THE
P RTAL
June 2017
Page 24
What does the
Church believe?
Geoffrey Kirk turns to the Catechism
of the Catholic Church for enlightenment
W
e in the Ordinariates have a special relationship with the Catechism of
the Catholic Church.
Many of us in England, at the behest
of Bishop (now Monsignor) John
Broadhurst, signed a submission to its
content as a way of indicating our desire
to be received into the Church. And
when, by the generosity of Pope Benedict,
the Ordinariates were eventually set up,
the Catechism of the Catholic Church
had a special place in that arrangement,
as the adequate and necessary statement
of the faith into which we were grafted.
It comes, then, as something of a
surprise to find that Pope Francis is
nowhere near so committed to the
Catechism as we are.
In one of his early morning sermons at the Domus
Sanctae Marthae the Pope recently addressed the
subject of capital punishment. It will come as no
surprise that he was against it. ‘Today’, he said, ‘we say
that the death penalty is inadmissible’. In so saying,
the Holy Father aligned himself with the emerging
consensus of the post-Enlightenment West. But there
are two problems.
The first is that the Church does not hold that capital
punishment is ‘inadmissible’. The Catechism (2267)
makes clear that ‘the traditional teaching of the Church
does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this
is the only way of effectively defending human lives
against the unjust aggressor.’ It allows not much of a
loophole; but it is nevertheless very far from claiming
it to be ‘inadmissible’. Did Francis speak in ignorance,
or out a mischievous desire to stir controversy? We
may never know.
But a second point eclipses the first. The Pope was
citing capital punishment along with slavery as an
obvious example of the way ‘we’ have improved and
progressed. It is the familiar Enlightenment dialectic:
‘in former times of darkness and ignorance…but
now all reasonable men agree that’. Members of the
Ordinariates will be all too familiar with
that mode of argument from the tedious
debates about women’s ordination.
The problem is that the Church does
not and cannot proceed like that. It
has its own requirements and its own
means of discernment. A Church which
supinely embraces the majority opinion
of the liberal West is no Church at all.
It is disheartening to think that the
Holy Father, even when expressing a
merely personal point of view, thinks
and proceeds in that way.