Within
the past month, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer voiced his opinion
on torture on the newspaper’s op-ed page. By using what have been
termed “special case scenarios,” Mark Bowden tries to rationalize
our country’s recourse to torture. He tries to claim that universal
laws against torture should have exceptions. The following column is written
in the conviction that the very publication of such articles has now become
a tragic pattern, in itself.
There are laws and there are laws. Some laws surely allow for exception-making.
A man takes a loaf of bread from a parked car. His children have had nothing
to eat for days. Taking what is not one’s own can be judged to be
morally innocent, then, because of the circumstances.
Evil in the very structure of the action
But there are other moral laws that do not admit exception. The moral
norm against torture is one of them. No consequences, however good, however
life-saving, can justify doing such direct harm to another human being.
There is something so deeply anti-human within the very structure of the
action, itself, that the agent of the action cannot but directly engage
in the evil, no matter what his or her further intentionality. The terrorized
becomes the terrorist.
A rightful and wide consensus
For many years now, moralists of many religious and secular persuasions
have spoken out of their different schools of ethics on this.
Their schools of thought go by various technical names — Consequentialists,
Deontologists, Situationalists, Objectivists. But somehow over these past
decades, these ethicists of divergent faiths — even ethicists of
no faith — have always managed to hold together a unique consensus:
Torturing another human being must retain its rightful moral taboo —
no matter what the reason, no matter what the consequences.
It has been this very healthy human repugnance that has allowed torture
to meet universal rejection in manuals of behavior for armed services
and in international conventions of behavior in war.
But now, suddenly and tragically, there emerges in our time a cave-in
that can only be called ominous. What even secular moralists never dreamed
of arguing is placed up for argument.
One thinks of the famous historian of 20th century totalitarian despotism,
Hannah Arendt, and her insight into the gradualism of evil: What once
was deemed unthinkable becomes thinkable. What once was seen as monstrous,
now becomes banal. Will we as Americans — now some 67 years after
Nuremberg — be the ones who turn the monstrous into the banal? Will
the terror of our time corrupt us into becoming the terrorists?
Not a political issue, but a moral and Gospel ethic
Not long ago, it came to me that a priest was told by one of his parishioners
that he should not preach against torture because such preaching would
be “political.”
How heartbreaking it is to think that such an attitude could begin to
penetrate even Catholic thinking. To preach against torture is to preach
from the very moral and theological center of the Church, from the very
center of what it means to be a Christian.
Such preaching has nothing to do with politics. The very idea that Catholic
and Christian teaching against torture would be seen as only equal to
a political opinion is sign of a deep deterioration of faith.
Pope John Paul II put it very succinctly: “Christ’s disciple
refuses every recourse to such methods (of torture) which nothing could
justify and in which the dignity of the human person is as much debased
in his torturer as in the torturer’s victim (Address to the Red
Cross, June 15, 1982). Notice the way the Holy Father speaks his word:
He does not say “Democrat or Republican.” He says, “Christ’s
disciple refuses every recourse to such methods.”
It is sad enough that such a fundamental norm of morality has been suddenly
placed up for debate in our country. It would be a spiritual tragedy beyond
all reckoning if such a moral collapse enters into our Church.
Let Catholics and all people of good will stand strong. Let not the monstrous
become banal. Let not the terror of our time corrupt us into becoming
the terrorists.
Msgr. Meehan assists spiritual directors in their work for St. Charles
Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood.