91: The Death Penalty and the Sex Abuse Scandal—Dr. Michael Pakaluk
The Patrick Coffin Show | Interviews with influencers | Commentary about culture | Tools for transformation
Patrick Coffin
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 September 2018
⏱️ 46 minutes
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Summary
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Michael Pakaluk is a father of 15 (not a typo—you can read the fascinating backstory in the memoir The Appalling Strangeness of the Mercy of God about his late wife Ruth, who may one day be raised to the altars, but that’s another story). I mention that he’s the father of a sprawling passel of children because it is germane to this interview and to the essay he wrote in a recent edition of First Things magazine that got my attention.
Pakaluk connects to dots that don’t seem at first to have much in common: the change of phrasing in the Catechism of the Catholic Church regarding the death penalty and the passive or abhorrent handling of the priestly abuse scandal.
The basic connection is an inability to exercise fatherly authority when it come to imposing punishments that involve separation, vengeance, and isolation. All of which distinguish true justice from what he calls “regulatory compliance.”
Bad fatherhood leads to weak and passive men, which in turn leads to doctrinal innovations and policies that are weak and passive, and hence dangerous for the Church, not to mention the victims of homosexual predators and other criminally behaving priests and bishops. Both deficiencies have made it harder for non-Catholics to accept the truth claims of the Church, and harder for Catholics to continue to trust their leaders.
In this episode you will learn:
- Why vengeance is a virtue not a vice
- How vengeance is not opposed to Christian meekness
- How passivity in the face of evil is not a masculine trait and how this has wreaked havoc in the Church
- The reason why saying “punishment is never retributive, but only deterrent” is a grave error
- How the crisis of fatherhood in general helps explain the crisis among men who are called Father by their flock
- Why a new emphasis on chastity in preaching and teaching needs to take root
- How the weak passivity has influenced and been influenced by the theory of Hans Urs Von Balthasar of a possibly-empty hell
Resources recommended in this episode:
- The Appalling Strangeness of the Mercy of God: The Story of Ruth Pakaluk - Convert, Mother & Pro-life Activist ed by Michael Pakaluk and Ruth Pakaluk
- Essay “Capital Punishment and the Priestly Abuse Crisis” by Michael Pakaluk, in First Things, August 22, 2018
- By Man Shall His Blood be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment by Edward Feser and Joseph Bessette
Question of the week
How has feminist ideology contributed to the crisis of masculinity in the Church and in the culture?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to episode 91 of the Patrick Coffin Show. |
| 0:03.4 | I'm Dr. Jordan B Peterson. Clean up your damn room. |
| 0:07.4 | Stand up straight with your shoulders back and listen to the Patrick Coffin Show. |
| 0:12.1 | Welcome to the show, lots to talk about. |
| 0:15.0 | We're going to talk about the sex abuse crisis, |
| 0:17.0 | and we're going to start by connecting some dots |
| 0:20.0 | that you probably haven't thought were connectable. |
| 0:22.0 | And that is, is there any tie you probably haven't thought were connectable. |
| 0:22.9 | And that is, is there any tie, any connection at all |
| 0:25.9 | between the change of the catacism of the Catholic Church |
| 0:28.9 | with respect to the death penalty |
| 0:30.6 | and the handling of the sex abuse crisis in light of the grand jury report and the I guess the |
| 0:35.3 | the Vagano letter as well. Our guest has tied them together and we're going to have |
| 0:39.5 | lots to talk about in this fascinating episode of the Patrick Coffin show which starts right about now. Dr Michael Pacalica's Associate Dean and Professor at the Bush School of Business at the |
| 0:58.6 | Catholic University of America. |
| 1:01.2 | He's our guest today. |
| 1:02.0 | His expertise lies in Aristotelian ethics and classical philosophy, |
| 1:05.6 | Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas, and Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman. He received his |
| 1:11.0 | PhD in philosophy at Harvard University and has been writing about things |
| 1:14.8 | philosophical and domestic ever since. |
| 1:17.3 | He's also the author of The Appalling Strangeness of the Mercy of God, another Ignatious |
| 1:22.2 | press title. |
... |
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