What Power Did Pilate Have?

Following my last post on this topic, one reader justly described the proposed change to the Catechism’s text on the death penalty as “confusing.”  One cause of confusion is its failure to acknowledge that there are two different reasons for punishment: the protection of society, and retribution, aka “Paying the guy back.”  (The hackneyed phrase “paid his debt to society” is a colloquial reference to retribution.)

Regarding the protection of society, as I hinted before, I still wonder whether even modern society is safe enough to warrant the abolition of the death penalty.  From a common good standpoint, I suspect it remains necessary in many parts of the world.

Of retribution, I am willing to believe that modernity may render void its ability to justify anycivil punishment at all.  But if retribution is passé, it is passé not because society is too good for it, but because we are not good enough; for it seems unquestionable that retribution is legitimate in principle. Thus, as one commenter (Mark Hausam) noted, retribution may be inadmissible, because...

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Now Is the Acceptable Time

Every November during the month of the dead, as the year drew to its close with the feast of Christ the King, my childhood pastor gave the same sermon.  The details would vary, but the gist was as follows.—

Many Christians, including many Catholics, spend time and energy on the fruitless question of when Christ will come again—fruitless, because Christ promised us that no one would know the day or the hour (a fact to which the many false prophesies of the end times testify.  Why, then, does Church devote readings to the end of the world?  Because we will all witness the end of the world: if not the end described in Revelations, the (for us) equally significant individual ends of our lives.  Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead; of more concern to us should be the fact that he will particularly judge each of us.

—That was the gist of Father’s annual homily.  He always managed to be edifying rather than terrifying, and there would be an uptick of confessions the following couple of weeks.

The homily stuck with me, through college and after.  And it came to mind, late one Saturday night some couple weeks ago, when I came to the end of Archbishop Viganò’s explosive “testimony.”  A great deal of commentary has been spent on the accuracy of the archbishop’s accusations: on how the factual details might be verified or falsified, and on what his motivations might be if they are not what he states in the letter (a desire to cleanse the church, and to put his own soul right before death).

But that Saturday night, on first reading the document, I was struck more by the tone of its conclusion.  After strong words calling for the resignation of those who “covered up McCarrick’s criminal behavior,” Viganò calls for “[a] time of conversion and penance” and for the reporting of all cases of abuse “to the media and civil authorities;” he even calls for the pope’s resignation.  Throughout the jeremiad, however, there are words of hope.  He invokes St. John Paul II’s famous words: Do not be afraid; he quotes St. Ambrose to the effect that “the Church is ‘immaculata ex maculatis.’”  He concludes as follows (emphasis in the original).

Read the rest at the Register.