Retribution, etymologically, means "to assign back." Retribution for a business man would be to receive from his debtors and give to his creditors, thus restoring order. It refers to the just bestowal of reward and punishment, as by God in the afterlife. It is mistaken for vengeance.
St. Thomas distinguished the two aims of punishment: to restrain or prevent violation and to restore order. The classic four part division is rehabilitation, protection, deterrence and retribution. The last deals with the restoration of order. The following continues a discussion about the disappearance, the "cancelling" of retribution, specifically in debate on capital punishment, including by our four recent popes.
Consider these comforting, reassuring words: "Rejoice beloved of my Father, receive the Joy that has been prepared for you from the beginning of the world: I was innocent and you raped me; I was trusting and you betrayed me; I was fragile and you tortured me. Do not be afraid! My Father knows nothing of retribution, condemnation or wrath. He is only Mercy, Gentleness and Absolutely Unconditional Love for you just as you are."
We know, of course, that in his actual words, Jesus condemns to hell, not genocidal psychopaths, rapists and pedophiles, but those who fail to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, visit the sick.
Hard fact, straight from Revelation, but ignored if not denied: Lucifer and his minions are condemned eternally to hell. Not to rehabilitate them, not to deter future sins, not to protect vulnerable angels. Out of sheer retribution. Wrath. Justice. Righteoussness. Condemnation. Stop, dear Reader, and ponder that for a bit. It is good for the soul. You are unlikely to be advised to do so by your parish priest, or bishop, or pope; much less your therapist or life coach!
On October 7, 2023 Hamas tortured and raped mothers before their children and children before their mothers; they emasculated and disembowled men; they took captives, innocent children and elderly, whom they still hold. The perpetuators deserve the death penalty. As a deterrent? Yes! As protection? Yes! As rehabilitation? Yes, in several ways: that they repent prior to final eternal judgement and for the Palestinian community to seek a new path. As retribution? Absolutely! It is right and just. Like Eichmann and the Nuremburg trials: dignity, presumption of innocence, due process, right to legal representation. If you viscerally resist this, beware! You may have unconsciously succumbed to our pervasive, undiagnosed pandemic of soft, effete, saccharine, sentimental secularity.
The "R" word has become dirty and cancelled: Retribution.
Retribution: Opposite of Revenge
First of all, it is confounded with revenge; in reality it is its polar opposite. Revenge is a personal VICE of hatred and resentment. Retribution is a different category: it is a judicial decision, by an authority transcendent of the conflict (judge, jury, parent, referee, dean of discipline), who practices the VIRTUE justice by restoring order and balance through punishment and reward.
Revenge: big brother hits little brother and little brother cracks big brother's head open with a baseball bat.
Retribution: big brother hits little brother. Father observes. He has feelings of anger, protective of little guy. But he checks himself. Breathes deep, counts to ten. Calls them together in silence, allowing guilt in big guy to arise, hurt and anger of little guy to subside. Speaks calmly, solemnly with both. Explains the nature of bullying: big violates little. Explains blood obligation to protect little brother. Elicits apology. Allows time for little guy to heal. Directs big guy to leave the baseball field and rake leaves for an hour as retribution.
This example is, of course, heavy on fatherly discipline/rehabilitation, as well as deterrence and protection. But the retribution part is distinct and essential. Both parties, subjectively, require it. It allows the culprit to make reparation and then emerge guilt free. Failure of authority to impose negative restitution fosters unconscious infections of guilt and shame. Correct and just retribution allows the victim to heal and bring closure as order is in some way restored, the balance of justice is honored. Retribution fosters forgiveness; cheap mercy feeds into resentment. Retribution is the antidote to both guilt and resentment.
Divine and Human Retribution
Retribution is good: it is just, wrathful against evil, protective of order. In our world, retribution virtually always works in harmony with rehabilitation, deterrence and protection. But it is distinct onto itself. It is its own form. It finds pure expression in the afterlife, in God's judgment against the damned, angelic and human, and judgment for the saved.
Human justice on earth is a reflection of the divine; it includes retribution, but never revenge. All authority on earth is given from above and reflects that of heaven: parental, political, juridical, etc. Genuine mercy is real only in tension with justice, which is restitution, both reward and punishment.
Sentimentality and Sensibility
The retreat from retribution is in part sentimental: a feeling of aversion that flows from about 80 years in the West of comfort, affluence, security, and the triumph of the therapeutic. More deeply, it flows from secularity: indifference to the supernatural realms of God, heaven, Lucifer, hell, sin, damnation. Even where belief in God and heaven is prevalent, as in the USA, the comfort and security of our prosperity make for a forgetting of the supernatural, especially of sin and evil.
The daughter of the deceased mafia boss spoke of her cousin, who had "ratted" on her father and remained in witness protection :"Dad is in a better place; but I will take care of my cousin as he would have." Really?
The 9/11 attackers died as martyrs, expecting 100 brown-eyed virgins each as reward. Really?
Three times since being elected, Pope Leo has spoken of Pope Francis looking down upon us from heaven. Really?
Pope Francis assured his agnostic journalist friend that God sends no one to hell. Really?
Such presumption is so pervasive that it is assumed, unrecognized, accepted as normative. I have attended a number of funerals in which the priest homilist canonized the deceased; in some cases their shortcomings were blatant. Sentimentality! Especially by the best of us. For about a century clergymen have been falling over each other in retreat from the vile, condemnatory priests that tormented Stephen Daedelus in the James Joyce classic "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." The worst thing imaginable for a priest since the 1960s is to hint at anything resembling divine judgement. We have succumbed to a mercy without justice, a compassion without wrath, an emotionalism without intellectual clarity.
Contrast Bishops Sheen and Barron
Let's contrast Bishop Fulton Sheen with Bishop Robert Barron. They are unequaled as American prelates for their communication skills, erudition, intelligence, charm, orthodoxy and evident holiness of life. They differ in spirituality because of difference in their audiences. Sheen addressed audiences that had suffered the Depression, a world war, the holocaust, a contest with Soviet communism. He was extremely aware of the supernatural aspect of things. My primary1950s childhood memory was of his big joke that the angels erased his chalk boards. The supernatural was close at hand. That included Satan, hell, evil and sin. Bishop Barron is keenly sensitive to his audience: us indulged boomers and our children. He avoids topics like eternal hell or retribution in regard to capital punishment. He favors the theology of Balthasar with his "dare to hope" for the salvation of all.
Balthasar, John Paul, Benedict and Ralph Martin
In his important work, "Will Many Be Saved," Ralph Martin approvingly quotes Balthasar that Scripture contains two strains which must be kept intact and in tension: the triumphant Mercy of God and the human freedom to defy God and incur his wrath. He faults the Swiss theological genius for collapsing the later into the former. This correction is appropriate.
Balthasar ranks, for me, with John Paul and Benedict, as the bright shining lights of Catholic theology of the last 80 years; as doctors of the Church; as right behind Thomas and Augustine for the depth and breath of their theology. They are flawlessly orthodox, including their doctrine of hell/retribution and maintain the balance much more than did Pope Francis. But I will be bold enough to challenge them on a singular weakness: a relative forgetting of God's retribution. It is not denied; but it is ignored; specifically in regard to capital punishment. A correction is required: Ralph Martin is in this prophetic as well as boldly unfashionable.
Relation to Priest Sex Scandal: Diminished Sense of Evil
A root cause underlying the absolute "inadmissibility" of capital punishment, the canceling of restitution, denial of eternal damnation and the episcopal tolerance of priestly sex abuse is: a diminished awareness of the radicality of evil, sin, Satan, spiritual warfare, and the Kingdom of Darkness. Accompanying Vatican II was an optimism, a positivity, a secular humanism that exulted in the prosperity and achievements of the time...economic, scientific, technological...and looked hopefully to the political and therapeutic. The supernatural, especially the bad part, became the "null curriculum." The positive part, belief in heaven, remained very strong in the USA. But immediately, in 1965, as the Council ended and the Cultural Revolution exploded, people stopped going to confession, priests and religious left their vocations in large numbers, Harvey Cox's The Secular City became a best seller, and the Church went into a steep decline. The focus of theological training in seminaries became the therapeutic (Freud), the political (Marx), and the techno-scientific (Darwinian evolution.)
At the first rumblings about the priest-homosexual-scandal bishops were directed by psychologists to pursue therapy, by lawyers to avoid liability, by their instincts to protect the reputation of the Church. Additionally, they had inhaled the naivete, optimism, and humanistic confidence of the time. They could not grasp the gravity, the radicality of the evil: trusted priests violating young men. They no longer believed deeply in evil, sin, Satan and hell.
In our time, what type of man pursues the priesthood and succeeds there? Mostly men who are wholesome, generous, kind, and trusting. Such unconsciously project themselves onto others: they expect others to resemble themselves. William James helpfully contrasted two religious types: once-born and twice-born. The once-born are naturally receptive, grateful, generous and trusting. The twice-born surrender to evil but experience a rebirth into goodness. Such retain an interior familiarity with evil. Examples of once-born: St.Terese of Lisieux, Carlo Acutus, and the childhood saints. Twice-born would include St. Mary Magdalene, St. Augustine and the Stephen-killing zealot Saul of Tarsus. Most of our bishops and vicars are once-born: naturally good. This temperamental credulity and naivete combined with a progressive, secularized positivity created a perfect storm for episcopal neglect in justly handling abusive, predatory priests. Perhaps no one is as ill prepared to deal with predators, con artists, sociopaths, and compulsives as our priests and bishops!
The avoidance, the denial of radical evil underlies the episcopal malfeasance about sex abuse, the retreat from retribution, and the abolition of the death penalty, as well as other mistakes.
Theology of Mercy: Faustina, John Paul, Francis
The revelation received by St. Faustina, almost 100 years ago, was (in my opinion) the most significant work of the Holy Spirit in the 20th century Catholic Church. Let us contrast the presentation of this mercy in three important figures.
St. Faustina was a classic Catholic mystic: her presentation of Mercy was so intense because it faced two other powerful forces: the evil of sin and the justice/wrath of God. All of our great saints and mystics maintain this tri-polar metaphysics: the evil of sin, the justice of God, and his mercy. This is not the Manichean world (of Star Wars) in which good and evil are eternally in opposition. Rather, God ultimately prevails, in both justice and mercy, but evil remains unvanquished until Christ returns in cloud of glory (in which he left us on Ascension Thursday, today as a matter of fact, NOT Ascension Sunday!) Even into eternity, with the complete victory of God's Mercy and Justice, a residue or remnant of evil abides in the damned souls, angelic and human. How this can be is beyond our imaginations and intellects.
John Paul's magisterial encyclical "Dives in Misericordia" ("Rich in Mercy") 1980, powerfully proclaimed the Mercy of God while tacitly keeping in place truth, justice, wrath, and condemnation of sin. It is an interpretive key to his person, life and mission.
With Francis we encounter a different reality: mercy becomes absolute, unconditional and thereby cheapened; retribution disappears; along with it the co-primacy of truth, justice, and wrath against evil. We have: blessing of homosexual unions, "who am I to judge?" compromise with the sexual revolution, Pachamama in the Vatican, continuing protection of highly connected clergy predators, the inadmissibility of capital punishment, surrender of the Chinese Church to the communist party, replacement of the apostolic college by a group dynamic process straight out of the 60s, repression of the ancient rite of the mass, and war against young priests configured as dogmatic, legalistic, condemnatory. The heavenly revelation to St. Faustina has been reconfigured as indulgence of evil.
What is Worse? Death or Sin?
From a natural perspective, death is normal, inevitable and unavoidable. There is an irrational randomness as to when it comes. From a faith perspective, it is a passing to the afterlife, the particular and general judgments, reward or punishment (retribution!), hopefully eternal joy. Sin is much worse: it offends God. It risks an eternity of damnation. It demands retribution.
Many years ago I argued with a dear priest friend: he told me he carried a condom in his wallet just in case he fell into sin, at a club for example, to avoid disease. I encouraged him to throw away the condom so he would be motivated, by fear of sickness, to avoid sin. He was unmoved. For him, sickness and possibly death were worse than sin. Later his acceptance of a gay identity caused him and a number of bishops many headaches.
Doctrinally, today almost everyone accepts a "delusional presumption": the dogma that everyone is going to heaven anyway. God is merciful. But suffering and death: horrendous tragedies! And so, we recoil at the image of the state taking a life: it is a violation of human dignity. It is as bad as things can get! We value this life, to an extreme: we do not dread hell, not for ourselves or others; nor do we passionately hope for heaven! We do not experience this life as a vale of tears as we bask in bourgeois comfort and security.
The move to absolutely abolish capital punishment, finalized by Pope Francis, is not an organic development of our legacy; it is a corruption. It is rooted in secularization, an amnesia of the supernatural, of divine holiness and justice. Capital punishment in some cases in required by retribution alone. Additionally, of course, it offers an opportunity for rehabilitation, not for this life, but for the soul who anticipates judgment. Some repentant murderers have requested and preferred this punishment out of a now properly contrite conscience. Along with this, note that the high confidence in our prison system in protection and deterrence is not well founded: just recently we had a murder in Ocean County Jail, the morning I was there with Catholic ministry as well as escape from prison in New Orleans by half a dozen accused of murder.
Perhaps the worst priest pedophile, John Geoghan, with 150 reported child victims, was murdered in a Massachusetts prison in 2003. A double irony here! Although he was in protective custody, our vaunted prison system could not prevent the murder. Additionally, the perpetrator was a man already convicted of murder of a gay man. In a crude way, retribution was inflicted. The homophobic culprit, already serving a death sentence, probably received a second. A clever fellow, he may manage to kill another homosexual. This is not impressive as rehab, deterrence, protection or retribution. If I were a gay imprisoned in Massachusetts, I would take another look about the " permanent inadmissibility" clause on the death penalty in our Catechism!
Hitler/Stalin/Mao/Putin/Amin/Osama/Hussein, Hamas, Hannibal Lector, Keyser Soze, Attila and so many more...do not need a life sentence. A death sentence is just and merciful for all involved. From a natural as well as a supernatural perspective.
Retribution, Temporal Punishment for Sin, Purgatory, Indulgences (Plenary and Partial)
In their Reformation, Protestants largely threw away purgatory, retribution, masses for the dead, temporal punishment due to sin, and indulgences. In the long game of history, in our age, the Protestants win; Catholics guided by Trent lose. A Catholic family today might spend close to $1/2 million on a quality secondary and college Catholic education: their child will be versed in Critical Race Theory and intersectionality but not know a partial from a plenary indulgence, a particular from general judgment, a mortal from a venial sin, or the meaning of divine retribution.
The Catholic practice of death, our November traditions around the last things (death, judgment, heaven and hell) and all saints/souls days, center upon the Mercy of God, of course, but also divine retribution (punishment and reward,) merit, temporal punishment due to sin, the debt to be paid, masses and indulgences offered for the dead. All of this has largely disappeared, after 400 years of Catholic militancy in defending it, in the prevalence of cheap mercy, secularism, presumption, and effete progressivism.
Dangers of Righteous, Religious Retribution: A Girardian Caution
Retreat from retribution is not unfounded. Surely, the worst violence is righteous, religious retribution. Sins of passion, gangster-type violence for money, power, and revenge are all understandable within the human realm. Religious indignance has an infinite boundlessness about it, exploding beyond nature and psychology into the supernatural and diabolic: the Jihadism of 9/11 and October 7, 2023; the boundless messianic license of communism; the religious fury of racism in Nazism and the KKK.
From Rene Girard we learn about mimetic rivalry and its resolution through the scapegoat dynamic of "sacred violence" which targets, in indignant condemnation, the innocent victim, thus unifying the community in self-righteousness. The pervasiveness of this dynamic at the heart of all culture and religion, excepting at the foot of the cross at Calvary, gives pause to a retrieval of retribution. Admirers of Girard would be inclined to cancel the category, guaranteeing the "inadmissibility" of capital punishment.
This would be to throw out the baby with the bathwater, to go to an extreme. A proper Girardian sensibility will scrutinize vigilantly all jurisprudence around retribution for disguised mimetic, scapegoating "sacred violence." But, if resentful, hateful vindictiveness camouflages itself in religious righteousness, we are not to entirely obliterate the category of retribution. The Catholic natural law tradition has a different perspective. Girard must be kept in tension with St. Thomas!
Personalism Needs Thomas! Thomas Needs Personalism
The defining theological accomplishment of Catholicism in the 20th century was the marriage of Thomism with Personalism: St. John Paul, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Pope Benedict, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Maurice Blondel along with Gabriel Marcel, Dorothy Day, Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Josef Pieper, the David Schindlers...an entire culture of rich Catholicism which synthesizes centuries of metaphysics, ethics, and theology with the best of contemporary phenomenology, social sciences and philosophy. The objectivity of classical thought finds a balance in the subjectivity of our age...and vice versa. It is a valid, licit marriage, but a rocky one. There remain (as in every marriage) tensions between the lovers.
The argument here is that the subjectivity of personalism, on the reality of retribution, requires the balance of objective justice, more prominent in classical Thomism, its epistemological realism, ontology of being, and ethics of natural law. It calls to mind the dynamics of the feminine and masculine in marriage: mutually delightful, complementary, asymetrical, and in tension.
Amnesia about Divine Justice, Wrath and Retribution: the Catholic Antidote
Retribution, justice in dispensing of punishment and reward, is crucial in our engagement with God as it safeguards the divine holiness and transcendence, including wrath towards evil, against a disordered, cheapened mercy that degenerates into presumption, relativism, indulgence of evil. It structurally protects created freedom in its accountability and consequences. Analogously, at every level of human interaction...discipline in the kindergarten playground, criminal justice, capital punishment, just war, police action, academic grading, athletic competition...it guards and restores order and harmony. It allows for the guilty culprit to make amends; and the hurting victim to move to pardon.
Happily, our Catholic heritage offers rich resources to strengthen our sense of justice. In the passion and death of Jesus we contemplate: the gravity of evil, the consequence of sin, the inexpressible holiness of God. In the Eucharist, properly understood and celebrated as a memorial of just this torture and death, we participate in the sacrifice that atones for sin and restores order, that pays an unspeakable price, that destroys evil and death as it rescues the sinner.
A rich network of devotion draw us into tenderness and reverence for our Lord in his sacrifice: stations of the cross, mysteries of the rosary, the liturgy of lent and holy week, use of the crucifix with the suffering body of our Lord. Our funeral liturgy relativizes the trauma of death and loss, as it strengthens our hope in the afterlife, anticipation of judgment, and vigilance against sin.
To ensure our reverence for the holiness of God, our aversion to sin, and a richness in genuine mercy......Let's bring back retribution!
