I am sorry but I would not force feed them. While I am not in favor of War I am student of History. Moselms have been trying to kill Catholics, Jєωs, and everyone else around them since its founding by Mohammed.
...and subjected to torture, both physical and psychological. The latter being relentless since it is deemed "not abuse..."
I don't want this comment to be taken as a defence of US neo-conservative policies, but I think it is helpful to remind everyone that the Church and Catholic countries had employed various forms of moderate judicial torture for many centuries, in accordance with Roman legal theory.
The status quaestionis on the liceity of torture is murky to me. Do you have any insights?
Not particularly, no. I could speak about the topic generally and give some evidence, such as its universal practice by the Inquisition and by saecular Catholic governments, including that of Saint Louis (who even increased its usage, or at least felt no compulsion to hinder a trend of its increasing use), since roughly the beginning of the XIIIth century. It was also used in the Roman Empire since Theodosius, having been abandoned apparently in the West for a period of several centuries before being vigorously re-imposed as a regular judicial procedure for certain crimes. Apparently torture was suspended in the Roman codices during the environs of Easter, going forward until Pentecost, according to
this article I just found.
Anyway, the idea that torture is intrinsically sinful would give rise to the logically consequent proposition that the Church -- and various holy men -- tolerated and endorsed something intrinsically sinful for the majority of Her history, something that I find to be, at the very least, temerarious to earnestly consider. The effort of the modern "neo-Thomist" do-gooder (no doubt sympathetic to the phenomenological project) to expunge the Church from such associations would necessarily have to lie in demonstrating that the Church never
supported, only
permitted, torture. I find such exercises to be distasteful, since they seem to wittingly or unwittingly conflate the unclearly defined evangelical spirit with the humanitarian ethics of universal empathy that have developed with liberalism and other kinds of non-Christian humanism (the language of which makes me feel unwell). In any case, that would be a rather difficult case to make, considering its free and vigorous use without protest for many centuries.
One of the conceptual problems that shrouds the torture question is the precise nature of how it could be wrong in the first place. I have one friend who, like me, cannot really think of why it would be wrong. For the purposes of establishing a conceptual framework for the question, here is a related one. Is a guilty criminal required to accuse himself (confess to a crime) if he is directly questioned by a magistrate, or is he entitled to be silent in an effort to spare himself from punishment ? English common law has considered the legal establishment of mandatory self-accusation to be inhumane since at least the early 1700's, and the principle of a "right to silence" has been common in Europe and North America since the Enlightenment, being based on the idea thatinsofar as it is overly severe to expect a man to condemn himself to punishment in the external forum when asked a true question.
Roman law, classically, has said the exact opposite, an understanding that was given strong endorsement by Pope Innocent IV's 1252 bull "Ad extirpanda," which teaches that the civil power is required to force heretics to confess both their crime and accomplices : "Since heretics are really brigands and murderers of souls and thieves of God's sacraments and the Christian faith, the secular power or the ruler is bound to force, without loss of limb or danger of death, all heretics he apprehends to expressly confess their errors. He must also force them to reveal other heretics whom they know, their defenders, just as thieves and robbers of temporal things are bound to reveal their accomplices and to confess the evil deeds which they committed." A question asked by one who possesses real authority merits a truthful response, and it does not belong to the criminal to fail to divulge information regarding transgressions against justice on account of the psychological difficulty of accusing himself and potentially condemning himself to some punishment. This is also the teaching of Saint Thomas and Saint Alphonsus. The theologian Natalis Alexander, commenting in 1694 on the Catechism of Trent's treatment of the subject (VIIIth Commandment), says that, when there is sufficient partial proof or infamy to warrant direct judicial interrogation in the first place, the accused mus confess "simply and without ambiguities, even though he knows certainly that by this confession he will condemn himself to death."
This principle was maintained in the Church through the procedures of the Roman Rota of 1910, wherein it was again affirmed that the accused is duty-bound to confess of his wrongdoing. This is a feature of inquisitorial judicial procedure which itself has its roots in the Roman Republic, particularly the dictatorship of Sulla, and developed organically from there. Unfortunately, the problem is not as clearcut as it might seem. Cardinal Journet claims that this papal legislation was merely directive, rather than magisterial, and he and many XIXth and XXth century theologians oppose the principle as such, despite the fact that the Catechism of Trent calls it "divine law." In the new Pio-Benedictine Code of 1917, permission is given for criminals to not condemn themselves when directly questioned.
Liberals claim that this means that the "controversy" was "settled," and many erstwhile orthodox theologians and Catholic commentators of an apparently strange and rather slippery XXth-century liberalesque mentality proudly endorse this assertion. I think that this development, which is clearly against the common opinion of all but the most recent theologians on the subject, poses more difficulties than it would apparently be calculated to solve. In sum, the question of the morality of torture seems to hinge on the question of the individuals rights. There are many attempts to marry personal individual rights with the Aristotelian-Thomistic maxim regarding the individual's subjugation to the common good. I vigorously oppose these attempts and hold to the classical position against Maritain, et al., which in turn inclines me strongly in favour of judicial torture and punitive justice, of course including the death penalty in its various forms according to the crime it remedies.
I hope my brief foray into the question was helpful or at least stimulated some thought on the matter. The question as such seems to have the cosmological concerns related to sovereignty, the common good, and the individual that I listed. As such, the
dramatis personae are easier to determine, and consideration of the question is likewise made easier.
Topic: Hunger strike at Guantanamo (Read 2170 times)