Catholic and Enjoying It! Confronts Torture. Again.

Mark Shea of Catholic and Enjoying It! is getting tired of apologists for torture. He's simply asking for a serious discussion on how we, as a society under siege from islamofascists, can avoid torture. He's not getting it, his linked story notwithstanding.

This is a serious problem we Fools must face. Either we stand with the Church or we don't. Since the Church is how Christ chooses to mediate his presence to the world, we had better make our stand after considerable reflection and deliberation. When we do, we had damn well better make it with conviction, for we've literally bet our lives on it! So which will it be?

Christ stands by his Church. His church has said that torture is an instrinsic evil. Therefore, if any of us advocate its use, define it down, obscure whether or not certain measures of "coercive interrogation" such as waterboarding are torture or in any other way apologize for this evil, we've departed from the Lord and his Church. Period.

It doesn't matter if the time bomb ticks away. We may hypothetically place ourselves in that situation. We may even imagine using the very evils we decry. That doesn't make torture moral. On the contrary, it makes us mortal sinners. Period.

Foolables on the right will insist we live "in the real world." Funny, I thought we lived in God's creation, which, admittedly, includes the world of sinful humanity. I thought our Father in heaven was Lord of this creation. I thought he provided laws written upon our hearts so that we would better love him and one another. And didn't this Father give us his very son? And still does? Why, yes, I believe he did. Maybe we all ought to have a little faith in him? As in, we can find morally acceptable ways to extract information from recalcitrant terrorists? Perish the thought!

Torture is wrong. Period. End of story. It doesn't matter who's political ox this gores, it's the truth. We can either assent or dissent from it, but we can't deny the truth of it: torture is intrinsic evil. Accept it.