#Church teaching on the issue of #interrogating #terrorists

Gitmo-suspected-terrorist1

Here is some resources from the Catholic Church, discussing the issue of coercive interrogation towards tourists being captured, and trying to get information from them.

http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/torture/upload/2013-02-TortureBackgrounder-FINAL.pdf

“Torture can take many forms: severe beatings and mutilation, exposure to excessively warm or cold temperatures, stress positions, sexual humiliation, and threats of death to a detainee or persons close to him or her.”

Catechism of the Catholic Church # 2297 – “torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity.”

Veritatis Splendor, 80

80. Reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature “incapable of being ordered” to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image. These are the acts which, in the Church’s moral tradition, have been termed “intrinsically evil” (intrinsece malum): they are such always and per se, in other words, on account of their very object, and quite apart from the ulterior intentions of the one acting and the circumstances. Consequently, without in the least denying the influence on morality exercised by circumstances and especially by intentions, the Church teaches that “there exist acts which per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object”.131 The Second Vatican Council itself, in discussing the respect due to the human person, gives a number of examples of such acts: “Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and MENTAL TORTURE AND ATTEMPTS TO COERCE THE SPIRIT; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator”.132

 

 

 

 

 

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