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Bishop Fulton Sheen on Netflix

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posted by The Jabberwock @ 11:15 PM 0 comments

Love and Law

In a letter to the Catholic Voice Nancy LeBlanc of Livermore asks:

The force of law is not a loving, Christian means for increasing the world’s morality. So why is the Church asking the state to prevent abortion and assisted suicide?

Taken to its logical conclusion, this premise would argue for anarchy, since all law entails the use of force rather than love. Suppose a man had brutally murdered a member of your family, should armed agents of the law apprehend that person and force him to spend the rest of his life in jail? Or would you instead wish to meet with the man, forgive him, share with him your Catholic faith, and pray he chooses to repent rather than kill again?

Or, to take perhaps a less extreme example, suppose I own a factory and choose to pay my workers $1 an hour and dump industrial waste into a nearby stream. What gives you the right to force me to pay minimum wage to my workers and respect the environment?

I went through a Libertarian phase in my early twenties so I know many of that presuasion would agree with my 2nd example and a few would even agree that murder would be better addressed by self defense and private security firms than by government. But what is the teaching of the Catholic Church on this issue? From Catechism of the Catholic Church 2266:

The efforts of the state to curb the spread of behavior harmful to people's rights and to the basic rules of civil society correspond to the requirement of safeguarding the common good. Legitimate public authority has the right and the duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense. Punishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced by the offense. When it is willingly accepted by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation. Punishment then, in addition to defending public order and protecting people's safety, has a medicinal purpose: as far as possible, it must contribute to the correction of the guilty party.

posted by The Jabberwock @ 6:40 PM 1 comments