Homily - 5 August 2018 - The Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

The Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

Dear brothers and sisters,

By appealing to the authority of the Risen Lord, Saint Paul insists that we who have been baptized into Christ “must no longer live as the Gentiles do” (Ephesians 4:17). Given the particularities and standards of the society in which we live, these are timeless words and a command we cannot ignore. It is because “truth is in Christ” – indeed, because Christ is the truth (cf. John 14:6) – that we should “put away the old self of your former life,” that is, the way of those who are not in Christ, the way of those who do not think and act in the light of the Paschal Mystery (Ephesians 4:22).

It cannot be convincingly argued that we live in a true, Christian society today because too many Christians think of Christianity principally as a moral code or an ethical standard, a code and standard which they continually water down and do not follow. Christianity, of course, includes and requires a moral code and an ethical standard modeled on the life of Christ, but we often fail to remember that the heart of Christianity, “the center of existence — which is what gives meaning and certain hope in the all too often difficult journey of life — is faith in Jesus, it is the encounter with Christ.”[1] Indeed,

It is not a matter here of following an idea or a project, but of encountering Jesus as a living Person, of letting ourselves be totally involved by him and by his Gospel. Jesus invites us not to stop at the purely human horizon and to open ourselves to the horizon of God, to the horizon of faith. He demands a single act: to accept God’s plan, namely, to “believe in him whom he has sent” (John 6:29).[2]

To use Saint Paul’s phrase, Christianity is about learning Jesus Christ, a learning which culminates in his friendship and in the reception of his own Body and Blood that “gives life to the world” (cf. Ephesians 4:20; John 6:33).

I mention this because, just a few days ago, His Holiness Pope Francis altered the text of the Catechism of the Catholic Church referring to the death penalty. He did so to clarify the Church’s moral teaching in the modern world. Some have called the alteration of this text a change in the Church’s moral teaching; strictly speaking, this claim is untrue.

The Church has always recognized the need of governments to protect their citizens. It sometimes happens that the only way to protect civilians requires the government to take the life of a dangerous criminal. While the Church tolerated capital punishment in past centuries, in more recent times there has been a clear and gradual development of the Church’s teaching regarding the death penalty. Pope Saint John Paul II reminded us that “not even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this,” as we see with the mark of Cain, who killed his brother Abel (cf. Genesis 4:15).[3] He also noted that “modern society has the means of protecting itself, without definitively denying criminals the chance to reform” and for this reason he continually appealed for the end of the death penalty, which he called “both cruel and unnecessary.”[4] Likewise, Pope Benedict XVI also called for the end of the death penalty.

Following in their footsteps, rather than changing the teaching of the Church, Pope Francis has furthered the development of this doctrine and, we might say, tightened it. The paragraph of the Catechism of the Catholic Church regarding the death penalty now reads as follows:

Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good.

Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.

Consequently, the Church 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”,[5] and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide (2267).

Judging the signs of the times, the Holy Father has judged the the death penalty is no longer necessary due to the advances in detention systems. He is calling us to no longer live as the Gentiles do, but to learn Jesus Christ, to learn his mercy and the futility of vengeance.

Many in these United States of America have sadly already rejected Pope Francis’ clarification of this teaching because they have forgotten that he speaks with the authority of the Risen Lord and has been entrusted with the power of the keys. Whenever I find myself discussing the death penalty with others, I cannot help but recall a passage from J.R.R. Tolkien’s, Lord of the Rings. Speaking of the creature Gollum, Frodo Baggins says to Gandalf, “He deserves death.” To this, the wizard responds, “Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”[6]

When Saint Augustine reflected on how unlike the Lord Jesus he was, he wrote in his Confessions that he “heard as it were [Jesus’] voice from on high: ‘I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me.’”[7] To be changed into Jesus Christ, to think and act according to his mind and heart, is the goal of every Christian. Let us pray, then, that we will learn Jesus Christ ever more closely and, receiving his own Body and Blood, will be changed into him. Amen.

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[1] Pope Benedict XVI, Angelus Address, 5 August 2018.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Pope Saint John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 9.

[4] Ibid., Homily in the Trans World Dome of St. Louis, 27 January 1999.

[5] Pope Francis, Address to Participants in the Meeting organized by the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, 11 October 2017.

[6] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994), 58.

[7] Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, VII.10. Henry Chadwick, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 124.

A news round up - 11 March 2015

Here are a few news stories you may have missed:

• The European city with more bicycles than people (Amsterdam) is planning to construct an underwater bicycle garage because it has run out of room for them above ground.

• According to the findings of a survey conducted by the Public Religion  Research Institute, for the first time in the history of the United States of America Protestants no longer make up a majority of the American populace.

• They said we were crazy for even suggesting something like this might happen because, you know, the "slippery slope" argument is a fallacy, and yet it happened: three men with same-sex attraction have entered into what is being called the world's first "gay married 'throuple'".

• Even as snow sits on Hawaii's Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea (which has delayed the construction of a telescope), the Iditarod - Alaska's famed dogsled race - went on this past Saturday as scheduled, despite a lack of snow. 
• Legislators in the state of Utah recently passed a bill to make Utah the only state in the union in which those receiving the death penalty may be brought before a firing squad. The governor has not yet said if he will sign the law.

A news round up - 10 February 2015

The news you may have missed:

• Two new pieces of legislation passed by the city council of Washington, D.C. would force Catholic organizations - such as universities and hospitals - to recognize groups contrary to their mission or to provide abortions, sterilization, artificial contraception, and even in vitro fertilization.

• By overturning a law aimed at protecting people from physician 'assisted' suicide, the Supreme Court of Canada has made it legal for doctors to prescribe death for any Canadian who has "a grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual in the circumstances of his or her condition." This would include even those with mental illnesses. What could possibly go wrong with this?

• The Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes have now recorded its 69th recognized miraculous healing.

• Abortion clinics in New York are inspected less frequently than pizzerias.

• Over the course of just two days, 5 churches were desecrated in the Diocese of Bellay-Ars in France.

• I've long known the Church in northern Europe has been struggling for years. It is apparently particularly bad in the Diocese of Groningen-Leeuwarden, which will close 75% of its parishes over the next three years.

• Legislators in Wyoming hope to pass legislation bringing back execution by firing squad. This is surely entirely unnecessary.

• The statue in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall of Blessed - and soon-to-be Saint - Junipero Serra, the founder of California, may soon be released because he is, according to some, a "controversial" figure, even though none of the charges brought against him can be historically substantiated. 

The news you may have missed - 30 January 2015

• Parents of a girl in a France named her Nutella, after the delicious chocolate-hazelnut spread, but a court has ordered her to named Ella instead because "it is contrary to the child's interest to have a name that can only lead to teasing or disparaging thoughts." While I don't support named children after Nutella, I do wonder how such a case ever found its way before a judge.

• Another piece of evidence has surfaced to demonstrate how far American society has fallen from decency and consideration. Staff at the City University of New York's Graduate Center have been cautioned against referred to students as "Mr.," Mrs.," or "Miss" So-And-So because using such titles once thought appropriate in civil society may now be interpreted as disrespect. If that's the case, I suggest we all stay home and never think of going outside again.

• Catholics in Boston are being purposely excluding from serving on the jury in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev - the "Boston Bomber" - because of the Church's teaching regarding the application of the death penalty.

• A survey from the Pew Research Center indicates the majority of Italians believe most Europeans would call Italy the mostly like nation of the European Union to be named the least trustworthy. Greeks, curiously, see themselves as the most hardworking of the European peoples.

NYT: "The death penalty is grotesque and immoral and should be repealed." And what of abortion?

It isn't every day that I agree with the New York Times, but today I do, at least in part.  In an editorial published yesterday, the paper called capital punishment "an indefensible punishment."

At least when considering the so-called "developed" world, I agree that the death penalty is an indefensible punishment, but I also accept that in certain rare circumstances it is within the State's duty to execute a criminal for the protection of its citizens.  Even so, such a set of circumstances in the United States of America seems inconceivable.

Here, then, follows the Times' editorial, with my emphases:

When the Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty 35 years ago, it did so provisionally. Since then, it has sought to articulate legal standards for states to follow that would ensure the fair administration of capital punishment and avoid the arbitrariness and discrimination that had led it to strike down all state death penalty statutes in 1972.

As the unconscionable execution of Troy Davis in Georgia last week underscores, the court has failed because it is impossible to succeed at this task. The death penalty is grotesque and immoral and should be repealed.

The court’s 1976 framework for administering the death penalty, balancing aggravating factors like the cruelty of the crime against mitigating ones like the defendant’s lack of a prior criminal record, came from the American Law Institute, the nonpartisan group of judges, lawyers and law professors. In 2009, after a review of decades of executions, the group concluded that the system could not be fixed and abandoned trying.

Sentencing people to death without taking account of aggravating and mitigating circumstances leads to arbitrary results. Yet, the review found, so does considering such circumstances because it requires jurors to weigh competing factors and makes sentencing vulnerable to their biases.

Those biases are driven by race, class and politics, which influence all aspects of American life. As a result, they have made discrimination and arbitrariness the hallmarks of the death penalty in this country.

For example, two-thirds of all those sentenced to death since 1976 have been in five Southern states where “vigilante values” persist, according to the legal scholar Franklin Zimring. Racism continues to infect the system, as study after study has found in the past three decades.

The problems go on: Many defendants in capital cases are too poor to afford legal counsel. Many of the lawyers assigned to represent them are poorly equipped for the job.

A major study done for the Senate Judiciary Committee found that “egregiously incompetent defense lawyering” accounted for about two-fifths of the errors in capital cases. Apart from the issue of counsel, these cases are more expensive at every stage of the criminal process than noncapital cases.

Politics also permeates the death penalty, adding to chances of arbitrary administration. Most prosecutors in jurisdictions with the penalty are elected and control the decision to seek the punishment. Within the same state, differing politics from county to county have led to huge disparities in use of the penalty, when the crime rates and demographics were similar. This has been true in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas and many other states.

So far, under this horrifying system, 17 innocent people sentenced to death have been exonerated and released based on DNA evidence, and 112 other people based on other evidence. All but a few developed nations have abolished the death penalty. It is time Americans acknowledged that the death penalty cannot be made to comply with the Constitution and is in every way indefensible.

We've been saying the same about abortion: it cannot be made to comply with the Constitution and is in every way indefensible.

When will the New York Times recognize the unconscionable act of abortion to be grotesque and immoral?