E. Christian Brugger, the J. Francis Cardinal Stafford Professor of Moral Theology at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary, has provided an elegant and comprehensive treatment of the Catholic Church's understanding of capital punishment in the second edition of his book, Capital Punishment and the Roman Catholic Moral Tradition.
There are three main components to Brugger's argument. The first is to demonstrate that St. John Paul the II made a definitive break with what he identifies as the Church's “traditional” understanding of the moral validity of the death penalty. Unlike the general consensus leading up to John Paul's papacy, which, with very few exceptions, recognized the death penalty as morally authorized, Brugger argues that John Paul II comes to the conclusion that capital punishment is almost never morally permitted. The reason, Brugger identifies, is because of a shift in the grounds of the moral reasoning underpinning the Church's conclusion; whereas the Church, relying deeply on the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, previously recognized the validity of the death penalty in the name of protecting the common good and punishing sinners (who have, by virtue of their grave sin, surrendered their “innocence”), John Paul II employs the language of dignity to argue that the deliberate taking of any human life is intrinsically evil—a principle that prohibits everything from stem cell research, to abortion, to euthanasia, to the execution of criminals. Brugger notes, as one of many examples, John Paul II's assertion that “the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil” (xix).
This position, Brugger emphasizes, must be understood as a change in the church's official position; although the church now stands as one of the foremost advocates for the banning of the death penalty internationally, historically, the church had once adamantly defended it. This new position, Brugger notes, has quietly made its way into official church teaching, including the most recent editions of the catechisms. Indeed, the second edition of the text adds a new essay demonstrating how Pope Benedict XVI essentially left his predecessor's position on the categorical moral wrongness of the death penalty unchanged, even if he did not entirely agree with it (as evidenced by other writings by Benedict prior to becoming pope).
In order to support the thesis that John Paul made a decisive break with the tradition, Brugger devotes the middle part of the text to surveying and analyzing the church's historical position on the death penalty. Brugger's treatment of the tradition is encyclopedic and nuanced, drawing on everything from Scripture, to the church fathers, to medieval authors (especially Thomas Aquinas), to papal documents, to relatively obscure writings by religious orders. Though he notes some diversity within the tradition (for example early Church fathers recognized the validity of the death penalty but prohibited Christians from taking part in it—a restriction that disappeared during the middle ages), he effectively demonstrates that the church had spoken more or less univocally on the validity of the death penalty up until, and even through, Vatican II. As Brugger concludes the section, “Defense of the moral right to kill criminals remains part of mainstream Catholic belief well into the 1960's” (130).
Two questions thus sharply emerge for Brugger: (1) Why did the church change its position? (2) How do we understanding this change from a doctrinal standpoint? In response to the first question, Brugger notes some historical factors that contributed to the Church starting to reassess its understanding of the death penalty (especially including the horrors of World War II and what the Church began to see as the general devaluing of all human life that took place in its wake). However, the primary reason, as noted above, is mostly conceptual for Brugger: as we see in the thought of John Paul II, the death penalty should not be understood in relation to the common good and the punishment of sinners, but, rather, in relation to human dignity—and dignity prohibits all direct and intentional killing of human life, whether that life is “innocent” or not.
In response to the second question, Brugger enters into a complex examination of the conditions for infallibility for moral doctrine and concludes that while the Church's traditional teaching on the moral permissibility of the death penalty met some of the conditions for infallibility, it did not meet all of them—namely the criterion that the bishops of the world be in agreement that a position be “definitively held” (142). Because, according to Brugger, the bishops never held such a position on the permissiveness of the death penalty, the Church, can, therefore, legitimately identify an authentic development of doctrine in establishing its new stance without contradiction or having to admit that its previous position was erroneous. Drawing on Vincent of Lerins and John Henry Newmann, Brugger concludes that Church's current position still represents universal moral truth, even though it has changed from a historical perspective.
This truth, however, is still in need of additional development and specification, and it is to this task Brugger turns in his conclusion. Engaging in a sustained critique of Aquinas's defense of the death penalty, Brugger develops his own constructive position on capital punishment that seeks to uphold John Paul II's conclusion while also recognizing the moral validity of a) penal punishment, b) the legitimate use of force for self-defense, and c) the participation in just war. While Brugger's normative position sometimes drifts into high casuistry in its use of the principle of double effect (claiming, for example, that locking up prisoners does not necessarily deny them any basic goods because one's intention is to act against their will to commit crimes, not to prevent them from free movement, free association, etc.), his position, overall, is meticulously crafted and compelling.
Whether or not one ultimately agree with Brugger's historical, theological, and normative analysis of the church's position on the death penalty—though the text provides ample evidence and intellectual rigor to make such disagreement exceedingly difficult—Capital Punishment and the Roman Catholic Moral Tradition is an essential texts for any Catholic reader, scholar or not, who wants a fuller understanding of the morality of the death penalty specifically, and the implications of a consistent ethic of life more generally.
