THE MORAL LAW
he Fifth Commandment is short and sharp. Thou Shalt Not Kill! Any commentary on that clear, curt command might seem superfluous. Could any four little words be simpler,---Thou Shalt Not Kill! So I can understand if one should say, "That fifth commandment is clear as crystal. Don't cloud it. Don't complicate it. Leave it alone."
And yet a moment's reflection will show that even that simplest and plainest of texts gives rise to scores of questions. And not all these questions are captious. Some of them are quite honest and legitimate. For example: "Thou Shalt Not Kill!" Does that mean that no man must go to war, and that every soldier is a murderer? "Thou Shalt Not Kill!" What? Not even in self-defense? Not even in defense of father or mother, or wife or child? Neither in defense of life nor in defense of virtue? "Thou Shalt Not Kill!" Is capital punishment, then, a crime? Are the judge on the bench and the legislature back of the judge, the prosecuting attorney and the jury, the warden and the executioner, the attendant who leads a criminal to the electric chair, perhaps even the clergyman who walks with the prisoner---are they one and all murderers?
Or---to take a totally different kind of problem: in child-birth if the mother's life is imperiled may the life of the babe in the womb be crushed out by a physician to save the mother? Or yet again, may a patient suffering unendurable pain and crying for death be "put out of his suffering"? And what about suicide? Certain ancient Stoic philosophers, Greek and Roman, condoned it, or even recommended it. Chinese and Japanese consider it in certain circumstances a matter of honor. In some elite military organizations if an officer has shown the white feather, he is handed a revolver and left to himself. Shall he abide by the code and shoot his brains out?
Again, if two men, after shipwreck, are clinging to a bit of wreckage that will hold only one, may one purposely slip off to give the other a chance? Was the companion of Robert Scott, the explorer, justified when he walked out of the tent to sure death in an Antarctic blizzard, so there might be one less mouth to feed?
Take yet another species of problem: If a woman's virtue is in peril, may she leap from a high window even at the risk of death? Or may she kill the man who threatens her chastity? If a woman has already been outraged, may a committee of citizens spare her the further disgrace of appearing in court, take the law into their own hands and lynch the assailant? In pioneer days on the frontier, were the vigilantes justified in hanging horse thieves without court procedure?
You see there is no end of problems that flow spontaneously from that simple, clear-cut little commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Kill!" Answer these questions, solve these problems as you may, you cannot deny that there is room for honest argument at least about some of them.
Obviously I have not time to discuss all these questions, but since I have mentioned them I dare not leave them hanging in the air. So permit me to answer most of them swiftly and categorically, not out of my own mind (personally I am no infallible moralist) but out of the mind of my Church, the Catholic Church, upon which, as I hold, God did confer infallibility. Then I shall pass on to a more detailed discussion of what I think to be the two most pressing and important of all the problems concerning the Fifth Commandment.
Well then, to give the Catholic answers point blank without argument. Suicide is never justifiable. The pagan philosophers in Greece, in Rome, in China and Japan, were wrong. Neo-pagans in England or America, or in any modern civilized land are wrong---and with less excuse. Suicide is always wrong---horridly, hideously wrong. As for the woman who leaps from a height to save her honor, she is no suicide. Her motive is escape. She does not seek death, though death may come incidentally. Sir Robert Scott's companion did wrong, though doubtless with a noble purpose. The shipwrecked man who lets go of the spar that will not hold two, is justified; he aims to save life, not to take life. The surgeon who directly kills the unborn babe, even to save the mother's life, commits a crime. The sufferer from incurable disease must not be put to death; he may be eased by drugs as far as possible; beyond that he must await the will of God. The officer in a fashionable regiment, convicted of cowardice, must not blow out his brains, the traditional code of honor notwithstanding. Such a code is pagan. Finally, lynching is always a crime. If there be a law requiring the appearance of the plaintiff in court, the law may be amended, but otherwise the grieved party must wait upon the law. No man is a law unto himself, in a land where courts are in operation. As for the vigilantes on the frontier, they were the law, they were the court, until a regular court could be established. Finally, capital punishment is permitted by the law of God as well as the law of the land.
ON THE 5TH COMMANDMENT-Capitial Punishment SEE--THE CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AT THE END OF THIS DOCUMENT
Let me repeat. I cannot in twenty minutes argue these cases out. Any one of them would require that amount of time. I answer them inadequately rather than leave them entirely unanswered.
And now let us come to the problems that I have called most pressing and most important; first the problem of crime in America, and second the problem of war.
And first with regard to crime: I remember that some twenty-five years ago, when a band of our mission preachers went into a certain state (which I prefer not to name) they were warned by the bishop "Preach the Fifth Commandment; in this part of the world there is too little respect for human life." A few years later in Chicago, I was shocked to learn that for every ten murders in that city only three arrests were made, and of the three arrested, only one received the full legal penalty. More recently in New York City, conditions have become, I fear, as bad as they were years ago in Chicago, if not as bad as they are in Chicago now. Indeed the entire United States seems to have become a happy hunting ground for murderers. He is the scandal of the world and the shame of America. We are the youngest of peoples: we commenced a century and a half ago with a splendid new experiment in government. Our Declaration of Independence, in spite of all the sarcastic criticism, is a glorious and stirring statement, a bugle call for justice and right and national honor. Our federal constitution again, in spite of all bad-tempered severe criticism, is, with the exception of one of its amendments, a beacon for the enlightenment of civilization. That is to say we have the best law in the world, but---here is the screeching exception---we are the most lawless people in the world. We have in proportion to our population twenty times more murders than England: we are more addicted to crimes of violence than any country in Europe with the possible exception of Russia, and even in Russia it is the Government and not the gangs that makes life uncertain. It is humiliating also to acknowledge the truth that our murder rate is higher than that of Mexico, which we are accustomed to think has a less developed civilization than our own. In China just now there is social and political chaos, but China, which has in round numbers four times our population, would need 48,000 murders a year to equal our murder rate, and I doubt if there are that many in China, unless you call by the name of murder what the Chinese call warfare. At least there are not in any civilized country bands of murderers to compare with our American gangsters, racketeers and other organized criminals, with whom murder is a trade and a method of transacting business.
Mr. Arthur Brisbane has recently written that we have become indifferent about murder. He records (rather frightening, I must admit) the discovery of parts of a dismembered human body, the torso floating in the Hudson River, "the legs lying in the street," and he added: "Once this would have been `a great murder mystery,' But mere individual murders cease to interest. In Chicago eight young bandits enter a nightclub, one announcing: 'This is a stickup.' A railroad watchman enters with a big dog. The dog bites the 'stickup' men. They turn out all the lights, then fire at random. Three female entertainers of the nightclub are killed, half a dozen others wounded. The police find corpses, and hysterical women and men. One little chopped-up torso is mild compared with that." Of course Mr. Brisbane is not really indifferent, but is trying to shock us out of our indifference. However, it is possible that our feelings and our moral sense have been chilled by constant reading of an endless succession of sensational crimes. It is commonly said nowadays that it is impossible to arouse the American people, as a whole, to high indignation against dishonesty, even vast dishonesty. But I pray to heaven that our people be not also beyond indignation at murder. We have reason to be worried over our unhappy supremacy in crimes of violence. I believe that every American sociologist and penologist, and I dare say, every thoughtful American citizens is appalled by the fact that crimes of murder and man-slaughter are more numerous now than they were even in pioneer days before our civilization became settled, and that they are constantly increasing. Murder is more than seven times as frequent in New York City as in London. Only recently a London correspondent of the New York World reported a decrease of more than 50 percent in the number of murders in the London area, compared with the average of the last 20 years. In 1919 there were 10 murders and 37 manslaughters in London. There were 357 murders or manslaughters in New York for the same period.
President Hoover, in a speech delivered to members of the Associated Press, shortly after his inauguration, like a High Priest making public confession of the sins of his people, declared that "more than nine thousand human beings are lawlessly killed in the United States each year" (others say twelve thousand) and he added this most amazing and yet undoubtedly true statement: "No part of the country, rural or urban, is immune. Life and property are relatively more unsafe [here] than in any other civilized country in the world." There may be some critics of the President who will say that he ought to have been more discreet and not to have uncovered our shame before all the world. In Europe there is a great deal of self-righteous comment upon our dominance in crime, and our European enemies pounced upon Mr. Hoover's confession with unholy glee. Nevertheless, I, for one, am glad that the President spoke as frankly as he did. If he can lead us away from that sickening self-satisfaction which so many felt when our leaders were singing "Prosperity, Prosperity" (as if Prosperity, even when genuine, could be the mark and measure of a nation's greatness) the change will be for the better. Perhaps, by the way, the present depression, though it seems an utter calamity, is a blessing in disguise. It will be so, if it teaches us, as our Savior said, that "A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth." In us the Scripture is fulfilled: "Thou sayest I am rich and made wealthy and have need of nothing and knowest not that thou art wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked." We have more money, more foreign trade, more manufactures, more automobiles and other luxuries; we live in finer homes, eat better food and have more expensive pleasure than the rest of the world, but what doth it profit us if, on the certain evidence of hard cold facts and figures, we lead the world also in crime?
I hope that no one will be so unkind or so unfair as to imagine that I state this appalling fact with any satisfaction. I repeat it in the same spirit in which Mr. Hoover spoke of it. As a good American, sincerely anxious for the welfare and the honor of the country of my birth and of my affection, I am primarily concerned not with evidence of our shame but with hope and desire for our improvement. Our regeneration, our salvation depends on our getting back to the Commandments of God. "It is an evil and a bitter thing for thee to have left the Lord thy God," said God himself to the people of Israel. It is as evil and bitter for America as for Israel. And surely, America has left the Lord if she no longer keeps His Commandments. Perhaps a nation, as a nation, has no soul, and therefore it may be a metaphor to say that a nation has lost its soul. But, literally or metaphorically, this nation is in danger of being damned. It will be if it does not return to the service of the Lord our God. We must get back to those forgotten, ignored, violated, commandments, and though it be humiliating to confess it, we (I say "we": I mean of course America) must go all the way back to that primary elementary basic commandment, the commandment that first lifts us out of sheer savagery, "Thou Shalt Not Kill!"
In my talk a week ago, I dwelt on the theme that if our nation is to be saved, we must reconstruct the home, re-establish the authority of parents and the obedience of children. In a word, I cried "Back to the Fourth Commandment---'Honor Thy Father and Mother."' Today I feel myself compelled, with considerable misfortune, to cry aloud, not indeed to my individual hearers but to our country, to America, "Back to the Fifth Commandment---'Thou Shalt Not Kill'"
I devote the remaining few minutes to the principal problem connected with the Fifth Commandment, the problem of war. It seems a simple problem. Indeed, to certain persons it seems no problem at all. They solve it instantaneously and dogmatically. They say: War is always wrong; no conceivable combination of circumstances can justify war; no motive, however exalted, noble, unselfish, can sanctify warfare. Some extremists go further still and declare that every man who fights in battle, whether he volunteered or was conscripted, is, potentially at least, and in most cases actually a murderer. If that theory were true, every soldier who discharges a rifle or flings a hand-grenade, or wields a bayonet in battle is as guilty before God as a gunman in a gang-war. Men may sing a soldier's praises, pin medals on his breast and worship at his tomb as at a shrine, but before God his hands are red with blood; his soul is stained with murder, and if he meet with sudden death, as is probable, he can have no hope of salvation. That, I say, is the utmost extreme of the pacifist theory.
I think that theory needs only to be stated to be refuted. I certainly shall not debate it. I am a lover of peace myself. I am a member of societies organized to assure and perpetuate international peace; I may, in a sense, be called, I have been called, a pacifist. But I certainly cannot agree with the mad theory that all war is organized murder and that the soldier is an outright criminal.
There is, or at, least there may be, such a thing as just warfare, the conditions of which have been laid down by Christian moralists. One recent Catholic theologian, Fr. Strattmann, of the Dominican Order, has summarized these conditions. He numbers ten, but for our purpose three of the ten will suffice. First: "The war must be caused by very great moral guilt on one side, and one side only." That is to say, one nation must be wrong, know itself to be wrong, and the other must be innocent; second: The object of the war must be the furtherance of good and the avoidance of evil; third: The war must be so conducted that the limits of justice and of love are never transgressed." Obviously, these conditions are difficult, some will say impossible. Be that as it may, they are the conditions recognized by Catholic theologians back to the days of St. Augustine, 1,500 years ago.
Theoretically, I believe these conditions can be fulfilled. Historically I think they have been fulfilled, though rarely. I beg leave to illustrate with an analogy that I used rather frequently during the War, and that still seems valid to me. Suppose you hear, in the middle of the night, a cry "Help!" "Murder!" from the next room. You leap from bed, grab a revolver, rush in and find, let us say, your brother being attacked by a man wielding an axe. The axe is poised in the air and about to descend. Will you or will you not shoot, and if need be shoot to kill, to save your brother's life? If you answer "Yes, certainly! I should be a coward if I did not!" then you justify war,---some war. For it makes no difference whether the cry comes from the next room or from the next continent, whether the victim be your brother by blood or by the common relationship of humanity. If you hear a cry for help, not from a person but from a nation, you feel and I agree with you, that you may rush to the defense of that nation, as you would rush to the defense of an individual. Mark you, I am not now justifying the World War. That would be a stupendous task. I am not even justifying our entrance into that war. I am not justifying any particular war. I am supposing a theoretical case. If that case actually occurs; if an innocent person or an innocent people is attacked, you may take up arms, and Catholic theology denies to any one the right to accuse you of murder or of any other wrong.
Of course, when an actual, not theoretical, war is impending, the question is usually more complicated. What we have learned to call "propaganda," that is, diplomatic lying, gets in its diabolical work; false rumors and reports are circulated; "horror" stories are deliberately manufactured, race-hatreds are stirred up, passions are inflamed, and altogether there is a conspiracy to befuddle the mind and cloud the judgment of the citizen. He reads the papers, listens to furious oratory, and then he himself mouths his opinions with violence and dogmatic assurance. But really, he doesn't know "what it is all about." He goes into the war, dies on the battle-field, or fights it through, returns, lives his allotted span, and goes down to his grave, never really knowing whether the war was just or unjust. If he could live for a hundred years and read all the discussions, study all the histories, pore over all the original documents, analyze all the hidden facts as they slowly come to light, he might perhaps finally know who was right and who was wrong. But as things go nowadays in this complicated and bewildering world, no private citizen, perhaps I might add no president, can be infallibly sure that the war in which he participates is justifiable.
Well then, if a man cannot know, is he entitled to go ahead and fight? For answer I refer you back to the principles concerning "conscience," the second discussion in this series. The private citizen must take the information at his disposal, keep his mind free as far as possible from passion and prejudice, form his opinion with care, and then go ahead..
I say, he must avoid passion and prejudice! And there is one thing about which we can be certain: every man is under the moral obligation to keep his heart clean from hatred. Our Savior, and after Him, the beloved disciple, St. John, and after them, the Church, has taught that hatred is a sin akin to murder. "It hath been said of old, thou shalt not kill," says Jesus, "and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment. But I say to you that whosoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment." And St. John adds, with extraordinary emphasis, "Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer."
St. John has also a very significant and pointed question, "If I love not my neighbor whom I see, how can I love God whom I see not" One might borrow the idea, with a slight adaptation, and say, "If I love not my fellow American whom I see, how can I love Europeans, and Asiatics, and Africans, and Australians, whom I see not? How can I make pretense of being a lover of all mankind if I cannot endure patiently the defects of my next-door neighbor?"
How can I keep peace with the Italians in Italy, if I am intolerant of the Italians in my own city? If I despise the Jews or the Irish, or the English, or the Germans, or the Poles, or the Swedes; if I call them by abusive nicknames, what right have I to send ambassadors of good-will to London, or Rome, or Dublin, or Berlin, or emissaries of peace to Geneva?
Some thoughtless persons may retort that the racial or religious prejudices they permit themselves in daily life have no relationship whatsoever to big issues that produce a war. But they are mistaken. Modern war arises generally from a complication of causes. Perhaps the first and chief is economic. Next comes bigotry, the exaggeration or caricature of patriotism. But not the least of the causes, of war is the feeling that a man is our born enemy because the blood that flows in his veins is different from ours.
Of course, there is no real difference between our blood and that of any other human being. The Creator made no difference. Aristocratic blood and the blood of the lower class citizen will naturally mingle. If a prince marries a peasant, his union need not be without fruit, and in the veins of his offspring the aristocratic corpuscles will not fight the corpuscles of the lower class person.
Furthermore, nature and nature's God have raised no barrier between race and race. The Italian can fuse with the Austrian, the English with the Irish, the French with the German. Nature has indeed erected geographical barriers between man and man, but not biological barriers.
In ancient days, men went to war because they were told that the people on the opposite bank of the river, or on the other slope of mountain, were monsters, cruel, savage, uncivilized, and what not. In these days of easy intercommunication between nation and nation, we know that the fellow over there is pretty much the same as the fellow over here. We are all brothers under the skin. We are all blood relatives.
Therefore, when war looms up, let us remember these elementary truths taught by Reason and Religion. If we keep our heads clear and our hearts right, we may prevent the next war, no matter how ardently certain diplomats and financiers and militarists may desire it. If we prevent the next war, we can prevent any war. If there is no next war, obviously there will be no war forever. So be it. God grant it. Amen.
You have heard that it was said to the men of old, 'You shall not kill: and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment." But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment (Mt 5:21-22).
2258 "Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God and it remains for ever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end. God alone is the Lord of life from its beginning until its end: no one can under any circumstance claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent human being." CDF, instruction, Donum vitae, intro. 5.
2266 The efforts of the state to curb the spread of behavior harmful to people's rights and to the basic rules of civil society correspond to the requirement of safeguarding the common good. Legitimate public authority has the right and the duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense. Punishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced by the offense. When it is willingly accepted by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation. Punishment then, in addition to defending public order and protecting people's safety, has a medicinal purpose: as far as possible, it must contribute to the correction of the guilty party.
2267 Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.
If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person.
Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm---without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself---the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically non-existent." NT John Paul II, Evangelium vitae 56.