LifeSiteNews interview on the ‘Death Penalty’ address of Pope Francis with Dr. Joseph Shaw, Oxford professor. October 20, 2017 Read report here: Scholars raise concerns over Pope Francis remarks on how doctrine develops LifeSiteNews: Can there ever be a "new understanding" of Christian truth that is contrary to a previous understanding? Shaw: If two ‘understandings’ of a teaching are mutually incompatible, they can’t both be correct. There have been some who suggest that doctrines correct understanding can change radically over time, because what is true in one era is not true in another. But such a view is incompatible not only with a common-sense view of what it means for something to be true, but also with the Church’s fidelity to Christ. It is what Christ gave to the Apostles, and the Apostles gave to the whole Church, which is the basis of what the Church must teach. LifeSiteNews: What is the deposit of faith? Shaw: The Catechism of the Catholic Church (84) says simply that the Deposit of Faith was given to the Church by the Apostles, contained in Scripture and Tradition, LifeSiteNews: Is the deposit of faith something static, or can it be added to? Shaw: Since the time of the Apostles, it cannot be added to, since its gift by the Apostles to the Church is an historic event in the past. To suppose the Deposit of Faith itself is changeable is tantamount to say that the words of Christ, spoken to the Apostles and either recorded in Scripture or handed on in Tradition, can be changed after the event. LifeSiteNews: What is doctrine? Shaw: The Catechism, again (88) describes doctrine as ‘truths contained in divine Revelation’ and ‘truths having a necessary connection with these’, which are proposed by the Church for the belief of Catholics: that is, in a binding way. LifeSiteNews: How does doctrine genuinely develop? Examples? Shaw: The Church over time refines and develops the truths which have been entrusted to her, and in doing so employs distinctions and technical terms not used before. For example, the First Council of Ephesus (in 431) determined that Jesus Christ possessed ‘two natures’, human and divine. This is not language one finds in the New Testament, but its purpose was not to establish a new doctrine, but rather to capture what was intended in New Testament and by other early witnesses of Tradition. The idea of two natures allows us to see how it is possible that Christ would say ‘I and the Father are one’ (John 10:30) and also say ‘The Father is greater than I’ (John 14:28): the first is true of His Divine Nature, the second of His Human Nature. The hope is always, when a doctrine is ‘developed’, that if one could go back in time and ask the Scriptural authors or the Church Fathers: ‘Is this what you meant?’, they would say: ‘Yes: although I didn’t use these terms, what you now say is implicit in what I wrote.’ Developments of doctrine generally become necessary because a misunderstanding or controversy has arisen – in the case of the First Council of Ephesus, it was the Nestorian heresy. It was precisely in order to preserve the true Apostolic Faith, that the Fathers of Ephesus adopted new, unambiguous language. LifeSiteNews: Is it true that doctrine cannot be tied to an interpretation that is immutable? Shaw: The doctrines of the Church leave room for different interpretations, in the sense of theological theories and systems. As doctrines are developed authoritatively, some of these theories will turn out to be incompatible with the tightened-up doctrine. But there continues to be space for legitimate theological speculation and debate. This legitimate debate, however, which has traditionally been presided over by the Magisterium, can never develop an ‘interpretation’ at odds with the doctrines themselves. LifeSiteNews: What do you think is really going on here when you read between the Pope’s lines? Shaw: The practical importance of capital punishment as an issue for Catholics has declined enormously in recent decades. When Pope St John Paul II made some of his most famous remarks about it, it was against the backdrop of a rising number of executions in the United States, following the end of a moratorium in 1976. The numbers of executions in the United States peaked at 98 in 1999; (link: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions-year ) since then it has declined by nearly 80%. Outside the USA, numerous countries around the world have abolished or suspended its use, and today the places where it is still used widely are those where Catholic opinion counts for little: the People’s Republic of China, Iran, and other strongly Islamic countries. (link: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-penalty-international-perspective ) The recent speech of Pope Francis has clearly not been stimulated by developments in relation to the use of capital punishment which the Church can hope to influence. We must look for other motivations for raising the issue. One reason to propose a ‘development’ of the teaching on capital punishment today is that it may seem the easiest topic to use in order to persuade an important group of conservative Catholics that the Church’s doctrine can be reversed. Once they are persuaded of that, then they will not be able to resist any other doctrinal reversals. LifeSiteNews: Why would conservative Catholics be open to this particular development of doctrine? Shaw: Pope St John Paul II was clearly personally opposed to capital punishment, and campaigned for its abolition. While he was careful never to claim that the teaching of the Church ruled capital punishment out, his views have become strongly associated with the Catholic Church and have influenced many conservative Catholics. It may seem a relatively small step between what Pope St John Paul II claimed – that capital punishment was not wise or appropriate in the conditions of the modern world – and what Pope Francis is now claiming – that capital punishment is never ‘admissible’, and that Catholics living in very different conditions from our own were wrong to make recourse to it. However, it is obviously a huge step to say that the Church herself was wrong in her consistent teaching, which has always been that capital punishment can be legitimate. LifeSiteNews: What further implications do the Pope's words have in Catholic ethics? Shaw: The Pope speaks in this address with a level of technical precision not always to be found in his remarks. He says: 'It is per se contrary to the Gospel, because it entails the willful suppression of a human life that never ceases to be sacred in the eyes of its Creator and of which – ultimately – only God is the true judge and guarantor.' This logically implies that the 'willful suppression of life' in self-defence and war is also always and everywhere ruled out. This aligns his position with that made famous by the American theologian Prof Germain Grisez (who, as a matter of fact, wrote an open letter to Pope Francis protesting about the undermining of the teaching of the Church on marriage, with his longstanding collaborator Prof John Finnis). Grisez argues that warfare is morally possible if we think of soldiers not intending to kill, but intending to incapacitate. This raises the question of whether Pope Francis or his collaborators would like at some point to take advantage of another implication of Grisez’s position. Grisez’s view is that it is intrinsically wrong to intend to take a life, and that this is always wrong (even in a just war). On the other hand, it would be permissible to remove a non-viable fetus from the womb, if the intention was not to kill but to remove the fetus from the womb for the sake of the mother’s health. Indeed, to facilitate this removal, it would be permissible to cut the fetus into pieces first. (See Germain Grisez ‘Towards a consistent Natural-Law ethics of killing’  American Journal of Jurisprudence 15 (1970) p4; cf. Finnis, Boyle, and Grisez Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) p311) This view was condemned by Pope St John Paul II in Evangelium vitae 62 (cf. §§40, 60, 63). It should be emphasised that Grisez and his collaborators accepted the position of Evangelium vitae as binding on Catholics. The condemnation of the death penalty in all circumstance could be part of a strategy to adopt this understanding of a consistent pro-life ethic. While it looks at first like a very strong ‘pro-life’ position, it allows so-called ‘therapeutic abortion’, and adopting it would enable the Church to make an enormous concession to the practice of abortion. Is should be noted that the great majority of abortions are carried out under the justification of the ‘health of the mother’, whether physical or mental, and while Grisez would insist that few could be truly justified on his theory, it would not be easy for legislators to distinguish which were and which were not. The practical result of adopting this approach would be the end of the Catholic campaign against legal abortion, and the resolution of the confrontation between the Church and the world on this most explosive of issues. In short, the implications for the pro-life movement would be catastrophic. LifeSiteNews: How does this kind of position fit into the Catholic tradition? Shaw: One way of expressing mistake in the ‘consistent pro-life’ approach, from the perspective of the Tradition, is that it ignores a distinction which had always been of crucial importance: between killing by private persons and killing by the state. St Augustine and St Ambrose had a very restrictive view of self-defence, and were doubtful that it could ever be licit to kill an attacker. By contrast, they had no hesitation about the right of the state to kill, in executions, in battling criminals, and in just wars. They followed St Paul (Rom. 13:4) and the words of Our Lord before Pilate (Jn. 19:11), which make clear that the state, even a not very just state, is given the right to kill by God. Later Catholic theorists, thanks in part to the influence of Roman Law, insisted on the right of self defence, and it was to reconcile the two views that St Thomas Aquinas suggested that in defending oneself, even with lethal force, one need not intend the death of the assailant. The suggestion that, in order to oppose common murder and abortion, one should raise doubts about the state’s right to kill, would have struck everyone in this debate as utterly wrong-headed. Again, Aquinas would have regarded extending his argument about lethal self-defence to warfare as completely unnecessary. Looked at in this light, the legitimacy of capital punishment should be recognised as a fundamental part of Catholic teaching. Whereas the justification of wars is a complex issue, and generally at least one side will be fighting unjustly, in the case of capital punishment every effort is normally made to establish the criminal’s guilt, in an objective and fair manner. We may say, then, that while it may be of limited practical relevance today, it is in principle not a marginal case, but the clearest possible case of justified killing of one human by another which the Church knows of.