”Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity.” -From the Catechism of the Catholic Church
“The University is thereby committed to…being truly Catholic in its full submission to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, thereby teaching as true what that teaching authority teaches as true, rejecting all propositions contrary to those truths, and promoting thereby all the truths of revelation whether found in Scripture or Tradition as taught by the Catholic Church. ” – From the Mission Statement of the Franciscan University of Steubenville
In the week since Franciscan University of Steubenville bestowed an honorary degree on its commencement speaker, former CIA Director and apologist for torture General Michael Hayden, there has been a nearly unprecedented outpouring of outrage among Catholics. Journalists and bloggers by the hundreds demanded the resignation of the president of the college, and the bishop of Steubenville requested that the honor be rescinded. The controversy generated headlines around the country. A letter writing campaign among angry alumni was initiated.
Actually, none of that happened, aside from the rumored alumni letter writing. Some liberal journals - The National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal, US Catholic – carried the story online, though in NCR it was buried in a report about the University dropping its student health insurance. And The Register ran a story beforehand, with no hint that there was anything amiss.
Vox Nova and this blog were apparently the only voices in the Catholic blogosphere to protest. According to friends in Steubenville there is no discernable outrage around the campus. The silence is deafening. The watchdog group the Cardinal Newman Society is nowhere to be seen.
Compare this to what occurs when a Catholic university awards a degree to someone who is prochoice. I am not saying there is anything wrong with this; in the 80s I led one such protest when the college that was associated with my seminary granted honors on the proabortion governor. On the feast of the Immaculate Conception, no less. But every school that has so honored a prochoice figure will tell you that they were not honored for their stance, but in spite of it. So what Steubenville did was something far worse: they specifically mentioned “defending our shores” as the reason for the honor. Never mind that as head of the National Security Agency in 2001 Hayden failed to defend our shores. The phrase is shorthand for his long career in the military and intelligence worlds. There is outrage over some drone in the bureaucracy whose guilty of, at most, remote participation in abortion, but little over honoring a man who directly participated and oversaw egregious violations of human life and dignity.
The impression is given that for some conservative Catholics the Church teaches with authority only on sexual morality and that there is really only one moral issue on which Catholics must agree, abortion. As evil as abortion is, that is really only one symptom of a culture of death. The Church teaches authoritatively that militarism and torture are grave evils, and for a university that prides itself on its “passionately Catholic” atmosphere, to honor a man with as dark a past as General Hayden’s is a travesty, as is the lack of reaction.
But apparently many conservative Catholics think that as long as you are wearing your Precious Feet pin, you can torture with impunity.
But perhaps I am being uncharitable; after all FUS is a small school; it is no Notre Dame. I would have been unaware of the honoring of the General had not a friend in Steubenville alerted me. And while my readership has grown hugely since I started near daily blogging, I doubt it rivals the numbers of one of the really big Catholic blogs. Perhaps people just don’t know. Perhaps the very lack of reaction explains the lack of reaction.
So if you are a blogger reading this and share my anger, consider linking to my posts on the matter of General Hayden, or write something yourself.
And if you are reading this and you think what the University did was fine, please stop calling yourself “prolife”. Call yourself “antiabortion”, or maybe “pro-American fetal life” (our bombing campaigns and drone strikes kill babies in the womb, too, you know).
And just shut up about “the sanctity of life”.
And shut up about your fidelity to the Church.
You are as selectively prolife and as selectively Catholic as those you love to vilify on the Left.
Thank you for saying this. I am an Alumni and am ashamed of my alma mater.
So am I. I AM VERY ASHAMED OF MY ALMA MATER AS well. They support war mongers and torturers and people who file frivolous lawsuits.
Funny how I have peace now???? Funny that when I was there in 05 to 08, my prayer was NOT GOOD ENOUGH BECAUSE I didn’t kneel at 90 degrees ever.
SO…..waterboarding a suspected terrorist (which actually does not fit the definition of “torture” according to the CCC you mentioned above) is equal to the direct dismemberment of an innocent unborn child? Start thinking and stop reacting.
Explain how “torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself” does not apply to waterboarding? I don’t think he was saying that waterboarding is equivalent to abortion, only that both practices are condemned as grave sins by the Church, and it is profoundly hypocritical for those on the right to blather on about the “sanctity of life” and the “dignity of the human person” with regard to abortion, yet support militarism and torture. Start thinking and stop reacting.
Hmm. I seemed to have missed the part in the CCC that says that acts that do not result in death and dismemberment are not torture. Where exactly is that again?
Your moral logic is stunning, sort of like a Jesuit on PCP.
That is not a compliment. You lecturing me on the need to be more thoughtful is rich.
And we are not talking about only waterboarding, which in fact is torture and was considered as such when our enemies used it against American soldiers, But people have died from American torture: http://www.salon.com/2009/06/30/accountability_7/
Attempts to diminish the severity of other immoral acts by using the abortion trump card are really misguided, as are attempts to downplay other evils by quantifying them: you know, Hiroshima was nothing, ONLY a couple of hundred thousand dead, when so many more than that are killed by abortion every year, blah blah blah.
First, every human soul is created in the image of God. Any attack on that image, by war or abortion or torture is an infinite tragedy, and an immeasurable affront to the Living God.
Second, a grave evil is a grave evil, each and every time it is committed. To try to diminish that makes you look cold and uncaring. And dumb.
My excellent academic education at Franciscan University taught me to reason similarly to your logical clarification in paragraphs nine through twelve: I have often pointed out that my contraception providing OB-Gyn should not consider herself pro-life—even though a staunch public proponent of the Mississippi Personhood Amendment, Proposition 26—merely anti-abortion.
Furthermore, I am acutely aware that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, not, as even some of my fellow alumni would have it, outside FUS. Consequently, I also question the honorary degree bestowed upon General Hayden, particularly given his Wall Street opinion editorial article.
But, I would be equally reluctant to cite media mogul millionaire Rupert Murdoch’s “fair and balanced” Fox News as the sola and bona fide news source concerning torture statistics as I would to reference journalist and revisionist historian David Talbot’s “progressive” Salon.com, particularly if I were to publicly “call out” a fellow Catholic via an impertinent swipe at the Jesuit order.
I am no theologian, philosopher, or canon lawyer. Nevertheless, my Literature classes from second grade to second senior year in college taught me to read within context. What I notice from the post-Vatican II Catechism of the Catholic Church, is that statement number 2297 concerning torture, under Section II, “Respect for the Dignity of Persons”, is curiously absent from the content of Section III, “Safeguarding Peace”. Even as it furthers the case against the use of torture, 2298 seems to relegate the Church’s teaching on “duty of clemency and mercy” to the forbidding of “clerics to shed blood”.
The language in “Safeguarding Peace” is rather indefinite, as well. Oddly, on matters concerning a government’s right to self-defense, the Church doesn’t consider herself an “international authority with the necessary competence and power” (2208). It would seem that somewhere between 2312 and 2313 would be a perfect place to assert the evil of torture for military intelligence purposes; instead the Catechism couches the assertion of “the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict” in the context of the “extermination of a people, nation, or ethnic minority” or genocide (2313).
What little I know about our post-911 “war on terror” I have gleaned from various media outlets with various biases. It is precisely because I am not privy to national security information or military standard operating procedures that I must look to Holy Mother Church for guidance, but even here I find different interpretations by Catholic men of good will.
Considering the non-traditional method of terror warfare and the “strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force” laid out in article 2309 and the affirmation of public authorities’ “right and duty to impose on citizens the obligations necessary for national defense”(2310), the honoring of General Hayden may not be such the travesty. (Nevertheless, had I been on the commencement committee—considering that the dark practices of former Ohio State football head coach Jim Tressel, were recently brought to light after is 2010 honors–I’d have passed on Hyden’s invite citing 1 Corinthians 8:13!)
I’ll end my response with the link to an article which I believe rationally tackles this issue with reference to Scriptural, Traditional, and Magisterial teaching and within a historical context. And, you may take comfort in the fact that the author is not a Jesuit!
http://archive.catholic.com/thisrock/2006/0612fea4.asp
Now, I’ll “shut up”.
In regards to the article by Fr. Harrison, cited by Stephanie, it is interesting to note than in a longer version of the article (at http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt119.html, which he cites in the shorter article), Fr. Harrison has this to say:
ADDENDUM
After the above article was published, Pope Benedict XVI, in a speech of 6 September 2007 on Catholic prisons ministry, personally endorsed a statement against torture found in the 2005 Vatican Compendium of the Church’s Social Teaching. Citing article 404 of this document, the Holy Father said, “In this regard, I reiterate that the prohibition against torture ‘cannot be contravened under any circumstances’”. (See http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2007/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20070906_pastorale-carceraria_en.html )
In the above article I have already cited and discussed, in my section A13 and endnote 27, this article 404 of the Compendium, which is a publication of the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace. I have pointed out that this and other statements authored by the Commission itself – as distinct from the statements of Popes and Councils which it cites abundantly throughout the Compendium – does not possess magisterial authority; for the various Vatican commissions, unlike the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, are not in themselves arms of the Church’s magisterium (teaching authority). However, now that Pope Benedict himself has personally reiterated this particular statement of the Compendium, I wish to state that I accept the Holy Father’s judgement on this matter, and so no longer hold that Catholics can ever legitimately defend the use of torture – not even in extreme circumstances to gain potentially life-saving information from known terrorists. Accordingly, the last sentence of the above article, regarding “the present status quaestionis” on torture, should now be taken as withdrawn.
Journalists have VOLUNTEERED to be water boarded. Water boarding has been used in the training of US troops (primarily pilots as I understand it).
People don’t volunteer for actual torture, and we don’t torture our own troops as training.
I just volunteered you, Stephen.
See Rsps’ comments below; we do briefly torture our soldiers in training, we just don’t put their lives at risk.
The only journalist I know of who volunteered to be waterboarded in an attempt to prove that it was not torture lasted a minute or two and begged for it to end. He changed his mind pretty quickly.
And we are not talking only about waterboarding; again see Rsps’s comments, as well as my link to evidence that many have died. I know, some of you won’t believe that because it came from Salon. That’s right, stay in your own corner, listening to Hannity and Fox News and the rest…
Lord have mercy. I can’t believe I am having a serious discussion on the morality of torture.
Then why do we waterboard troops in SERE?
We waterboard our own troops in SERE specifically to teach them to be resistant to torture. Therefore waterboarding is torture.
“When why do we waterboard troops in SERE?”
Why is punching someone on the street battery when we let people fight in boxing matches all the time?
I hadn’t thought of the Term ‘Sere’ for a long time. But this is the training that Navy Seals and Special forces endure. This under special observation (with medics standing by and for brief periods) they are trained in resisting ‘torture’. But, it is made very clear to them that this is highly simulated. In other words what is actually done is far worse. I mentioned below my ex boyfriend…who actually drowned during a Sere session. He had his hands and feet tied and was thrown into a pool to simulate a possible torture/capture scenerio. He drowned and was revived. This is why they have medics standing by. That is not the case from what I understand of actual live on the ground situations.
Have you read the autopsy reports? Most detainee’s died of asphyxia or drowning or blunt force trauma internal trauma bleeding. Considering the tactics that I know are commonly reviewed in Sere this would make sense.
How do any of these tactics preserve human dignity? How are they things we should aspire to, ascribe to and encourage as a means to become more humane, more as a loving God intended us to be? Unfortunately, too many people are mixing up being ‘conservative’ and being ‘orthodox’. After witnessing such confusion I have decided that the best thing for me to be is ‘humane’ and live out the golden rule to the best of my abilities.
Superb post.
I think perhaps the single most spectacular contemporary species of sophistry is found when neo-con Catholics explain how the use of waterboarding does not violate the CCC. Of course giving a tied down person the sensation of drowning, repeatedly, over the course of hours (sometimes days), wouldn’t necessarily constitute an act of violence meant to extract a confession, or to frighten, or to punish. Just like an act of sodomy between two men doesn’t constitute a homosexual act so long as a condom is used and they give each other the opportunity to wash up afterwards.
I don’t know about you, but I signed an online petition, and got an e-mail back saying that nearly 24,000 signatures had been delivered to the President of the university protesting this.
But you have a point- the same week 36,000 signatures were delivered to the President of Georgetown for a similar action honoring Kathleen Sebelius. Of course, General Hayden hasn’t targeted Catholic Churches with drones- yet. But Kathleen Sebelius has indeed done so with the courts, not just to pro-life Catholics, but to Lutherans, Baptists, and every small community in Oregon that depends on a Catholic Hospital for their health care (about 65% of the hospitals in Oregon will end up closing or being sold to for-Profit health corporations under the mandate).
I consider myself to be Catholic pro-life- against abortion, war, the death penalty and euthanasia- stuck in a state that is so deep in the culture of death that they think choking down 9 grams of rat poison is a dignified death.
I know nothing of an online petition. If it really got that many signatures in spite of the relative silence of the blogosphere it must have taken off like wildfire on Facebook. Can you provide a link? I will gladly post it!
I’m sorry, didn’t keep the e-mail. It came to me from one of those “subjects you are interested in” e-mails from Change.org. Next time I put a petition on there, I’ve got to remember to be as vague as possible and mention the word “Catholic”.
Never did see it on facebook. Never see most Change.org petitions on facebook. Their form encourages person-to-person sharing by asking for a list of 10 e-mails.
Weather or not I agree with your post, I must point out that you seem to have appointed yourself the quasi-magisterial authority on orthodoxy. I have a few questions:
Did you contact the University for a comment?
Whom did you attempt to contact?
Did you receive a response?
Did you ask someone credible with an opposing view to give you reasons for their view? You certainly bashed those who you call “conservative Catholics” while you use words such as “assume.”
I will not tell you to “Shut up.” I don’t believe that is in keeping with your dignity and that of every other human person. I will ask you to to let us hear both sides.
Inflammatory headline titles and comments, like implying that Hayden is responsible for tragedies of 9-11 not being stopped, will increase your readership numbers. But having REAL discussion about topics is what makes a great blog. In encourage you in this.
Another dumb Jesuit in my comboxes.
Look, the magisterium is the Church. I am not “quasi-magisterial” because I listen and expect others who proclaim their fidelity to do so as well.
Why do I have to contact the university? They are a public entity and have done a public act. And I have not had good luck in the past trying to talk to bureaucrats.
And Hayden was the head of the NSA on 9/11. It may have been completely understandable given the situation, but yeah, he failed to detect the threat.
But really, please: if I ever endorse torture and preemptive war while calling myself “prolife” do tell me to shut up!
COMPLETE NON SEQUITUR:
A question about the photo…. real or mash-up?
(if real, ugh… gag me with an AK47.)
ANOTHER ONE:
Yesterday my husband was giving a ride to an acquaintance who wanted to stop on the way at a mini-mart for beer (coincidentally, after they attended a Secular Franciscan meeting). As the brother went to get his six-pack, my husband sat outside meditating on a poster in the window. It showed an array of military persons of every stripe, sex, and race, with a white male soldier (and his sexy lady on his arm) in the forefront, with the caption,”Budweiser… supports our troops!”
Wow, now you can drink beer and feel like you’re serving your country at the same time!
The water boarding happened before Hayden was director.
http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,161672,00.html
So, *you* shut up.
:-)
Waterboarding is only one of the ‘enhanced interrogation’ tactics used. The others include; sleep deprivation, the tying of the body in uncomfortable (and even dangerous) positions for long hours, the depriving of food and water, exposure to extreme heat or cold, the laying of heavy objects on the chest to inhibit breathing and slowly crush ribs, blindfolding and holding what is thought to be a gun to the head of the detainee, locking one in a ‘hot box’ a small foot locker like box often exposed to the sun which then heats up.
I used to date a captain in the Special Forces. He described the training that he had to go through which only simulated some these tactics for a very brief time. He was locked in a hot box, deprived of sleep for 24 hours with a looped recording of animals being slaughtered and screaming piped in continuously, denied food and water, removed from the box as he would start to fall asleep and interrogated. He was then brought out into the light blindfolded and held up against a wall where after all that he had experienced he believed he was going to be shot. There are well documented deaths of detainee’s because they have been tied with their arms above their heads and only their toes touching the floor which eventually creates the same effect that crucifixion does; asphyxia.
I stopped dating him. No one can do such things and not have it effect them to their core.
Hey Bathroom: What Rsps said. Hayden, before taking the CIA post, was head of the NSA. His complicity in grave evils before and after heading the CIA is well documented in the article (click the third link).
And Stephanie: Hey, at least you sound like a Jesuit who isn’t on PCP..
That is a compliment; my greatest teachers have been Jesuits.
The comment about dumb Jesuits is a riff on something I once heard Fr Benedict Groeschel say: “the world is full of rich Franciscans, dumb Jesuits, Dominicans who can’t preach, and Salesians who hate small children.” That is, full of people who contradict their supposed charism. So while I respect the Jesuit charism, the word “Jesuitical” did not arise in a vacuum, and it is the corruption of reasoning that I mock.
Like Fr Harrison. Another tortured rationale for torture. Catholics who quote medieval popes to “prove” that torture is an open question just look stupid, and the fact that they use scholastic methodology to justify what any child can see is evil makes it that much worse. As one of my godchildren said when she was little, to describe something beyond stupid: “Stoop-da-doop-doop-dupid”.
And, you know, evil.
Daniel: Welcome to my world. The gargantuan amount of effort “conservative” Catholic put into justifying the idiotic use of torture (in proportions greater than the general population) will be one of the things that future generations of Catholics will look back on with shame. I’ve listen to this embarrassing filth for years. It doesn’t even make sense since, as interrogators themselves constantly point out, torture is stupid and counter-productive. But Real Catholics[tm] have been arguing for it for years with idiotic rationales. The mystery of evil.
Pretty depressing.
And Mark, why haven’t you covered FUS honoring this guy? It’s right up you alley, and a big time blog like yours taking note would help call attention to it…
I linked to something you wrote on this a couple of days ago (titled “Sigh” if memory serves). Beyond that, as I mentioned on my blog, I’m in the middle of a huge project and am missing a lot. So it goes.
Must have missed that; I’ll look again…
Daniel- Mark Shea linking to your blog is the only reason I started reading it. The same day as my first post, he mentioned the torturer at FUS.
agree with daniel – would love to see a mark shea post about this.
Personally, I blame Anselm…
Huh?
HI Daniel, speak it. When are you going to resurrect your mag so I can send you some more poems? Hope you are well.
D. Craig
Oh, I don’t know. When I retire and have time, if someone will give me a million dollars to do it. Meanwhile, this is less time consuming and is free…
Christ is unjustly executed – lynched – by the cooptation of God-created structures, the State, Revealed Religion and its Teaching (Torah), culture and philosophy by sin, fallen humanity, and Satan. In dying and rising, Christ defeats the latter along with death and radically relativizes the former, such that these things can never again claim to be God, to take the place of God, and to be in communion with God means to be free of the demands that these structures make. Thus, the death of Christ upends the old order, put in place after the fall in order to keep humanity from destroying itself, and Christ’s death and resurrection sets the stage for the full liberation of humanity, beginning now, with Pentecost, and reaching its final fruition in the Parousia.
Anselm turns this on its head. For Anselm and all who come after him, the death of Christ “satisfies” the demands of the Father, expressed in the old order, and thus, the death of Christ, far from subverting that order, in fact reinforces it, making is possible for a “Catholic” university to honor a torturer in that he is an exemplar of one who has been highly successful in upholding the old order.
Ah. I think you are on to something, Father.
I wonder if any of the people on here defending the use of ‘enhanced interrogation’ tactics would be comfortable with their children growing up to use them on prisoners of war or terrorists.
Or maybe they’d be totally cool being married to a person who can do such things to people.
Or maybe it’s on their checklist of things they want to be when they ‘grow up’.
I’d love to have one sane person say; Yes I’d be totally ok with my child growing up to do this to people. Seems there is a HUGE disconnect. As long as it is just an idea, done behind closed doors by someone else and they don’t have to participate in it, see it or acknowledge the terrible inhumanity of it…they can justify it.
Shame on them.
I’m not willing to defend it, but I can see how people *would* justify it, IF they don’t know anything about human psychology AND are in one of the situations where it can make sense.
I say don’t know anything about human psychology because those who do, see the flaw in the reasoning: there is NO guarantee that the person being questioned isn’t lying, and there is every motivation for the person being tortured to say whatever the torturer wishes to hear, thus there’s a huge confirmation bias in any questioning involving torture that makes the results absolutely useless.
Having said that- I’ve often defended the actions of the Spanish Inquisition on the following grounds:
1. They were in the tail end of a civil war retaking the Hispanic Peninsula from the Islamics, who have NO qualms about using torture at all- in fact, under Sharia Law or the Caliphate, torture is mandated for certain crimes.
2. They increased the amount of justice by taking an original system full of vigilante trial-and-evidence-free justice and imposing upon it the concepts of evidence and the tribunal.
3. Given the number of cases they were handling and the utter lack of knowledge of human psychology of the time, the percentage of cases of torture are surprisingly small. We know this because *very* detailed records were kept.
4. Same with execution- out of millions of cases tried, less than 5000 ended in execution.
So on a continuum where utter despotic random vigilante justice is the norm at one end, and present church teaching is at the other, torture by legitimate authority falls somewhere in between. And I’d hope, if my worst fears are realized and the world my son turns 50 in falls back into the barbarism of the dark ages, that my son would have the COURAGE to face up to the darkness regardless of the means he uses.
The same goes for war and the death penalty.
In contrast- abortion and euthanasia, as currently practiced, are utterly justice free and still at the base end of that scale, with no good evidence for them at all. Any righteous skeptic who errs on the side of good, has to be pro-life from conception until natural death.
Was that just a consequentialist argument for the Inquisition? Sheesh.
And actually, if one does not recognize revealed truth, there is no rational argument against euthanasia. I just experienced a long slow death (my mother’s) and if I did not believe in the redemptive power of suffering it would have been untolerable…
Not quite consequentialism, more a progressive view of history that strives to understand the past rather than condemn it outright. In that, the Inquisition was better than what came before, therefore was more positive than negative, just as in modern times the Theology of the Body beats out “The talk” that parents were giving in the 1950s.
In fact, I’ve gone so far as to say that what Africa needs to deal with their problems of polygamy, witchcraft, and competition from Islam, is a good Catholic Inquisition- which will inject a bit of evidence-based justice into the system of vigilante justice that currently exists. One of the reasons why Islam is so popular in Africa is because it encourages strict observance of an external law.
Glad you’re not pope.
Are you saying you prefer what went before- with random people accused of witchcraft then lynched by the mob, merely for being different?
One needs to understand the past *first*, before one condemns in an unthinking reaction.
Also, the rationalist/materialist/atheist argument against euthanasia goes something like this: This life is all I have and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let go of it regardless of how much I have to fight or how much pain I need to go through- because there is nothing else I can do.
Nothing about the redemptive power of suffering- and *everything* to do with a strong will to live.
I agree this was the wrong person to honor in any way because the intelligence services in general have a very sketchy human rights history. But I also agree with Craig and would REALLY have liked to have read a response/quote from the university with their rational on why they selected this person. Don’t let your blog devolve into sensationalism, elevate it to actual journalism.
I referred to what the University said in my first post on the matter, that Hayden was honored for “defending our shores”, which, as he did not succeed in defending our shores when he was head of the NSA in 2001, can only be shorthand for his military and intelligence service. But even if he had been honored for some other thing, he should have been disqualified precisely for his military and intelligence service.
The full quote from the University’s website is here:
Three speakers noted for their Catholic faith and public service will address the graduates: the Most Reverend Arthur Serratelli, bishop of Paterson, New Jersey; retired Air Force General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency; and Dr. Marie Hilliard, director of Bioethics and Public Policy for the National Catholic Bioethics Center.
“This year’s commencement speakers have distinguished themselves by defending our shores, protecting the sacredness of human life, and shaping our form of worship as Catholics,” says University President Father Terence Henry, TOR. “These outstanding leaders will send forth the Class of 2012 with the faith, hope, and courage so needed in our world today.”