Para Pena de Morte, Igreja Católica = Papa Francisco?

O Papa Francisco anda dizendo que a "Igreja mudou seu entendimento sobre pena de morte" , "se desenvolveu" e agora não aceita mais isso. Para ele, no passado, a Igreja não tinha esse entendimento e queimava os heréticos vivos.

E também anda clamando por São Vicente de Lérins para dizer isso.

Bom, a mudança no Catecismo sobre pena de morte foi feita sem qualquer consulta à Igreja Católica, o Papa Francisco fez isso sozinho. Ele nem convocou sínodo, nem declarou de forma "ex-cathedra" a mudança. 

Ele não é a Igreja. 

Ao falar que a Igreja do passado era terrível em entendimento, além de ser arrogante por achar que ele conhece a verdade mais do que os papas e santos do passado, o Papa Francisco despreza séculos de combate à heresia feito por inúmeros santos.  

Sobre São Vicente de Lérins, quem conhece o santo sabe que ele jamais aprovaria a mudança feita no Catecismo, uma vez que a defesa da pena de morte é uma defesa de 2 mil anos da Igreja, defendida pela Bíblia, por todos os doutores da Igreja e todos os papas predecessores do Papa Francisco.

Vejam o debate sobre São Vincente de Lérins mostrado pelo site Life News, que traz a opinião do filósofo  Edward Feser e de um dominicano que não quis se identificar.

Aqui vai parte do texto:

Sanctuary of truth or brothel of error? More papal controversy on the death penalty

Pope Francis aroused more controversy this week, making even more explicit his apparent belief that the death penalty is always and everywhere wrong, while frankly acknowledging that the Church has not taught this in the past. 

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he Pope expounded on the point, invoking the ancient saint whose thought played a pivotal role in Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman’s classic work, On the Development of Christian Doctrine. He told journalists aboard the papal plane:

A fifth-century French monk, Vincent of Lérins, coined a beautiful expression to explain how one can grow in faith, explain things better, and also grow in moral [understanding] but always being faithful to the roots. He said three words but they indicate the road: he said that growth in the explaining [esplicitazione] and awareness of faith and morals must be ut annis consolidetur, dilatetur tempore, sublimetur aetate, that is, growth must be strengthened through the years, expanded over time, but it is the same faith that is exalted over the years. 

“This is how we understand, for example, that today we have removed the death penalty from the Catechism of the Catholic Church,” he said. 

“Three hundred years ago, heretics were burned alive. Because the Church has grown in moral understanding, and in respect for the person,” he added. 

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Renowned Catholic philosopher Edward Feser, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California, is one of the foremost contemporary writers in the Thomistic tradition, and a leading expert on the Church’s teaching on the death penalty. 

In comments to LifeSite, Feser said:

It is odd for the pope to cite St. Vincent of Lérins in defense of the recent change to the Catechism, because St. Vincent was the opposite of sympathetic to innovative and ambiguous theological formulations of the kind represented by the new language. Indeed, his major theme was precisely to condemn, in harsh and unmistakable terms, all ‘novelties’ in doctrine, by which he meant teachings that were not true developments but reversals of what the Church has taught in the past.

Feser then explained that development is only legitimate if it logically follows what has already been taught in the deposit of faith. It is therefore is a legitimate development if it’s a logical conclusion of what the Church has taught in the past. If a given teaching is not a logical conclusion, it cannot be legitimate. 

Feser insisted that not only does St. Vincent of Lérins not support logical rupture but he is preoccupied with preventing such novelties. He said: 

Now, St. Vincent absolutely hammers on the theme that Catholics must avoid novelties or even reinterpretations of past doctrine, and that when some new teaching or reinterpretation seems to conflict with antiquity, we must cling to antiquity. Quite rigidly, you might say. He is very, very insistent on this and very harsh even on people who would try to use ambiguous formulations to smuggle in novelties, let alone those who brazenly propose them.

The author of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed told LifeSite: 

Now, in the case of capital punishment, things are far less ambiguous even than my artificial example, because scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and previous popes have all already explicitly taught, over and over and over again, that capital punishment can be legitimate at least in principle and in some circumstances. They already explicitly considered the suggestion that capital punishment is per se contrary to justice or to the Gospel, and explicitly rejected that claim as heterodox.

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A Dominican theologian who spoke with LifeSite on condition of anonymity said regarding Pope Francis’s recent comments on the death penalty: “On capital punishment Pope Francis unfortunately continues to talk as if he can justify putting himself in contradiction with the teaching of the Church by speaking of development.” 

“As Bishop Athanasius Schneider has recently said, Pope Francis is contradicting a bi-millennial doctrine,” he added, referring to Schneider’s essay on what the Church should do about a heretical pope.

“With regard to religious freedom,” the theologian continued, “the Church has a God-given power of using sanctions against her delinquent members, including punishing crimes such as heresy. As modern canon law still teaches, these sanctions can be either spiritual, like excommunication, or bodily, like confinement to a monastery.” 

“In a Catholic country which officially recognizes the Church’s authority, the Church can call on the civil power to help enforce these sanctions,” he said. “No pope or council can strip this right from the Church, though they may decide not to use it,” he said. 

“Unfortunately,” the Dominican sighed, “as often with this pope, his words savor strongly of the heresy of modernism, which denies that the dogmas of the Church keep the same meaning from one generation to the next.”

He noted that St Vincent’s great concern is “that we should believe only what has always been believed — as he puts it, that we must ‘in no way depart from those interpretations which it is manifest were notoriously held by our holy ancestors and fathers’ (Commonitorium Primum, chapter 2).”

Citing the same work from the ancient saint of Lérins, the theologian concluded:

St. Vincent warns against false development, writing: ‘If what is new begins to be mingled with what is old, foreign with domestic, profane with sacred, the custom will of necessity creep on universally, till at last the Church will have nothing left untampered with, nothing unadulterated, nothing sound, nothing pure; but where formerly there was a sanctuary of chaste and undefiled truth, thenceforward there will be a brothel of impious and base errors.’ This is the danger today” (ch. 58).

Summing up St. Vincent of Lérins

The authentic doctrine of St. Vincent of Lérins might best be summed up in the words taken from him with which the First Vatican Council concludes its dogmatic constitution on the Catholic Faith, Dei Filius. The passage reads:

That meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by Holy Mother Church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding. May understanding, knowledge and wisdom increase as ages and centuries roll along, and greatly and vigorously flourish, in each and all, in the individual and the whole Church: but this only in its own proper kind, that is to say, in the same doctrine, the same sense, and the same understanding [Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium primum 23].

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São Vicente de Lérins, rogai por nós.