Try to cut down on how many people you kill
Should you kill people? You’d think that in the Ten Commandments it is clear: “Thou shalt not kill.” Other commandments, however, are couched in moral terms: they forbid stealing not taking; false witness not saying things that are untrue (as in a work of fiction); adultery, not sexual intercourse. When Jesus refers to the commandments, he quotes this one as: “Thou shalt do no murder” (Matthew 19:18).
Not only that, but the Bible seems quite keen on wrongdoers being killed. Indeed murderers should be put to death, so the Book of Numbers insists.
I realise that Christians do not follow the whole law of the Hebrew Bible. But they have, for example, seen not merely a right but a duty to kill the enemy in order to defend people from an aggressor. The whole theory of a “just war” depends on an element of defence.
So there was surprise in some quarters when at the beginning of the month, Pope Francis directed that The Catechism of the Catholic Church be amended to read: “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’.”
There have been adjustments to The Catechism of the Catholic Church before. It is no ancient document, having been published only in 1992. It is intended to contain reliable formulations of doctrine, but it also has a pastoral dimension, with advice on the best way of dealing with a changing world. The Catholic Church recognises that its teaching changes by development, as John Henry Newman tried to outline in his book on the subject in 1845. The Church refines and distinguishes, bringing out elements formerly left implicit.
Often, teaching changes because the world changes. This is the case with the morality of usury. It is still possible to be usurious, but the change in the nature of money over the centuries means that it is now an innocent thing for a widow to accept interest (small enough, it’s true) on her Post Office Savings.
I’d say that an obligation that many conveniently forget concerns the right to property. There is no absolute right to pile up millions in personal riches. “The goods of creation are destined for the whole human race,” says the Catechism. This implies that once someone has made provision for supporting himself and his family now and in retirement, he had better set about making the surplus available to those in need. As the Catechism puts it: “Those who hold goods for use and consumption should use them with moderation, reserving the better part for guests, for the sick and the poor.”
It’s easy for me to emphasise this particular duty because I am so badly off, myself.
When the Pope ruled Rome as a temporal monarch, the Papal States employed an executioner, and even kept a guillotine, executing seven criminals a year up to 1861.
The change in the world that has brought the Pope to make the prohibition of capital punishment general is that, where the state functions, it is possible to render murderers harmless and protect people against them without killing the murderer.
Before the Pope’s latest intervention, the Catechism had already been updated in 1997 to include a quotation from an encyclical by Pope John Paul II saying that if “bloodless means are sufficient to defend against the aggressor and to protect the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means.” Cases of the need for capital punishment it said were “very rare, if not practically non-existent”. Now it seems they are extinct.