A New Wrinkle

Or just something I had forgotten...

For the discussion on torture over at WWWTW, I went back and reread what the CCC says about torture:

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. Except when performed for strictly therapeutic medical reasons, directly intended amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations performed on innocent persons are against the moral law.[90]

2298 In times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law and order, often without protest from the Pastors of the Church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law concerning torture. Regrettable as these facts are, the Church always taught the duty of clemency and mercy. She forbade clerics to shed blood. In recent times it has become evident that these cruel practices were neither necessary for public order, nor in conformity with the legitimate rights of the human person. On the contrary, these practices led to ones even more degrading. It is necessary to work for their abolition. We must pray for the victims and their tormentors.

So torture as defined in the CCC includes its use for punishment.

Is Christian personalism just a variant of liberal moral theory? I wrote that this is a novelty and the appeal to human dignity and respect for the person is not reducible to what has been written by Thomists about the virtues of charity and justice. So how much weight should the CCC carry? I do not hold it to be an infallible document, and while it should be respected, I think there is a break with the past with regards to punishment. Now it might be that Sacred Tradition does not explicitly maintain the infliction of pain as punishment is licit. But it would seem that various moral theologians (and bishops?) have taught it.

Again, how is torture as it is broadly defined here different from corporal punishment by parents or lawful authorities?

Fr. Brian Harrison has an article from 2006 for This Rock, but I would think it has been superceded by his addendum.

Edit. I vaguely recall an attempt to harmonize the CCC with "traditional" teaching on the infliction of pain as a punishment, but I can find no record of having written about it on this blog. I may have written it somewhere else, or just done it mentally. One could interpret the CCC as prohibiting the torture of those who have already been sentenced and punished for an offense -- torture (or any sort of maltreatment) would in their case be going beyond what has already been determined to be a proper punishment for their offense. (Maltreatment might be justified on the grounds that they have lost human dignity, etc., but I do not think that this would be in accord with a traditional understanding of justice.)

Still, I think the more obvious sense of the sentence in the CCC is that it prohibits torture as a form of punishment. But this would only be a problem if the CCC were represent the highest teaching authority of the Church and protected by infallibility.