Ya think?
Here in Commonweal:
The Sermon on the Mount’s prohibitions of retaliation are absolutely binding on Christians, in both the private and the public spheres, for on the cross Christ at once perfected the refusal of violence and exhausted the Law’s wrath.
This simply begs the question, not only of present injustice, but of final judgment, which Christianity nevertheless teaches. The wrath of God has been hardly exhausted and will be meted out, according to the clear Christian teaching. This makes no sense if the Law's wrath has been "exhausted". The only conclusion to be drawn from that, if it is true, is that there will be no final judgment. This, of course, is where universalism comes from. And the doctrine of purgatory is its halfway house.
The ordinance not to retaliate, like all of the teaching, for example on poverty, is part of the wider message that the world is soon coming to an end. Take that end away, and the teaching becomes utterly obscurantist. It is only intelligible as an explicitly interim ethic in an eschatological time. But even at that, as Schweitzer correctly pointed out, it really represents the negation of ethics and is no ethic at all because all traditional human relationships under it have come to an end ("For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother").
That is why Tacitus correctly called the Christians haters of humanity.
It's also why Christians themselves at length gave it up.
People will not persist in an interminable state of poverty and undergo injustice in very large numbers or for a very long period. The history of the church tells us so. It is the history of the compromise and defeat of the original eschatological message. It is a history of degeneration.
Early in the essay Hart deflects the charge of sentimentality saying that he thinks there are very few opponents of capital punishment who do not realize the heinousness of many crimes. But in its place Hart advocates for his own sunny form of unrealism:
[I]f Newman was right—and believing Catholics had better hope he was, for the sake of the intelligibility of their faith—it is not only doctrine but also the church’s understanding of its teachings that is clarified over time by the Spirit. There may be slight missteps, of course, but the general view of development tacitly taken by the magisterium is that there are no violent retreats from clearly stated new discoveries; there is only a relentless narrowing and intensification of focus. This suggests, among other things, that the teachings of the magisterium under the current pontificate are probably more trustworthy than those under the pontificate of, say, Leo X.
I expect Mary to be declared part of the godhead any day now.
