Catholicism and Capital Punishment Revisited | Sr. Elinor Gardner, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2024

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given on March 3rd, 2024, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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About the Speaker:

Sister Elinor Gardner, O.P., is Affiliate Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dallas. Prior to arriving at UD, she taught at Aquinas College (Nashville, TN) and at The Catholic University of America, and spent one year assisting in formation at her Congregation’s Novitiate. She has a PhD from Boston College with a doctorate titled “St Thomas Aquinas on the Death Penalty.” Besides the ethical and political philosophy of Aquinas, her other research interests include the Christian anthropology of Robert Spaemann and Edith Stein.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.8	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.1	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:22.5	to mystic institute.org. Our topic tonight was actually inspired by the Timistic Institute chapter
0:31.9	here. That is, I was asked to speak on this particular topic. And even more particularly, I was asked to give a talk about capital punishment connected to the theme of building bridges, which is, I take it your theme for this semester or this year.
0:48.4	When I heard that, or read that in Earl's email, I immediately recalled a comment that John Paul
0:56.0	the second makes in his encyclical letter, Evangelium Vite, the Gospel of Life,
1:02.3	which came out in 1995 and was the remote inspiration for my doctoral work.
1:09.5	So I had been thinking about that question on and off
1:14.1	since really since that encyclical came out or first came to my attention. In section 26 of
1:23.1	Evangelion Vite, John Paul II notes that, quote, signs which point to the victory of Christ
1:31.6	over death are not lacking in our societies and cultures strongly marked though they are by the
1:39.2	culture of death, end quote. And the Pope then goes on to note in the next paragraph of the encyclical,
1:48.0	this is a rather long quotation. He says, among the signs of hope, we should also count the spread
1:55.4	at many levels of public opinion of a new sensitivity ever more opposed to war as an instrument for the resolution
2:02.9	of conflicts between peoples, and increasingly oriented to finding effective but nonviolent
2:10.3	means to counter the armed aggressor.
2:13.8	In the same perspective, there is evidence of a growing public opposition to the death penalty,
2:19.3	even when such a penalty is seen as a kind of legitimate defense on the part of society.
2:25.3	Modern society, in fact, has the means of effectively suppressing crime by rendering criminals harmless
2:33.3	without definitively denying them the chance to reform.
	...

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