John Joy has done it again! Just a few days ago, we cited Joy’s brilliant defense of the infallibility of Quanta cura against the anti-integralists of the Witherspoon Institute’s house organ, Public Discourse. Now, after Francis’s baffling declaration of the inadmissibility, Joy lays out at The Josias an unanswerable case against assent to the new text of the Catechism. Joy digs in to the language of the new Catechism text and Cardinal Ladaria’s letter to argue that the Catechism text is an act of the authentic papal magisterium and as such presumptively entitled to religious submission of will and intellect. He then rebuts the presumption, showing how ambiguous and contradictory it is. More than this, the morality of the death penalty is, Joy shows, a dogmatic teaching of the Church. For these reasons, Joy concludes, the faithful are well advised to withhold assent from the new teaching until the Church sorts things out.

For us, Joy’s piece shows how weird the change and the arguments adduced in support of the change really are. In particular, given the language in the new text and Cardinal Ladaria’s letter about the once-upon-a-time morality of the death penalty, it is hard to see how “inadmissible” can mean intrinsece malum. Fr. John Hunwicke, as always full of Latin erudition, has picked up on this point. Of course, the Pope knows how to say something is immoral—though he seems to spend more time saying things aren’t immoral, no matter how they might seem—and his Latinists know how to say something is intrinsece malum. Thus, the fact that they chose the baffling non posse admitti over intrinsece malum suggests that they did not intend to say that it was intrinsece malum. Perhaps they meant to imply it though. Francis is a master of implication, as we have seen time and time again, and perhaps, acknowledging the doctrinal difficulties in saying the death penalty is intrinsece malum, he merely wished to imply it. We think not.

In Veritatis splendor (no. 80), John Paul cites Gaudium et spes 27 for a long list of acts “always and per se” seriously wrong, regardless of their circumstances. The text of the new Catechism could have compared the death penalty to those acts, taking the Council’s condemnation and dragging it into this context, instead of relying on the march of progress to make it “inadmissible.” Moreover, John Paul went on to teach, “If acts are intrinsically evil, a good intention or particular circumstances can diminish their evil, but they cannot remove it. They remain ‘irremediably’ evil acts; per se and in themselves they are not capable of being ordered to God and to the good of the person” (no. 81). Yet the text of the new Catechism acknowledges that, “Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good.” (Emphasis supplied.) The text goes on to speak about “Today” and “a new understanding” and “more effective systems,” implying that the moral liceity of the death penalty hinges on this narrative of progress. If Francis or Cardinal Ladaria or whoever wanted to imply that the death penalty was intrinsece malum, they sure picked a funny way to do it. Indeed, given what John Paul says in Veritatis splendor, they have picked the exact backwards way to do it. Consequently, we do not believe that they even imply that the death penalty is intrinsece malum. Given the fact that they neither say nor imply that it is intrinsece malum, we must conclude that they do not think it is intrinsece malum. Good! Francis may just have saved his tiara after all!

Moreover, the question has occurred to us whether the change to the Catechism may rightly be called a papal act. If a dicasterial text is to be considered a papal act as opposed to an act of the responsible dicastery, in the practice of the Church (see, e.g., art. 126 of the 1999 Regolamente Generale della Curia Romana), then it must be approved in forma specifica. In fact, it must contain the magic words approbavit in forma specifica (with reference to the Roman Pontiff). In the Latin rescript accompanying the new Catechism text, we find only approbavit. Does this mean that the change to the Catechism is merely an act of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith? (Remember that Francis knows how to promote someone else’s text to his authentic magisterium.) Some clever canonist or theologian will have to explain it to us! Perhaps it doesn’t matter: Francis has made on a couple of occasions statements basically the same as the new Catechism text. But given his manner of speaking, it might be argued that those statements have basically no magisterial value.

But these speculations are ultimately unnecessary. Francis’s partisans, official and otherwise, will insist simultaneously that this is a major change and that it is simply a development in existing doctrine. Only a few members of Team Bergoglio, like Massimo Faggioli, will have the intellectual honesty to assert that this is a major rupture with the Church’s prior teaching. However, they will in the same breath assert that such ruptures are simply part of the Church’s life. In this respect, Faggioli (and those like him) are the mirror image of the traditionalists who likewise assert that there have been numerous ruptures in teaching, especially since the Second Vatican Council. That said, there is no sense meeting Francis’s partisans with narrow technical arguments about whether or not the rescript approving the new text had the three magic words to make it a papal act.

However, there is a lot of sense, for those inclined to do so, to meet Francis’s partisans with John Joy’s argument. But we stand on the point we made a couple of days ago. The merits of the Catechism change itself are what they are. Joy’s argument against assent is, we think, quite unanswerable. However, the Catechism text is not ultimately about the death penalty. It is about returning to the dialectic that prevailed in the Church prior to Paul VI’s death forty years ago tomorrow. Seen in that dimension, Francis has succeeded.