There is a passage from Book Gamma of the Metaphysics that one always rereads with a rather uncharitable smile. Aristotle, weary of those who denied the principle of non-contradiction, decrees that there is no point in arguing with them: whoever claims that something can both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect resembles, he says, a plant. Not a fool, nor even a sophist: a vegetable. One likes to think that twenty centuries of theology took the warning seriously. God does not contradict Himself, truth does not contradict itself, and a Church assisted by the Spirit cannot teach on Monday the opposite of what it solemnly and universally taught until Sunday afternoon. All of this, of course, was before August 2, 2018.
That day the Holy See published a rescript, approved in May and signed on August 1, that rewrote number 2267 of the Catechism. The 1997 text, drafted under John Paul II—who was hardly an enthusiast of the scaffold—admitted capital punishment only if it were “the only possible way of effectively defending… human lives,” and added that such cases were already extremely rare, perhaps nonexistent. The new text teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that the death penalty “is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” and commits the Church to its universal abolition. As its sole source, the footnote refers to a speech by Francis himself, from October 2017. The Catechism citing the Pope who corrects it by citing himself: Tradition as a self-portrait.
It is worth recalling what this is written against. In 1208, Innocent III imposed on the Waldensians who wished to be reconciled with Rome a profession of faith declaring that the secular power “can, without mortal sin, exercise judgment of blood”; Denzinger files it under 795, for those who care to check. The Roman Catechism of St. Pius V taught that the execution of a criminal by legitimate authority, far from violating the fifth commandment, was an eminent obedience to it. Pius XII—a pope with a telephone, radio, and microfilm, not a Carolingian bishop—explained in 1952, before a congress of neuropathology, that the condemned person has, by his crime, forfeited the right to life, whose deprivation is then reserved to the public power; the neurologists, one must suppose, took note. And in 2004 Cardinal Ratzinger clarified to the American bishops that on abortion and euthanasia there is no room among Catholics for “legitimate diversity of opinion,” but on war and the death penalty, there is. Eight centuries, a single line. The light of the Gospel, it seems, took all that time to reach the desk lamp.
What is remarkable about the new 2267 is not only that it contradicts that line: it contradicts itself, and with a neatness that almost makes one reluctant to spoil it. Its premises are three, all circumstantial: awareness of the dignity of the offender has grown, the state’s understanding of punishment has changed, more effective prisons exist. Its conclusion, however, is essential: the death penalty attacks the dignity of the person. Premises of a sociologist, conclusion of a metaphysician; the syllogism limps on the leg that hurts most. For if human dignity renders execution inadmissible, it rendered it inadmissible in 1208—the dignity does not improve with prison architecture—and then the Church taught error for centuries and moreover demanded it as the price of orthodoxy from the Waldensians. And if what has changed are the circumstances, then inadmissible means today inadvisable, and to say that one does not amend a catechism: a press conference suffices.
To the dilemma—either error yesterday or equivocation today, tertium non datur—the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith responded with a letter from Cardinal Ladaria certifying that the new formula is an authentic development that “is not in contradiction with previous teachings of the Magisterium.” One used to think contradictions were detected; one did not know they could be resolved par décret. Roma locuta, logica finita. And the letter, with a candor one appreciates, cites in its support, note 12, the Commonitorium of St. Vincent of Lérins, chapter twenty-three: precisely the chapter that sets out the rule of legitimate development, in eodem sensu eademque sententia—growth in the same sense and with the same judgment; profectus, not permutatio. Citing the judge who condemns you has, at least, procedural merit. For the Lérinian rule is clear: dogma grows as a child grows, becoming an adult without turning into its own negation. Newman placed as the first note of authentic development the preservation of type: the acorn develops into an oak; if it develops into a rabbit, we do not call it development, we call it something else. A yes that matures into a no has not matured. It has died, and something else has taken its place.
There remains the refuge of the conciliators: inadmissible would not be a technical term, the text does not say intrinsically evil, the lawfulness in principle would remain intact, only that it is unmentionable. It is a dignified exit, and it lasts exactly as long as it takes to read the footnote. The 2017 speech that the new number cites as its sole source affirms that the death sentence is an inhumane measure regardless of the circumstance, and that it is “in itself contrary to the Gospel.” In itself. Per se. The footnote: that basement where documents store what the text does not dare to say in the drawing room. That the same speech hastens to deny any contradiction with the past no longer surprises anyone: at this point, denying the contradiction is part of the genre.
It will be said that I exaggerate, that no one here is lying. Granted; and that is what is grave. For contradiction, no liar is needed: it suffices that one of the two propositions be false. The liar, at least, knows the truth. A Church that had solemnly taught error for centuries—or that teaches it now—would not be a Church of liars, but something worse: a teacher without credit. And credit is not lost by parcels. If the ordinary and universal magisterium could be so mistaken for so long in so grave a matter, what exactly remains guaranteed? Four ex cathedra definitions and good day? Whoever needs that answer for other matters—each may think which—has found in the death penalty the perfect lever: no one will take to the streets to defend the scaffold, and in the meantime the precedent is established that a yes of centuries can become a no by rescript. The method is the message.
The White Queen of Lewis Carroll boasted of having believed six impossible things before breakfast; a matter of practice, she explained to Alice. The Catholic after 2018 is asked for a more modest exercise: two only—that the Church was right then and is right now—with the inconvenience that both cannot be true. To call that development is the euphemism; Orwell had a less kindly word reserved for it. One, who still aspires to distinguish himself from a plant, stays with Aristotle; and for that very reason with the Church of always, which never asked anyone to believe p and not-p at the same time. The other, the recent one, will already find someone to water it.