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| Everybody else was out saying you wouldn't even have Christianity without capital punishment, and I appreciate that, but doesn't that imply that it's already served its purpose? If Christians don't need to avoid pork or shellfish or sex with women during their periods because their Redeemer has redeemed them from all that, why would they have to put up with executions, of all things? Ilya Repin, Golgotha, 1869, via Varvara. |
Disappointed that young Monsignor Ross Douthat hasn't come out formally to protest against Pope Francis's announcement that the death penalty is "inadmissible", though he has produced a pretty subtle Twitter thread where he wonders if the Pope has gone even further with this than he did when he suggested it might be OK to let divorced people take Communion sometimes, and how dangerous could that be for the future survival of the Holy Mother Church, though he's pretty sure the death penalty issue is less serious than the divorce one—
—it's one of his technical pieces, written to assure 12 or 13 of his readers that he's really as intellectual as he looks, and he's pretty careful not to have any feelings about it other than your "concerned kitten is concerned" frowny face, and not adjure to anything controversial like having his own beliefs about right and wrong.But the bottom line is that this is another example of how Pope Francis has consistently exposed the tensions in the post-Vatican II conservative position, and pushed the JPII synthesis into intellectual crisis.— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) August 2, 2018
