Frankly, if you cannot make a distinction between persons who commit capital crimes and innocents, you are an absolute moral idiot. Execution of one who commits a capital crime, after due process, is in no wise a “premeditated murder.”

One cannot be a moral idiot if one denies the existence of morals. Anyway…

The definition of what constitutes a capital crime is subjective and fluid. We like to think of “capital crime” as being shorthand for “premeditated murder” or, at the very least, some form of murder. Thats not the reality in the west much less in the world. A capital crime is no more or less than any behavior which a government decides to kill you for. As for due process, that is hardly a guarantee included in “the power of the sword” unless we’re going to assume that the Catholic church believes all governments existing prior to universal suffrage (including Vatican City) to be unworthy of that power. As usual, Featherstone, your interest in digging deeper is limited by your ideology.

Also, I would object to your argument that executions are not premeditated murder. They are the planned and willful taking of a human life and, until quite recently in the west, often included a significant amount of torture or public spectacle. The only difference between a man who kills his wife for cheating on him and an executioner is the cultural context of their actions, and the last time I checked the Vatican was a big believer of transcendent truth and fought against the forces of relativism. Perhaps Ratzinger has done something interesting while I wasn’t looking…

It is, and remains, a justified killing in defense of the civil order and society at large.

Perhaps that is an accurate assessment but, to go back to my previous analogy, an olive is still an olive. That would be a better argument against the banning of all olives, not for naming one as an exception. Indeed, if we were really considering that thorny matter of internal consistency we might think about another analogy involving olives. Perhaps one concerning an execution following a capital offense. Maybe at the foot of the mount of Olives. Ahh, but perhaps that is a special case as well.

This, the Church holds, is within the prudential capacity of the civil authorities, subject to certain moral precepts. Similarly, the civil authorities may rightfully prosecute a just war – a war to arrest genocide, for example, is just, whereas a war to capture the Stanley Cup and bring it to the United States is not just.

But this is not true of all Christians. I can think of a number of very old, very conservative Christian sects which object to the very idea of a just war. It seems to me that the Catholic church has compromised it’s own rigid moral precepts in order to obtain and maintain power throughout the ages. That is part of the hypocrisy I’m calling out. On the one hand you have the Church arguing that sometimes it is OK to kill under certain social circumstances, on the other you have their savior who stopped a just execution and instructed his followers to turn the other cheek when struck. One would think the latter would carry more weight, but the former gets you further with a Roman emperor who fears the Mithrists in his military.

Lastly, do you really think that “those who grant them tax-exempt status” can be confined to those politicians who support the use of the death penalty?

Your imagination is reliably limited, Featherstone. I was being glib there, I figured most people would understand that I was referencing the various privileges and rights of access the church has developed over the years by collaborating and colluding with governments.

Then again, I suppose the church does have a vested interest in maintaining exceptions for capital punishment and just war. Otherwise how would they justify their history?

William, this is truly silly beyond words. You’re taking the shorthand of “Pro-Life,” which all acting in good faith understand in the context of abortion as an abrogation of standing doctrine, which it never was. Frankly, if you cannot make a distinction between persons who commit capital crimes and innocents, you are an absolute moral idiot. Execution of one who commits a capital crime, after due process, is in no wise a “premeditated murder.” It is, and remains, a justified killing in defense of the civil order and society at large. This, the Church holds, is within the prudential capacity of the civil authorities, subject to certain moral precepts. Similarly, the civil authorities may rightfully prosecute a just war – a war to arrest genocide, for example, is just, whereas a war to capture the Stanley Cup and bring it to the United States is not just.

Additionally, this is indeed the second thread in which you wholly misunderstand excommunication and its use and import. By excommunication, you mean the public or formal form, which is not a punitive measure, but is instructive and to be used in an attempt to correct an individual.

Lastly, do you really think that “those who grant them tax-exempt status” can be confined to those politicians who support the use of the death penalty? Is there some movement to strip tax-exempt status from Churches in the mainstream left about which I am wholly unaware?

William, the last thing I’ll say about FOCA [so as not to de-rail too much] is that the punishment in question is indeed incarceration, no conscription. The idea is that doctors would refuse to perform the operation and be punished for their unlawful malpractice.

Raskol, so far you seem to have been arguing from a position of good faith so I’ll refrain from calling bullshit. Instead, I ask that you put up or shut up. Here is a link to the full texts of the FOCA, please tell me where it says that doctors are mandated to do anything at all:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:S.1173:

But the time line doesn’t quite match up – the RCC’s support of the death penalty pre-dates the abortion campaign. The death penalty is not being re-defined to exempt it from the standards that abortion is held to, it was exempt long before abortion was found to be specifically not exempt.

It doesn’t matter when you started calling green olives “savory grapes,” everyone can still see the absurdity for what it is. From what I remember Moses didn’t come down from the mountain with a list of exceptions.

It was only when abortion became safe(r) than birth that it had to be prohibited. Then the Church turned its own doctrine on its head to work to abolish birth control and keep abortion dangerous.

Your olives example is a good one. It highlights well how fine the technical distinction is that the RCC makes.
But the time line doesn’t quite match up – the RCC’s support of the death penalty pre-dates the abortion campaign. The death penalty is not being re-defined to exempt it from the standards that abortion is held to, it was exempt long before abortion was found to be specifically not exempt.
And if anything, the current trend is trying to move the RCC to apply the same standards, with people refusing to eat the technically-legal green olives, as it were.

The issue of abortion is a tough one, for sure, when it comes to the mother’s health. The Church’s position stems from the fact that they consider the unborn fetus to be a person in the fullest sense of the word. If situation puts the pregnant woman in the situation of having to choose between her life or her child’s, the prescription is essentially that no one can choose one life over the other. Which makes sense IF you believe what Catholics do about life from conception through natural death. Admittedly, most people do not. But if you are one of the people that view the fetus as an “unborn child,” the sort of let-it-be position is only logical. Save the mother if you can, but if you cannot then I suppose Catholics would say “it was her time” or “it was God’s will” or whatever they say when people die.
Is this position reasonable? I’m not convinced one way or the other just yet. But it is, at a minimum, logical, given the core beliefs of Catholics.

This is not an example of an institution ’saying one thing and doing another,’ as the line goes.

If Caesar one day decreed that the eating of olives was forbidden in Rome and that all people caught eating olives would be fined, that would not be hypocrisy. If he then ate olives himself but was not fined, it would be hypocrisy. But if he quietly revised the definition of olives so that green olives, his favorite kind of olives, were no longer “olives” but instead “savory grapes” what would that then be? Perhaps not hypocrisy in the most technical of senses by it definitely fits with the spirit.

Also, the threat to shut down hospitals was not out of protest or “to make a point,” it was a statement that if there is no recourse in the law for doctors to refuse to give abortions, then Catholic doctors will cease practicing, rather than be put in a situation where their refusal to perform such an operation would put them at odds with the law.

For that to be true one of the following things would have to be true: the RCC has seen a radically different version of the FOCA than the rest of the world or no one in the RCC is capable of understanding that they are not “a branch, department, agency, instrumentality, or official (or other individual acting under color of law) of the United States, a State, or a subdivision of a State.” If neither of those two things are true (and they both seem unlikely) than the RCC was making a threat to make a point. Nothing in FOCA said that doctors had to perform abortions if they didn’t want to.

No, the RCC decided that it would threaten to shut down entire hospitals and end ministry to the sick in the United States to make a point about abortion. They argued disingenuously to defend their threat, and either outright lied about what was contained in the FOCA or failed to understand that they weren’t a branch of the US government. Either possibility speaks volumes.