“Rigid Christians”

Corrie ten Boom, 1921

“RIGID CHRISTIANS”

“Intrinsically evil acts…lying…can’t be used to a good end. So, if you say, like, hey, I lied, sure, yeah, right, but I did it for a great end, you know, like, to protect the Jews in my basement, for instance…you can’t do evil that good may come.”

Father Gregory Pine, O.P. is morally wrong about the Gestapo scenario (5:20) because he is using a limited moral and theological framework. See:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEnP6oEnzEk

—Pints With Aquinas, “Is Lying ALWAYS Sinful? w/ Fr. Gregory Pine, OP,” YouTube video, 14:54 minutes, February 20, 2022

This line of reasoning is rigid. It assumes an unvarying principle that is dogmatically applied to every case without exception.

Father Pine cites Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and the Council of Trent—basically, medieval theology—in support of his position.

Trent theology is basically a compendium of medieval doctrine, even though Trent takes place at the beginning of the modern period.

Aquinas’ argument is found in Summa Theologiae, Question 110, Article 3:

“As words are naturally signs of intellectual acts, it is unnatural and undue for anyone to signify by words something that is not in his mind. Hence the Philosopher says (Ethic. iv, 7) that ‘lying is in itself evil and to be shunned, while truthfulness is good and worthy of praise.’ Therefore every lie is a sin, as also Augustine declares (Contra Mend. i).”

In contrast, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) 2488-2489 offers a nuanced, more persuasive view [boldface mine]:

“The right to the communication of the truth is not unconditional. …This requires us in concrete situations to judge whether or not it is appropriate to reveal the truth to someone who asks for it. Charity and respect for the truth should dictate the response to every request for information or communication. The good and safety of others, respect for privacy, and the common good are sufficient reasons for being silent about what ought not be known or for making use of a discreet language. …No one is bound to reveal the truth to someone who does not have the right to know it.”

The CCC passage draws upon at least two robust traditions in ethics:

 

Rights theory 

Consequentialism

Rights theories of ethics originate in seventeenth-century political philosophy, John Locke in particular, who wrote:

“Men...enter into society...the better to preserve himself, his liberty and property [rights]...the power of the society, or legislative constituted by them, can never be supposed to extend farther than the common good.”

—John Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) in The Great Political Theories, Volume 1, edited, with introduction and commentary by Michael Curtis (New York: Avon Books, 1981), pages 374-81

The CCC passage invokes rights theories of ethics by citing the right to safety, the right to privacy, and the right to information, adding that the latter is not absolute:

“The right to the communication of the truth is not unconditional. …The…safety of others [and] respect for privacy…are sufficient reasons for being silent about what ought not be known or for making use of a discreet language. …No one is bound to reveal the truth to someone who does not have the right to know it.”

Historically, consequentialism directly arises from utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is a political philosophy that follows upon major social and political changes, specifically, the rise of liberalism, taking place at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.

“At the beginning of the 1800s the British Empire was still expanding. The thirteen American colonies had gained their independence, but Britain continued to control India, Canada, and Australia, and it was soon to acquire vast territories in Africa as well. The Industrial Revolution was also making England the world's first great industrial power....

“But power comes at a price, and in Britain the price was a society more sharply divided along class lines. Although the landed aristocracy was still the dominant force in the 1800s, middle-class merchants and professionals made enormous political and economic gains during the first half of the century. The same cannot be said of the men, women, and children of the working class. Poor and numerous, they toiled in the mines, mills, and factories that sprang up during the Industrial Revolution, and their situation was bleak indeed. ...

“In economic status and in political power, too, the working class fell far behind the middle class in the first half of the nineteenth century. ...This was a matter of some concern to the leading liberal writers of the day, a group known then as Philosophic Radicals and later as the Utilitarians. ...

“From this [Jeremy] Bentham drew two general conclusions about government. The first was that government could generally promote the greatest happiness of greatest number simply by leaving people alone. ...His second conclusion was that government is not likely to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number if it is controlled by a small segment of society. In the pursuit of utility, Bentham declared, everyone is to count equally. Government must weigh everyone's interests, and this requires that almost everyone be allowed to vote.”

—Terence Ball and Richard Dagger, Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal, 5th edition (2004), page 64-66

When the CCC justifies the use of “discreet language” for the “good of others” or for the sake of the “common good,” it makes a consequentialist argument.

Consequentialism offers the strongest argument for “lying” to protect hidden Jews hunted by the Gestapo. Telling the truth by revealing their location makes the truth-teller instrumental in their genocide. I’d say that if you know that the Gestapo is going to murder the hidden Jews in your basement, you are complicit in their genocide by turning them over. Consequentialism argues that you should not reveal their location because it would result in their murder.

If the decision was made in ignorance or moral confusion, it would be objectionable nonetheless.

Father Pine describes a situation that is not at all hypothetical. Numerous times it had occurred during the real-life persecution of Jews under Nazi wartime occupation.

One famous case is that of Corrie ten Boom, whose family hid Jews in secret compartments inside their Dutch home. Corrie, her father, and her sister were arrested by the Gestapo for hiding Jews. Only Corrie survived the incarceration.

Corrie’s justification for hiding Jews in her home—which naturally involved lying about their whereabouts—is religiously based. Her family invoked the defense of their fellow human beings against their unjust persecution.

“The ten Boom family were members of the Dutch Reformed Church, which protested Nazi persecution of Jews as an injustice to fellow human beings and an affront to divine authority. In her autobiography, ten Boom repeatedly cited religious motivations for hiding Jews, particularly her family’s strong belief in a basic tenet of their religion: the equality of all human beings before God.”

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/corrie-ten-boom

—United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, “Corrie ten Boom,” Holocaust Encyclopedia

In response to Father Pine’s video, a YouTube comment persuasively invokes Just War theory in defense of “lying” to protect hidden Jews. I quote:

“The [Roman] Catholic Church allows Just War under certain circumstances. Just War includes deceiving and killing enemy combatants. When the Gestapo officer comes to the door looking for Jewish families, I think it’s reasonable to consider him an enemy combatant in a Just War.... Therefore, intentionally deceiving him...would be licit.”

In other words, in a Just War, lying is a morally licit means of exercising the right to self-defense.

Thomas Aquinas, who is principally responsible in the Roman Catholic Church for developing Just War theory, is also responsible for advocating the principle that lying is always morally evil.    

We would note, by the way, that Just War theory presents its own moral conundrums, for example, and I quote:

begin

- the existence of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction requires a different approach to the problem

- these weapons can only be used for unrestricted war and so the condition of proportionality can’t be met if they are used

- using these weapons guarantees civilian casualties, and thus breaks a basic rule of the conduct of war

- since these weapons can’t be uninvented they render just war theory pointless

- in recent times it has become possible to target such weapons quite precisely, so the problems above only apply to indiscriminate versions of such weapons

- the ethics of weapons of mass destruction are a different topic

end

https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/war/just/against.shtml

—“Against the Theory of the Just War,” BBC (2014)

Besides rights theories of ethics and consequentialism, other robust ethical traditions may be invoked in support of “lying” as a morally justifiable act.

Based on virtue ethics, which conceives of virtue, a moral ideal, as the habit between two extremes, we might advocate for the exercise of discretion as the virtue that lies between the extremes of duplicity and naiveté.

Calling upon social contract theories of ethics, we could maintain that a tyrannical government violates the social contract and abrogates it, so that resistance, including lying in self-defense, is morally licit.

We could also appeal to the ethics of compassion, hailing from both Western and Eastern traditions. According to this ethical framework, the imperative to show compassion readily overrides proscriptions against lying to protect the victims of Nazi genocide.

Immanuel Kant, a major exponent of deontology in the West, argues in his Lectures on Ethics against the rigid application of the principle that lying is always morally wrong.

Kant implicitly invokes both rights theories of ethics and consequentialism when he repudiates truth-telling as an absolute moral imperative.

“Not every untruth is a lie…. If we were to be at all times punctiliously truthful we might often become victims of the wickedness of others who were ready to abuse our truthfulness.… If my enemy takes me by the throat and asks where I keep my money, I need not tell him the truth, because he will abuse it; and my untruth is not a lie (mendacium) because the thief knows full well that I will not, if I can help it, tell him the truth and that he has no right to demand it of me.”

https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/02/2631/

—Hadley Arkes, “When Speaking Falsely Is Right,” Public Discourse: The Journal of the Witherspoon Institute, February 19, 2011

Arkes cogently expounds:

“The point is: Not every taking of property is a theft. Not every killing is a murder. A ‘murder’ is an ‘unjustified killing.’ An innocent person, set upon unjustly, could not be unjustified if lethal force offered the only means of rescuing himself from that unwarranted assault. Plainly, we could not put on the same plane the killing done by a Hitler and the killing done by those who would resist being killed unjustly by a Hitler.

“In the same way, not every act of speaking falsely is a ‘lie.’ As many people have recognized, nothing wrong has taken place when children decline to tell their father of the surprise they are planning for his birthday. A ‘lie’ is an unjustified act of speaking falsely, as a murder is an unjustified act of killing. The untruth becomes a lie when it is directed to a wrongful purpose, as in deceiving for the sake of fraud and for the hurting of the victim. Now, if we are in the presence of something we could finally call a ‘lie’ in that sense, it would seem to me to follow that lying is indeed always and everywhere wrong. But that is not what is done by the Dutch householders protecting the Jews they are hiding and speaking falsely to the Gestapo.”

Besides traditional medieval theology, there are multiple other ways to robustly address the moral conundrum entailed in the defining case of lying to the Gestapo about hidden Jews.

Consider that Church teaching on the permissibility of capital punishment has changed because social conditions have dramatically changed.

Concerning Aquinas’ absolute moral imperative against lying, we underscore that the saint did not anticipate or contemplate the conditions of genocide during World War II.

So let’s not treat Aquinas like the unchanging dogmatic authority he isn’t.

The term that Papa Francesco has used is “rigid.”

“The pope’s talk Sept. 1 continued along the same line of the danger of ‘these new preachers’ who had convinced some Galatians ‘that they had to go back and take on the norms, the precepts that were observed and led to perfection before the coming of Christ.’

“St. Paul tries to convince these Christians they risked losing ‘the valuable treasure, the beauty, of the newness of Christ’ if they let themselves ‘be enchanted by the voice of the sirens who want to lead them to a religiosity based solely on the scrupulous observance of precepts,’ the pope said.

“…Christians today must also reflect on how they live their faith, he said. ‘Does the love of Christ, crucified and risen, remain at the center of our daily life as the wellspring of salvation, or are we content with a few religious formalities to salve our consciences?’”

https://www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/francis-chronicles/holiness-does-not-come-following-rigid-rules-pope-says

—Carol Glatz, Catholic News Service, “Holiness does not come from following rigid rules, pope says,” National Catholic Reporter, September 1, 2021

Let’s not be rigid. Father Gregory, you are a deep disappointment.