Waiting for Godot to Leave

A reader of Mark Shea's blog tells of a priest who was tortured to death via "the water cure". He links to an article in the New York Times from 1903, in which some great things stand out in a quote attributed to Judge Advocate General George B. Davis, who said, (107 years ago) ... " No modern State , which is a party to international law, can sanction either expressly or by a silence, which imports consent, a resort to torture with a view of obtaining confessions as an incident to its military operations. If it does, where is the line to be drawn? If the 'water cure' is ineffective, what shall be the next step? Shall the victim be suspended, head down, over the smoke of a smoldering fire; shall he be tightly bound and dropped from a distance of several feet? Shall he be beaten with rods? Shall his shins be rubbed with a broomstick until they bleed? For all these, and more, have been done during the Spanish domination in the Philippine Islands, a...

Four years ago I was very naive. In 2010 when I began blogging seriously and using Facebook regularly I actually thought that reasoned arguments could happen on the internet.  Now, of course, I know better. The Torture Debate was the first issue I engaged at the time.  The Torture Enthusiasts, who since they Dissent from Church Teaching I will henceforth call Dissenters (though clear terminology makes them furious - see below), were using this approach ... They denied that the Church forbid Torture, or else they claimed that Church teaching forbidding Torture in any and all circumstances was not Magisterial or was still in flux. They claimed that the act they were defending (in this case waterboarding) was not in fact Torture. I later discovered that this handy template is the only one that's used by right wing Dissenters on all their precious issues.  Just fill in the blank and you're good to go.  And go and go and go.  If you're a Dissent...

This was published four years ago in Gilbert Magazine.   I had linked to it then , but the link is now broken.  However I discovered that the editorial had been mirrored by Andrew Cusack , and so I am copying and pasting it below.  It is well written and covers all the bases. It's literally a damned shame that this issue is even coming up again, but the points Dailey made four years ago are just as valid today. T hose who see abortion as an evil are often frustrated by those who attempt to justify abortion by vague arguments about “choice” or even more practical arguments about exceptions for rape or incest, or the health of the mother. But many of these same people lose their moral clarity when the subject is torture. Suddenly they are the ones bringing up exceptions and parsing definitions. There is so much confusion over this issue that in a recent TV interview, a prominent Catholic journalist let a former Bush Administration speechwriter, also a Catholic, gros...

Let's torture the torturers and eat the cannibals. 99 years ago, G. K. Chesterton wrote an article in the Illustrated London News that answers the question we keep hearing today. "Why can't we torture terrorist prisoners?!" confused Catholics are asking .  "We'll be at a disadvantage if we don't!  God knows they'd do it to us!  We need to fight fire with fire!" Chesterton, of course, on June 5, 1915, was writing about World War I (which was then in full swing) and not the War on Terror, but he's writing as much for America today as he was for England a century ago.  Some excerpts (my emphases) ... If we were at war with the King of the Cannibal Islands, these people would say that our Admirals ought to eat their prisoners.  At least, they show no perception of any intellectual principle that could save them from such a conclusion.   It does not seem to dawn on them that we do not eat savages ... because we are not savage.  We do n...

Here's the big game advocates of torture play: If torture is wrong, you mean I can't spank my son when he misbehaves?  If torture is wrong, you mean nuns should not have been rapping the knuckles of their students with rulers?  If torture is wrong, then why can't we even define what it consists of?  Goodness gracious, drowning or producing a fear of drowning in a Muslim.  How could that be torture??? Cowardly as this line of reasoning is, it at least points toward a truth.  The Church says that torture is intrinsically evil, evil by its very nature.  If torture is merely severe corporal punishment (and nothing else), then how can that be?  Does the nature of something change when its degree changes?  Corporal punishment is not intrinsically evil, so why should severe corporal punishment be?  Severe corporal punishment may be wrong (as too much eating or too much drinking is wrong), but the thing in and of itself is not wrong, no more...

You would think that if we really were able to get exactly what we wanted, we would be happy.  But that is hardly the case.  Precisely and exactly the opposite is the case. *** On Tuesday I posted about what I consider the primary symptom of life without God - Unreality . We can live unreal lives in a number of ways, but sooner or later we get checked.  And even when the check is not sudden or dramatic, God's Reality (which I call Judgment ) has a way of checking our Unrealities little by little every day.  This "reality check" consists not so much of us "checking in" with Reality, but with Reality "checking" us, in the sense of a body slam that halts our progress.  And when Reality can't intervene and check us, we suffer.  I have known a few extremely wealthy people, and the worst thing their money does is shield them (and especially their children) from the consequences of bad behavior.  You might say that Blank Checks can ward off Reality...