The Pope's Legacy
Sister Helen Prejean
The Real Woman Behind "DEAD MAN WALKING".
The Pope's legacy: The Death Penalty
Above All Else, Life
By HELEN PREJEAN
Boulder, Colo. — Of the many great legacies of Pope John Paul II, the one I prize the most is this: he was instrumental in helping the Catholic Church reach a position of principled opposition to the death penalty- an opposition that brooks no exceptions.
The effects of the pope's leadership will be felt for years to come, both in the highest echelons of the Catholic hierarchy and among the Catholic faithful in the pews. Whereas polls once showed that American Catholics supported the death penalty about as much as other Americans, they now show that support for the death penalty among Catholics has fallen below 50 percent. Just last month, Catholic bishops in the United States inaugurated a vigorous educational campaign to end the death penalty.
This is a moment I have been waiting for, hoping for and praying for more than two decades, ever since I walked out of the killing chamber in Louisiana after watching Patrick Sonnier electrocuted to death in 1984. And it is the pope who made it possible.
In the early 1980's, I began looking for a way to have a direct dialogue with the pope about the death penalty. During this time I had accompanied three people to execution and plunged headfirst into public debate. My efforts to persuade Catholic bishops in the United States to include the death penalty as an integral part of their pro-life campaign had been futile. While the bishops had issued numerous statements that cited the moral failure of the death penalty, they had failed to conduct energetic educational campaigns to change the hearts and minds of the people in the pews.
At last, in 1997, I finally got my chance to communicate directly with Pope John Paul II. It happened through the case of a Virginia death row inmate, Joseph O'Dell, whose spiritual adviser I had become and whose plea for justice had attracted the pope's attention. Lori Urs, who was working on the legal team trying to save Mr. O'Dell's life, visited Rome and handed my letter to the pope on Jan. 22, 1997. A friend of mine in the Vatican, present when my letter was delivered, assured me that John Paul read every word of my letter.
And an impassioned letter it was, pouring into the pope's lap 14 years of searing experiences of accompanying human beings into killing chambers and watching them be put to death before my eyes. "Surely, Holy Father," I wrote, "it is not the will of Christ for us to ever sanction governments to torture and kill in such fashion, even those guilty of terrible crimes. ... I found myself saying to them: 'Look at me. Look at my face. I will be the face of Christ for you.' In such an instance the gospel of Jesus is very distilled: life, not death; mercy and compassion, not vengeance."
I spoke candidly about my disagreement with one part of the pope's 1995 encyclical, "Evangelium Vitae" ("Gospel of Life"), which, while urging imprisonment instead of execution, allowed the use of the death penalty in cases of "absolute necessity." Whenever governments kill criminals, I pointed out in my letter, they always claim to act out of "necessity." I urged him to close the loophole and make Catholic opposition to government executions unequivocal.
This was no small thing. The teaching of the Catholic Church upholding the right of the state to execute criminals "in cases of extreme gravity" had been in place for 1,600 years.
But that's precisely what the pope did: he removed from the Catholic catechism the criterion "in cases of extreme gravity." The omission changes everything, because Catholic teaching now says that no matter how grave the crime, the death penalty is not to be imposed. This cuts the moral ground out from under American politicians who advocate the death penalty for the "worst of the worst criminals."
The quantum change in the catechism took place in September 1997, and in 1999 when the pop visited St. Louis, he uttered words of opposition to the death penalty that could not have been more uncompromising: "A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil."
For this statement, and for his leadership, I am forever grateful. Thank you, Pope John Paul. Because of you, the Catholic Church can at last stand alongside those human rights groups that oppose, unequivocally, government killing.
[Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun, is the author of "Dead Man Walking" and, most recently, "The Death of Innocents." She spoke at Affirmation Night (the one banned by Fr. Brum) at Holy Spirit Parish in 2002.]
Submitted by a parishioner-
Note: If you would like to contribute a posting or a comment to this site, please send it to: kanickers@aol.com, with "Holy Spirit" in your title line. You may also e-mail this article to a friend, simply by clicking on the little envelope icon below!
Above All Else, Life
By HELEN PREJEAN
Boulder, Colo. — Of the many great legacies of Pope John Paul II, the one I prize the most is this: he was instrumental in helping the Catholic Church reach a position of principled opposition to the death penalty- an opposition that brooks no exceptions.
The effects of the pope's leadership will be felt for years to come, both in the highest echelons of the Catholic hierarchy and among the Catholic faithful in the pews. Whereas polls once showed that American Catholics supported the death penalty about as much as other Americans, they now show that support for the death penalty among Catholics has fallen below 50 percent. Just last month, Catholic bishops in the United States inaugurated a vigorous educational campaign to end the death penalty.
This is a moment I have been waiting for, hoping for and praying for more than two decades, ever since I walked out of the killing chamber in Louisiana after watching Patrick Sonnier electrocuted to death in 1984. And it is the pope who made it possible.
In the early 1980's, I began looking for a way to have a direct dialogue with the pope about the death penalty. During this time I had accompanied three people to execution and plunged headfirst into public debate. My efforts to persuade Catholic bishops in the United States to include the death penalty as an integral part of their pro-life campaign had been futile. While the bishops had issued numerous statements that cited the moral failure of the death penalty, they had failed to conduct energetic educational campaigns to change the hearts and minds of the people in the pews.
At last, in 1997, I finally got my chance to communicate directly with Pope John Paul II. It happened through the case of a Virginia death row inmate, Joseph O'Dell, whose spiritual adviser I had become and whose plea for justice had attracted the pope's attention. Lori Urs, who was working on the legal team trying to save Mr. O'Dell's life, visited Rome and handed my letter to the pope on Jan. 22, 1997. A friend of mine in the Vatican, present when my letter was delivered, assured me that John Paul read every word of my letter.
And an impassioned letter it was, pouring into the pope's lap 14 years of searing experiences of accompanying human beings into killing chambers and watching them be put to death before my eyes. "Surely, Holy Father," I wrote, "it is not the will of Christ for us to ever sanction governments to torture and kill in such fashion, even those guilty of terrible crimes. ... I found myself saying to them: 'Look at me. Look at my face. I will be the face of Christ for you.' In such an instance the gospel of Jesus is very distilled: life, not death; mercy and compassion, not vengeance."
I spoke candidly about my disagreement with one part of the pope's 1995 encyclical, "Evangelium Vitae" ("Gospel of Life"), which, while urging imprisonment instead of execution, allowed the use of the death penalty in cases of "absolute necessity." Whenever governments kill criminals, I pointed out in my letter, they always claim to act out of "necessity." I urged him to close the loophole and make Catholic opposition to government executions unequivocal.
This was no small thing. The teaching of the Catholic Church upholding the right of the state to execute criminals "in cases of extreme gravity" had been in place for 1,600 years.
But that's precisely what the pope did: he removed from the Catholic catechism the criterion "in cases of extreme gravity." The omission changes everything, because Catholic teaching now says that no matter how grave the crime, the death penalty is not to be imposed. This cuts the moral ground out from under American politicians who advocate the death penalty for the "worst of the worst criminals."
The quantum change in the catechism took place in September 1997, and in 1999 when the pop visited St. Louis, he uttered words of opposition to the death penalty that could not have been more uncompromising: "A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil."
For this statement, and for his leadership, I am forever grateful. Thank you, Pope John Paul. Because of you, the Catholic Church can at last stand alongside those human rights groups that oppose, unequivocally, government killing.
[Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun, is the author of "Dead Man Walking" and, most recently, "The Death of Innocents." She spoke at Affirmation Night (the one banned by Fr. Brum) at Holy Spirit Parish in 2002.]
Submitted by a parishioner-
Note: If you would like to contribute a posting or a comment to this site, please send it to: kanickers@aol.com, with "Holy Spirit" in your title line. You may also e-mail this article to a friend, simply by clicking on the little envelope icon below!
1 comment:
Maybe we should re-run our series of lectures on the Papacy. Not to worry, Nova, PBS and ETWN will all have something soon.
Nevertheless, here is an interesting point of view.
A Parishioner-
The Price of Infallibility
By THOMAS CAHILL
With the news media awash in encomiums to the indisputable greatness of Pope John Paul II, isn't it time to ask to which tradition he belonged?
Partisans unfamiliar with Christian history may judge this a strange question. Why, they may answer, he belonged to the Catholic tradition, of course. But there is no single Catholic tradition; there are rather Catholic traditions, which range from the voluntary poverty of St. Francis of Assisi to the boundless greed of the Avignon popes, from the genial tolerance for diversity of Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century to the egomaniacal self-importance of Pope Pius IX in the 19th century, from the secrecy and plotting of Opus Dei to the openness and humane service of the Community of Sant'Egidio. Over its 2,000-year history, Roman Catholicism has provided a fertile field for an immense variety of papal traditions.
Despite his choice of name, John Paul II shared little with his immediate predecessors. John Paul I lasted slightly more than a month, but in that time we were treated to a typical Italian of moderating tendencies, one who had even, before his election, congratulated the parents of the world's first test-tube baby - not a gesture that resonated with the church's fundamentalists, who still insist on holding the line against anything that smacks of tampering with nature, an intellectual construct far removed from what ordinary people mean by that word.
Paul VI, though painfully cautious, allowed the appointment of bishops (and especially archbishops and cardinals) who were the opposite of yes men, outspoken champions of the poor and oppressed and truly representative of the parts of the world they came from, like Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, who tried so hard at the end of his life to find common ground within a church rent by division. In contrast, Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston rebuked the dying Cardinal Bernardin for this effort because, as Cardinal Law insisted, the church knows the truth and is therefore exempt from anything as undignified as dialogue. Cardinal Law, who had to resign after revelations that he had repeatedly allowed priests accused of sexual abuse to remain in the ministry while failing to inform either law enforcement officials or parishioners, must stand as the characteristic representative of John Paul II, protective of the church but often dismissive of the moral requirement to protect and cherish human beings.
John Paul II has been almost the polar opposite of John XXIII, who dragged Catholicism to confront 20th-century realities after the regressive policies of Pius IX, who imposed the peculiar doctrine of papal infallibility on the First Vatican Council in 1870, and after the reign of terror inflicted by Pius X on Catholic theologians in the opening decades of the 20th century. Unfortunately, this pope was much closer to the traditions of Pius IX and Pius X than to his namesakes. Instead of mitigating the absurdities of Vatican I's novel declaration of papal infallibility, a declaration that stemmed almost wholly from Pius IX's paranoia about the evils ranged against him in the modern world, John Paul II tried to further it. In seeking to impose conformity of thought, he summoned prominent theologians like Hans Kung, Edward Schillebeeckx and Leonardo Boff to Star Chamber inquiries and had his grand inquisitor, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issue condemnations of their work.
But John Paul II's most lasting legacy to Catholicism will come from the episcopal appointments he made. In order to have been named a bishop, a priest must have been seen to be absolutely opposed to masturbation, premarital sex, birth control (including condoms used to prevent the spread of AIDS), abortion, divorce, homosexual relations, married priests, female priests and any hint of Marxism. It is nearly impossible to find men who subscribe wholeheartedly to this entire catalogue of certitudes; as a result the ranks of the episcopate are filled with mindless sycophants and intellectual incompetents. The good priests have been passed over; and not a few, in their growing frustration as the pontificate of John Paul II stretched on, left the priesthood to seek fulfillment elsewhere.
The situation is dire. Anyone can walk into a Catholic church on a Sunday and see pews, once filled to bursting, now sparsely populated with gray heads. And there is no other solution for the church but to begin again, as if it were the church of the catacombs, an oddball minority sect in a world of casual cruelty and unbending empire that gathered adherents because it was so unlike the surrounding society. Back then, the church called itself by the Greek word ekklesia, the word the Athenians used for their wide-open assembly, the world's first participatory democracy. (The Apostle Peter, to whom the Vatican awards the title of first pope, was one of many leaders in the primitive church, as far from an absolute monarch as could be, a man whose most salient characteristic was his frequent and humble confession that he was wrong.) In using ekklesia to describe their church, the early Christians meant to emphasize that their society within a society acted not out of political power but only out of the power of love, love for all as equal children of God. But they went much further than the Athenians, for they permitted no restrictions on participation: no citizens and noncitizens, no Greeks and non-Greeks, no patriarchs and submissive females. For, as St. Paul put it repeatedly, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; for all are one in Christ Jesus."
Sadly, John Paul II represented a different tradition, one of aggressive papalism. Whereas John XXIII endeavored simply to show the validity of church teaching rather than to issue condemnations, John Paul II was an enthusiastic condemner. Yes, he will surely be remembered as one of the few great political figures of our age, a man of physical and moral courage more responsible than any other for bringing down the oppressive, antihuman Communism of Eastern Europe. But he was not a great religious figure. How could he be? He may, in time to come, be credited with destroying his church.
Thomas Cahill is the author of "How the Irish Saved Civilization," "Pope John XXIII" and, most recently, "Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter."
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