Eating Toadstools

In the United States last year, 25 people were executed by law. The shortest time between conviction and execution was nine years; the average was 25 years. All were men. This was the racial breakdown: 13 white, nine black, two Hispanic, one Native American. That was in accord with the ratios of murderers in those categories; if anything, whites were slightly overrepresented. 

The youngest person to receive the death sentence was 18 when he committed the crime. He had already been convicted of kidnapping and rape and was serving two life sentences when a jury found him guilty of a previous and unrelated crime of rape followed by murder. Another man, 19 when he murdered a convenience store clerk in a robbery, tortured and killed a fellow prisoner—who was serving 90 days for a traffic offense —between his conviction and his sentencing two days later. A third man, also 19, was embroiled in gang wars and murdered two people at two separate places in one day while he was on the run from a previous murder. Those are the three men who were under 20 when they committed their capital crimes.

The cases are miserable: murder for hire, double murders, rape and murder, murder by someone on parole while serving a sentence for a previous murder, murder followed by rape and mutilation of the corpse, murder followed by the rape of a little girl, and so on. To enter the area of these murders is to lift up a tattered curtain that separates the nicer part of a foul room from its dank and rat-ridden corner. It is our world, festering. 

Again and again in the stories of these malefactors—and often of their victims too—we find sexual confusion, irresponsibility, and treachery: children growing up in chaos; no father in the home; “blended” (read “mangled”) families; seething jealousy and vindictiveness; sexual abuse; pornography. And all these are merely accepted as the foul air above a garbage dump is accepted. After a while, you no longer notice the stench. But the sick miasma is under no compulsion to become salutary because it is no longer sensed as sick. You can pretend that a toadstool is a chanterelle. The toadstool demurs.

I bring up these capital cases not to argue for the death penalty but to note a curious inconsistency among—I use the word for want of a better—“liberal” Catholics. Last year, about a million children in the United States were snuffed out in the womb. The ratio of murdered unborn children to executed murderers was not 4-to-1, not even 40-to-1, but 40,000-to-1. For each executed inmate, a whole city the size of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, was obliterated. 

Now, if it is morally wrong to execute a man guilty of kidnapping along with two counts of rape and murders committed in two completely separate incidents, or of a hired assassin who slashed a middle-aged woman to death slowly and torturously, or the enraged killer of six people at once with guns and an ax, or a murderer who raped and mutilated the corpse of a female hitchhiker whom he and his buddies tortured to death—if it is morally wrong to execute these men who, by their actions, declared war on all society and all law, then it is immeasurably more vicious and foul to sentence an innocent unborn child to death—one whose very existence, unless you were raped, is owing to your own voluntary action and who rightly claims from you the special protection that a child claims from his mother and father. Yet where is the outrage now?

But forget about outrage. Where is the moral analysis? I am not arguing that we should sentence people guilty of aggravated murder to death. The death penalty, so long delayed and so rarely enforced, has no value as a deterrent. I can be persuaded that we should exercise mercy even in these terrible cases—and even at some risk to the lives of wardens, doctors, nurses, guards, repairmen, janitors, cooks, other prisoners, and people outside of prison whom the capital offenders may murder by proxy. I cannot be persuaded, though, that to administer condign punishment is evil—because reason itself perceives the balance, the equity, the fit application of the death sentence to the deadly. Scripture itself prescribes the penalty, which, as I say, I can be persuaded to set aside, for mercy.

The problem lies not in a supposed inconsistency in Catholics who use the case of capital punishment as the ace of trumps against their anti-abortion fellows in the pews but in their consistent nominalism in moral matters regarding sex. That is, they believe that in one area of the moral life, what traditional Catholics see as a crucial area with all kinds of social evils that flow from getting things wrong, there is no such thing as objective good and evil so long as no compulsion is involved; in which case it is not the act itself but the coercion that is wrong, the violation not of the nature of the body but of the individual will. They can claim no precedent for such nominalism, whether they hold it philosophically or, more likely, with a loose negligence. And Catholic authors most concerned with the social good are against them: Leo XIII, Charles Péguy, Léon Bloy, Jacques Maritain, G.K. Chesterton, François Mauriac, Dorothy Day, Pius XI, Paul VI, Malcolm Muggeridge, and John Paul II, among many others.

Now, nobody is a nominalist when it comes to eating mushrooms. We know that the death cap can kill. So can the destroying angel, the false morel, and other poisonous fungi that attack the liver and the kidneys. Traditional Catholics believe something analogous about moral evil. When they argue against “liberal” Catholics, they assume that their opponents believe that good and evil are objective facts in the moral order, that they can be known by reason, that they have inevitable consequences, and that, in the case of grave sin, the consequences are dire in this life and may be eternal in the life to come. But if the opponents do not believe those things, where is the common ground from which to discuss things? 

When it comes to the most contested issues, how can you appeal to reason as applied to Scripture and to past and consistent teachings of the Church when your opponents believe that history is a burden to be shucked off or a chain to be broken, that the teachings are as changeable as is the platform of a political party and thus that no logical consistency is required, and that Scripture is not the word of God in its specifics but only in the generality? And in the generality, too, only as it is presumed to be tending in historical progress toward some undefined end, one conformable to the current beliefs of political progressives.

If someone eats the ivory funnel mushroom, we can expect the horrible symptoms of nerve poisoning to ensue shortly. The person may well die. But it is not like that with the moral life. The consequences are not so immediately visible and traceable.

When people do evil, persuaded that it is good or at least permissible, the specific evil of the action itself is not compounded with the further evil of contumacy against God. Stupidity is in part a mitigating or attenuating factor. Nor does the entirety of a man’s moral life depend wholly upon rightness in one or another organ, so to speak. If you lose your kidneys, you die. But adulterers walk among us and may yet be kind to dogs and old ladies, honest in their business dealings, and dependable in the quality of their work. 

Even so, I would not want to count too much on those areas remaining unaffected. The moral poison, settled into one area, leaches into others. And in important ways, evil in the moral life is more disastrous than eating bad mushrooms. Amanitin in Joe’s stomach does not leap to Bob’s stomach. But moral evil poisons the society that accepts it; and it does so, again, regardless of the opinions of the people involved. The Hurons were worse—quite a great deal worse—as human beings for the brutality of their tortures. The libertine atheists in the salons of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France spilled their evil abroad by example and by the falsehoods about God which they accepted and promulgated, and blood flowed like wine in the streets. 

We Americans are worse—quite a great deal worse—as human beings for our casual dismissal of the moral law governing sex and marriage and the begetting and raising of children. It is not just the broken families I am talking about here but hardness of heart, extending so far as to leave the sexes not different from one another, which they are by God’s natural ordaining, but alienated. We are a society starved for love songs.

I fear, then, that any insouciant treatment of the moral law regarding capital punishment is meant not, primarily, to protect 25 men who may die this year for their dreadful crimes. Instead, it is meant to dismantle Catholic moral teaching generally as understood as reflecting objective fact, with objective and predictable and miserable consequences attendant upon its violation. If it were not so, we would hear from the opponents of the death penalty the same kind of warning that you would give to people regarding anything deadly—in this case, deadly to them, the people applying the penalty. 

We would also, a fortiori, find opponents of the death penalty decrying abortion as immeasurably worse for the people who perform or procure the abortions because, as I say, if you risk your own spiritual death by taking part in a state’s execution of a kidnapper, rapist, torturer, and murderer, how is it logically possible to believe anything other than that you risk at least the same by snuffing out the life of your own unborn child?

Would you let your children play with darts dipped in curare? Would you send them to schools where poison is common? Would you hire a cook who raises bad mushrooms as a hobby, to feed them to mice? Of course not. In morals as in mushrooms, the personal motives of the opponents or proponents of a diet may reflect the condition of their souls, a condition known only to God, but they do not matter as to fact. 

That is what traditional Catholics believe and what the Church teaches as regards what moral truth essentially is. Good and evil do not shift with the tides, and development cannot ever mean flat contradiction, no more than reason can be irrational, God can contradict Himself, or the Holy Spirit tell lies. If you agree, we can argue. If you do not, we might as well be shouting at each other in mutually incomprehensible languages—and our problems lie far deeper than, for example, that of a bishop playing footsie with a proponent of mass murder of the unborn.