A brutal legacy.

In the late nineteen fifties, Pierre Berton wrote the following about the paddle, solitary confinement, and capital punishment in Canada: ". . . it seems to me that modem society admits defeat when the only treatment it can prescribe is legal torture or legal murder. When we adopt the brute's methods, we ourselves become tainted with the brute, and it is not a pleasant experience. Certainly, as long as we condone the breaking of men's flesh and the breaking of men's necks, we cannot call ourselves civilized."

Berton, of course, was speaking for himself and others with similar views. He was not speaking for the rest of us. His use of plural personal pronouns was a rhetorical device to instill guilt and promote change. A rhetorical device is not an argument.

Punishment, even capital punishment, may be properly used to defend society against the lawless. St. Thomas Aquinas considered it a matter of self-defence to kill those who, on account of some sin, are dangerous and destructive to the community. To an extent, the state is a true totality, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Insofar as this is so, states have a right to protect themselves by taking action, even lethal action, to preserve society.

In The Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul II judges that, because they have other means of dealing with the sinfully destructive, modern states would rarely, if ever, be justified in resorting to capital punishment. Although the principle of totality provides a moral basis for capital punishment, the death penalty is likely indefensible in current circumstances.

Berton's protest against torturing and killing the guilty appeared about a decade before Canada legalized the dismembering of the innocent. Now, abortionists in this country dispatch more than 100,000 unborn children annually in clinics and hospitals. Many of these legally murdered human beings are old enough to feel what is being done to them. So legal torture and legal murder take place on a much larger scale than when Berton wrote.

You might object that if the killing is legal we cannot call it murder, but Berton called hanging murder when it was legal and now Canada no longer does it. The brighter "pro-choicers" have come to admit that abortion is the killing of a human being. However, they contend that the rights of the unborn are subordinate to the rights of their mothers. So many Canadians commit legal torture and legal murder to secure what they consider to be their rights, and we, as a society, become brutalized as a result and cannot call ourselves civilized.

By yielding to the clamour for abortion, Canada seems less able to resist other forms of brutality. Some Canadians have come to believe that parents should be allowed to murder their severely handicapped infants and children, at least as a last resort. Some are also leaning toward legalizing doctor-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia of the adult handicapped and the aged. We don't seem very concerned that in the Netherlands, a pioneer in voluntary euthanasia, thousands of people experience involuntary euthanasia each year. It is almost as if killing were addictive.

Abortion is a classic case of using an evil means to achieve a good end. Once people accept the principle that the end justifies the means, they become desensitized to increasing levels of atrocity in pursuit of their interests. Many Canadians show no outrage when medical scientists discuss the harvesting of fetal stem cells to treat disease and fetal organs to replace defective ones in those of us lucky enough to have been born.

Here, possibly, is an emerging spare parts industry, through which members of the helping professions can grow wealthy cannibalizing the young for those of us who disdain growing old. No longer will it be said that any of the unborn are unwanted; like outlaws in the old West, they will be wanted dead or alive by those who seem ready to devour our children for the sake of longevity. We have discovered, perhaps, the legendary fountain of youth, but drinking from it may be as devastating for humankind as Genesis tells us that eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge was, for it is a fountain that runs red with the blood of innocents.(+)

Joseph Campbell lives in Saskatoon and is Catholic Insight's social justice analyst.