Vatican II was a pastoral and not a doctrinal council. Even if it were merely a pastoral council, its acts deserve respect.
Weigel wrote a book on revolution against the soviets after the fall of the Iron Curtain. He claimed that the purpose of Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Freedom was primarily aimed at atheists and even communists who were not favored by communist regimes in Eastern Europe in order to convince them that the Roman Catholic Church was a desirable ally in the struggle against communist dictatorships. It took those behind the Iron Curtain more than a decade to figure out that Vatican II was serious about not trying to force them to live like Catholics much less as Catholics. It is said that a third of the martyred Fr. Jerzy Popielusczko's (who can properly spell such a name/let's call him St. Jerzy) congregation at Nova Huta were respectful agnostics and atheists who came for the sermons in solidarity against Jaruzelski and Moscow and did not approach for the Eucharist.
Not persecuting others for their legitimate religious beliefs is one thing. Allowing the excommunicated and the schismatic to publicly claim Catholicism and to seduce others into the schism and very possibly to perdition is quite another thing. I suspect that Hus and Wycliffe were not necessarily disturbing public order in the medieval era but were burnt at the stake for their reckless risk of harm to the souls of others.
This particular document was at the root of the personal falling out between Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani and his one-time disciple Albino Cardinal Luciani who became John Paul I. In spite of logtime bad relations between Ottaviani and Luciani, Ottaviani and his aged allies Carlo Cardinal Confalonieri and Amleto Cardinal Cicognani (all three banned from Conclave by Paul VI's imposition of a new age limit of 80) went to the Rome airport, greeted the incoming cardinals and actively and successfully lobbied for Luciani's election. They knew where the bodies were buried.
I trust those three old cardinals of 1978 and Luciani and Wojtlywa and Ratzinger. I also trust Weigel who has usually proven quite trustworthy as well.
I firmly believe that execution was not warranted in St. Joan of Arc's case since an English Inquisition condemned her after her capture commanding French armies against the British. It is said (although it may be merely part of the discredited and dishonest Black Legend) that the Spanish Inquisition condemned to death some who were guilty only of usury. On the other hand, it was well warranted in many other cases and not just those which disturbed the state.
In our time, some are repelled by the physical details of execution. Others subscribe to a school of "thought" that says: Who are we to decide?. The reference to a "sane world" is, among other things, a reference to a world which worries about the possible "immorality" of electrocuting or gassing to death a Charles Manson or a Jeffrey Dahlmer but have no problem with 1.4 million abortions a year for 32 years and counting.
Finally, I would probably be kinder to SSPXers if they would keep a civil tongue in their heads and a civil keyboard attached to their computers regarding recent popes and the Church itself. I thoroughly respect the efforts of others such as you to engage them on an intellecdtual or scholarly level. Under the circumstances, I personally am not interested in engaging the schismatics in civil discourse but rather in advocating that they be appropriately punished and, if they wish to be restored to the Church, subjected to appropriate public sanctions as a condition. Now, if the pope decides otherwise in his personal kindness, who am I to disagree? That ought not to require that I root for the schismatics to get gold medals for their execrably revolutionary and utterly obnoxious behavior.
If Church executions were available for at least the ringleaders, I would favor it. The decision is out of the hands of even B-XVI much less the laity. My sense of life in this respect seems to differ from yours. Life would be less interesting if we agreed on everything.
God bless you and yours and all that you do here (even when we disagree).
Appendix D... The Authority of the Ordinary Magisterium
By Dr. Art Sippo
While I agree with you that Vatican II's declarations must be accepted with "religious submission" of mind and of will, this is not because it any new infallible statements. Granted it reiterated doctrines that had already been infallibly defined, but in regard to any new statements, particularly the ones you list in your article "No Salvation Outside the Church" (e.g. the Council's declaration on Religious Liberty), I'd have this to say: Surely the Pope who approved the statements of Vatican II should know what its status is as regards infallibility or non-infallibility, and Paul VI had this to say: "In view of the pastoral nature of the Council, it avoided any extraordinary statements of dogmas endowed with the note of infallibility, but it still provided its teaching with the Authority of the Ordinary Magisterium which must be accepted with docility according to the mind of the Council concerning the nature and aims of each document" (General Audience, 12 January 1966).
Please don't misunderstand my comments as implying that I don't believe one is morally bound to accept the teachings of Vatican II. On the contrary, I do. This is because the Church is our Mother and we can trust her not to deceive us even when there is the theoretical possibility that that this might occur. There is the remote possibility that my food might be poisoned, but it would be ridiculous of me to refrain from eating for this reason! (For a full explanation of the infallible/non-infallible binding statement controversy, please see Father William Most, Catholic Apologetics Today, TAN Books.)
Take care and God bless.
Jeremy
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Hi Jeremy!
Thank you for your note. The question of the status of the documents of VCII has been tendentious. Some very reactionary elements in the Church have acted as if the documents lacked any Magisterial standing because of the "pastoral nature of the council" and could thus be set aside. Others more cautiously have depicted the documents as only part of the Ordinary Magisterium, which required religious submission and thus did not consider them infallible. Others have acted as if they all represented acts of the extraordinary Magisterium.
In fact, it is much more complicated than any of these options. While many of the documents were Pastoral Constitutions, there were 2 Dogmatic Constitutions: Lumen Gentium (On the Church in the Modern World) and Dei Verbum (On Divine Revelation) which were completions of the original work of Vatican I which had been interrupted by the Italian Revolution in 1870. If you look at the end of Lumen Gentium in the VCII document collection by Fr. Flannery, you will see that the CDF clearly stated that part of the document did represent authentic new teaching that was binding on the Church. Dei Verbum definitively settled a serious question on the proper way of interpreting the teaching of the Council of Trent on the relationship between Scripture and Tradition. Trent had not clarified whether we were dealing with two separate sources or one source in two forms. DV definitively settled the question in favor of the latter solution.
As regards Dignitatits Humanae (Declaration on Religious Liberty), it was NOT a Pastoral Constitution, but a declaration of teaching. This is a different kind of document. It is not a solemn definition but it is at least as definitive as an encyclical. The document reaffirmed previous Catholic teaching on the relationship between Church and State but definitely broke new ground. It defined for the first time the meaning of the "Public Order" and established that the just order in a state is inseparable from the objective moral order. The facile separation of "Public Order" from the "Common Good" postulated by some Catholic scholars was thereby rejected. There was also a clear apology for the excesses of the Inquisition and a recognition that the moral order requires that States organize their laws recognizing the dignity of the human person. This was all new.
Some people have argued that DH was only a pastoral document and therefore not irreformable. I don't agree. This was a General Council of the Church. It is clear that doctrine developed here and subsequent Popes have always referred to the documents as part of the Magisterium. While this was not a solemn declaration of a dogma, what was taught meets the criteria for infallible teaching as part of the Ordinary Magisterium. In the same way, Cardinal Ratzinger and the CDF have made it clear that it is infallibly taught that women cannot be ordained even though we have had no ex cathedra statement on this.
The quotation by Pope Paul is merely saying that there were no solemn dogmatic definitions at VCII by which opponents were anathematized and excommunication was threatened if one did not submit. This had been common in most other Councils of the Church. Here, we were not trying to condemn heretics, but to clarify Catholic doctrine and to build bridges to our separated brethren and to all people of good will. This did not exclude definitive and infallible teaching or new and irreformable developments in doctrine.
It is not necessary for a doctrine to be defined by the Extraordinary Magisterium in order to be infallible. The Ordinary Magistrerium is good enough. Pope Pius XII in Humani Generis (para 20) clearly taught that the words of Jesus in Luke 10:16 applied to the Ordinary Magisterium:
Luke 10:16 "He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me."
You can't get more infallible than that.
Art
*Sippo is a reliable, and intelligent, orthodox Christian Catholic