Customer Reviews

Capital Punishment and Roman Catholic Moral Tradition

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I found Dr. Brugger's view of capital punishment and the Catholic view to be persuasive and articulate. I now consider the concept of capital punishment to be the greatest waste in humanity, perhaps only outdone by wrapping your Forest Green Porsce 911 around a tree.

Dr. Bruggers views should act as a beacon to us all.

Sadly, all this excellent digging into Patristic thought culminated in simple maralizing about capital punishment. Citing the US Conference of Catholic Bishops should be a red flag to anyone interested in scholarship instead of policy. The talented author here found what the patres said but one must suspect that he did not penetrate their thought. The Holy Father knew intimately the thought of the earliest christians as well as the philosophy that surrounded them when he wrote about capital punishment. This book gets the information but not the sense of what led John Paul II to restrict the need for what today is considered drastic punishment.

In Capital Punishment And Roman Catholic Moral Tradition, E. Christian Brugger (Assistant Professor of Ethics, Department of Religious Studies, Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana) critically examines the position of the Catholic Church on the death penalty down through the centuries to the present day. Professor Brugger postulates that while the Catechism of the Roman Catholic faith does not expressly condemn the death penalty, neither does it imply through logic that the death penalty is wrong. Capital Punishment And Roman Catholic Moral Tradition is a confidently recommended to a Roman Catholic readership as being a serious, in-depth, scholarly study of a controversial ethical, moral, and social issue.