Posted on 01/16/2011 4:10:55 AM PST by marktwain
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Catholic Church's position on gun control is not easy to find; there are dozens of speeches and talks and a few documents that call for much tighter regulation of the global arms trade, but what about private gun ownership?
The answer is resoundingly clear: Firearms in the hands of civilians should be strictly limited and eventually completely eliminated.
But you won't find that statement in a headline or a document subheading. It's almost hidden in a footnote in a document on crime by the U.S. bishops' conference and it's mentioned in passing in dozens of official Vatican texts on the global arms trade.
The most direct statement comes in the bishops' "Responsibility, Rehabilitation and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice" from November 2000.
"As bishops, we support measures that control the sale and use of firearms and make them safer -- especially efforts that prevent their unsupervised use by children or anyone other than the owner -- and we reiterate our call for sensible regulation of handguns."
That's followed by a footnote that states: "However, we believe that in the long run and with few exceptions -- i.e. police officers, military use -- handguns should be eliminated from our society."
That in turn reiterates a line in the bishops' 1990 pastoral statement on substance abuse, which called "for effective and courageous action to control handguns, leading to their eventual elimination from our society."
On the world stage, the Vatican has been pushing for decades for limitations not just on conventional weapons of warfare, such as tanks and missiles, but also for stricter limitations on the illegal and legal sale, trade and use of small firearms and weapons, said Tommaso Di Ruzza, the expert on disarmament and arms control at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.
Di Ruzza told Catholic News Service that the Vatican is one of just a handful of states that would like to see small arms and weapons included in the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty, which would better regulate the flow of conventional arms.
He said while many countries are open to limits on larger weapons systems, most nations aren't interested in regulating small arms even though they "cause more deaths than all other arms (conventional and non-conventional) together."
The Vatican's justice and peace council is working to update its 1994 document, "The International Arms Trade," to further emphasize the importance of enacting concrete controls on handguns and light weapons, he said.
The current document calls on every nation and state "to impose a strict control on the sale of handguns and small arms. Limiting the purchase of such arms would certainly not infringe on the rights of anyone."
The more weapons there are in circulation, the more likely terrorists and criminals will get their hands on them, the document said.
The Catholic Church recognizes that "states will need to be armed for reason of legitimate defense," as Pope Benedict XVI said in a message to a Vatican-sponsored disarmament conference in April 2008.
However, armed defense is something appropriate for nations, not for all individual citizens in a state where rule of law is effective, said Di Ruzza.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, individuals have a right and a duty to protect their own lives when in danger, and someone who "defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow."
How that "lethal blow" could be licitly wielded is unclear, but the catechism clarifies that repelling the aggressor must be done "with moderation" in order to be "lawful" in the eyes of the church; using "more than necessary violence" would be unlawful, it says.
According to the catechism, the right to use firearms to "repel aggressors" or render them harmless is specifically sanctioned for "those who legitimately hold authority" and have been given the duty of protecting the community.
Di Ruzza said that in "a democracy, where there is respect for institutions (of law), the citizen relinquishes his right to revenge onto the state," which, through its law enforcement and courts system, aims to mete out a fair and just punishment.
"There is a sort of natural right to defend the common interest and the common good, and in 1791 (when the United States passed the Second Amendment), my right to have a weapon served the common good because there wasn't an army; the democratic institutions were young and a little fragile, and I could have been useful in a time of war as a soldier," said Di Ruzza.
But once a nation has a functioning army, police force and court system, "do I still serve the common good with my gun or do I put it at even greater danger?" and promote a lawless kind of "street justice where if you steal my car, I shoot you," he asked.
The Vatican's justice and peace council's 1994 document said, "In a world marked by evil and sin, the right of legitimate defense by armed means exists," but, Di Ruzza said, it wasn't lauding the potential of weaponry as much as it was lamenting the existence of arms in an imperfect world.
Nations have a duty, the document said, to reduce if not eliminate the causes of violence.
And as Pope Benedict wrote in his message to the disarmament conference, no reduction or elimination of arms can happen without eliminating violence at its root.
Every person "is called to disarm his own heart and be a peacemaker everywhere," the pope said.
They defy a lot of teachings Lazamataz, that being one of the least of them. I pray my catholic brothers and sisters wake up before it’s too late.
Eliminate SIN and then you can eliminate guns. I have NEVER heard a priest or bishop speak on gun control.
Perhaps freedom loving Freepers of the Catholic faith would care to refudiate this article.” ________________________
The critics predisposed conclusions on this matter is like a guy trying to opine on calculus having failed or never taken basic arithmetic.
A no brainer. First of all a committee styled opinion remarking that “....the Church ....opposes firearms for civilians.....” is certainly not the voice of the Church. The sources cited and the committee style group of individuals alone are speaking. This blurb does NOT qualify as the Church speaking. These are hardly a rule of faith, a Church teaching, or any other caricatured and framed pronouncement one might wish to pin on the Church.
The fact is that the Church speaks only when the Holy Father speaks, and only then when he speaks Ex Cathedra, and only then when he speaks on matters of Faith and Morals alone, and only then when it undergirds the Truths of the Christian faith, which have been and are now well known to all the faithful for over 2 thousand years.
ps:
To judge “the Church” by the standards of former Catholics, non-practicing Catholics and anti-Catholics of the US is a stupendous error, laughable to traditional Catholics. The Church has certainly NOT spoken on your local gun laws.
All this “peacemaker” talk makes me think of Sam Colt’s version.
No, I deliberately used Sarah Palin’s new word.
A combination of refute and repudiate seemed appropriate.
And sometimes, overt political correctness, too. During my Catholic school days (when I was really young in elementary school), we were subjected to speech control in the form of parents who had diabetic kids in the school actually being allowed to speak in front of the class and demand that we not call their kids “diabetics,” but, rather, people “with diabetes!”
Thank you for your reasoned response. I have supported the efforts by Catholics to have St. Gabriel Possenti made the patron saint of handguners. It may yet happen.
"and now he said unto them, but now he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise a wallet; and he that hath none,let him sell his cloak, and buy a sword."
I don't know how you interpret this, but sounds an awful lot like Jesus not being adverse to weapons for self defense, as opposed to offensive reasons.
CC
Not much chance of that. The CC is the best brainwashing unit on Earth.
Thank you for working toward this; I'm familiar with St. Gabriel but not with the website... heading there now.
To coin a phrase, "mea culpa"
I Shoulda' scanned the page first, Laz, didn't see your post until after I hit the submit button.
CC
There is nothing like this in the Bible. Even Jesus' disciples were commanded to be armed in the Garden of Gethsemane. Perhaps Marxism has now infiltrated the highest levels of the Catholic hierarchy? At my church, on the other hand, we carry every Sunday.
Not Marxism... It can be attributed simply to political correctness on our side of the pond, and irrational fear of weapons (due to three+ generations of war) or the other. See my post upthread.
"blessed be Jehovah, My rock, who teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight"
CC
They've been doing that for centuries.
So you’re say that the US Conference of Bishops isnt part of the Catholic Church?
I agree that both of those are beyond the Church's competence, which is why I totally disagree with the effort to eliminate the death penalty, and THIS part of the Catechism's statement:
"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 definitely 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 nonexistent."
Said condition simply does not exist in today's world. As I said above, "life imprisonment, without parole, in solitary confinement" is the only TRULY workable alternative to the death penalty, but AFAIK, such a sentence has NEVER, EVER been issued.
There is one other possible alternative, and that is surgical severing of the spine to render the perp a quadraplegic. If he/she can't move arms and legs, then they can do no harm.
BUT, neither of the above possible alternatives to the death penalty prevents the perp from having someone ELSE commit murder (crime bosses). So you need to also eliminate the possibility of outside contact with society.
I don't see any of those alternatives ever being seriously considered.
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