Justice Scalia Was More Catholic Than the Pope
Cliff Kincaid — February 23, 2016
On Saturday night, a lunatic by the name of Jason Brian Dalton went on a weekend killing spree in Michigan. The next day, contradicting the official Catholic Catechism, Pope Francis called for the worldwide abolition of the death penalty.
The pope doesn’t have to worry about Dalton getting the electric chair or a lethal injection. Michigan does not have the death penalty, which means Dalton, even if convicted of murder, will be entitled to a life at taxpayers’ expense—complete with three meals a day, free health care and cable TV.
On the same day that the pope spoke out against capital punishment, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a Catholic, was laid to rest. Scalia had said that judges who oppose capital punishment should resign. But that’s not a contradiction of church teaching. Article 2267 of the Catholic catechism, an authoritative compendium of church teaching, says the church “does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives” against criminals.
Scalia said the death penalty is not immoral and noted that support for it has been part of Christian and Catholic tradition in the old and new testaments.
The pope said, “The commandment ‘You shall not kill,’ has absolute value and applies to both the innocent and the guilty.”
But that’s not what Christianity or Catholicism teaches. As noted by Cardinal Avery Dulles in the April 2001 issue of First Things, “Turning to Christian tradition, we may note that the Fathers and Doctors of the Church are virtually unanimous in their support for capital punishment, even though some of them such as St. Ambrose exhort members of the clergy not to pronounce capital sentences or serve as executioners.” He noted that St. Augustine wrote inThe City of God:
The same divine law which forbids the killing of a human being allows certain exceptions, as when God authorizes killing by a general law or when He gives an explicit commission to an individual for a limited time. Since the agent of authority is but a sword in the hand, and is not responsible for the killing, it is in no way contrary to the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ to wage war at God’s bidding, or for the representatives of the State’s authority to put criminals to death, according to law or the rule of rational justice.
The pope’s comments were widely covered, but news outlets failed to point out that the pope’s position is definitely anti-Catholic and anti-Christian.
The pope appealed “to the consciences of government leaders” that they might join the “international consensus for the abolition of the death penalty.” The official Vatican Radio Network saidhe “spoke directly to Catholic leaders,” asking them, as a “courageous and exemplary act,” not to carry out any death sentences during the Holy Year of Mercy.
Scalia would have disagreed. In fact, Scalia’s final order was to deny the stay of execution of a Texas man, Gustavo Garcia, who was sentenced to death. The loony-left site ironically named “Think Progress” ran a story headlined, “Scalia’s Final Order Was To Let This Texas Man Die.” It was as if Scalia had failed to save the life of an innocent man. Garcia was executed by the state of Texas on February 16.
Who was this man? CBS Newsreported, “Court documents show Garcia shot [Craig] Turski in the abdomen on Dec. 9, 1990, then reloaded and shot the man in the back of the head. A month later, Garcia and [Christopher] Vargas entered a Plano convenience store armed with a sawed-off shotgun and carried out a holdup in which another clerk, 18-year-old Gregory Martin, was fatally shot in the head.”
The so-called “Think Progress” website fretted that “a commonly used lethal injection cocktail causes the sensation of being burned alive.”
It had no comment on the sensation of being shot in the head by a criminal.
In another recent case, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that death sentences handed down against three men, in what became known as the “Wichita Massacre” in 2000, should not have been tossed out by Kansas’ highest court. Scalia wrote the decision. The sole dissenting opinion came from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama appointee who was confirmed by the Senate in 2009 in a largely party-line vote, 68 to 31.
The case involved what the court called a “notorious Wichita crime spree [which] culminated in the brutal rape, robbery, kidnaping, and execution-style shooting of five young men and women.” The victims were white and the Carr brothers are black.
Hearing the case last year, Justice Samuel Alito said it involved “some of the most horrendous murders that I have ever seen in my 10 years here. And we see practically every death penalty case that comes up anywhere in the country. These have to rank as among the worst.”
The Wichita Eagle reported:
Underscoring the court’s apparent tilt, Justice Antonin Scalia took the unusual step of reading, at length, a detailed account of the Carrs’ December 2000 crimes: The brothers broke into a Wichita home on Dec. 15, where they forced the three men and two women inside to have sex with each other while they watched, then repeatedly raped the women over about three hours.
The brothers then forced the victims to withdraw money from ATMs before taking them to a soccer field at 29th Street North and Greenwich, making them kneel and shooting each one in the head.
Four of the victims died, but one woman survived a gunshot wound to the head because a plastic clip in her hair deflected the bullet. She ran naked through the snow for help and later testified against the brothers at trial.
Sedgwick County, Kansas, District Attorney Marc Bennett commented, “More than one family member from the Carr case commented as to how much it meant to them when Justice Scalia cut through all the legalese and recited the litany of brutal acts back to one of the attorneys for the defendants.”
By contrast, Reuters reported that Pope Francis made his comments “to throw his weight behind an international conference against the death penalty starting Monday in Rome and organized by the Sant’Egidio Community, a worldwide Catholic peace and justice group.”
You know that when you hear the words “peace and justice,” you’re dealing with the far-left.
This constitutes nothing less than an attempt to impose what has been called a “new global legal order” on the United States. It’s an insidious campaign to replace U.S. law with “international law” and United Nations treaties.
In a 1999 case, Knight v. Florida, Clinton-appointed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer voted to give a stay of execution to a convicted killer scheduled for execution on death row in Virginia. He cited several foreign court rulings as justification for his decision.
Breyer has actually written a book,The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities,which The New York Times noted had raised the question, “Does foreign law have a place in interpreting the American Constitution?”
Calling the book “lucid,” the paper said that “Breyer contends that events in the world have effectively resolved the foreign law controversy. Playing the judge as enlightened modern technocrat, he offers a reasoned elaboration of the mounting costs that judicial isolationism would entail in our increasingly interconnected world. Globalization, he argues, has made engagement with foreign law and international affairs simply unavoidable.”
The Times forgot to mention that a Supreme Court justice takes an oath swearing allegiance to the U.S. Constitution. So why aren’t Breyer’s views grounds for removal from office?
That oath is:
“I, _________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
.
The AUTHOR Cliff Kincaide is either willingly ignorant or uninformed about his Roman Catholic church and the Jesuit Order, of which the Pontiff is a member of...
ReplyDeleteIn the article the Oath taken by the Supreme Court Justices when they are placed on the bench.
Speaking of Oaths..
Here's the Jesuit Oath which Bergoglio, the Bishop of Rome swore to uphold:
I Jorge Bergoglio , now in the presence of Almighty God, the blessed Virgin Mary, the blessed St. John the Baptist, the Holy Apostles, St. Peter and St. Paul, and all the saints, sacred host of Heaven, and to you, my Ghostly Father, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, founded by St. Ignatius Loyola, in the pontification of Paul the Third, and continued to the present, do by the womb of the Virgin, the matrix of God, and the rod of Jesus Christ, declare and swear that His Holiness, the Pope, is Christ's Vice-Regent and is the true and only head of the Catholic or Universal Church throughout the earth; and that by the virtue of the keys of binding and loosing given to His Holiness by my Saviour, Jesus Christ, he hath power to depose heretical Kings, Princes, States, Commonwealths, and Governments, and they may be safely destroyed. Therefore to the utmost of my power I will defend this doctrine and His Holiness's right and custom against all usurpers of the heretical or Protestant authority whatever, especially the Lutheran Church of Germany, Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and the now pretended authority and Churches of England and Scotland, and the branches of same now established in Ireland and on the continent of America and elsewhere and all adherents in regard that they may be usurped and heretical, opposing the sacred Mother Church of Rome. I do now denounce and disown any allegiance as due to any heretical king, prince or State, named Protestant or Liberal, or obedience to any of their laws, magistrates or officers.
(Continues)
(Continued)
ReplyDeleteI do further declare the doctrine of the Churches of England and Scotland of the Calvinists, Huguenots, and others of the name of Protestants or Masons to be damnable, and they themselves to be damned who will not forsake the same. I do further declare that I will help, assist, and advise all or any of His Holiness's agents, in any place where I should be, in Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Ireland or America, or in any other kingdom or territory I shall come to, and do my utmost to extirpate the heretical Protestant or Masonic doctrines and to destroy all their pretended powers, legal or otherwise.
I do further promise and declare that, notwithstanding, I am dispensed with to assume any religion heretical for the propagation of the Mother Church's interest; to keep secret and private all her agents' counsels from time to time, as they entrust me, and not to divulge, directly or indirectly, by word, writing or circumstances whatever; but to execute all that should be proposed, given in charge, or discovered unto me by you, my Ghostly Father, or any of this sacred order. I do further promise and declare that I will have no opinion or will of my own or any mental reservation whatever, even as a corpse or cadaver (perinde ac cadaver), but will unhesitatingly obey each and every command that I may receive from my superiors in the militia of the Pope and of Jesus Christ. That I will go to any part of the world whithersoever I may be sent, to the frozen regions north, jungles of India, to the centres of civilisation of Europe, or to the wild haunts of the barbarous savages of America without murmuring or repining, and will be submissive in all things, whatsoever is communicated to me.
hen the word is passed, or I am commanded to defend the Church either as an individual or with the militia of the Pope. All of which
I,_______________, do swear by the blessed Trinity and blessed sacrament which I am now to receive to perform and on part to keep this my oath. In testimony hereof, I take this most holy and blessed sacrament of the Eucharist and witness the same further with my name written with the point of this dagger dipped in my own blood and seal in the face of this holy sacrament.