"May The Judgement Not Be Too Heavy Upon Us"

Despite my disagreements with Andrew Sullivan on whether the Israel lobby is as nefarious as he now thinks it is, he is often an eloquent and moving writer on moral issues whom I find deeply moving, especially in his writing about torture. His meditation today on Ash Wednesday and March Thiessen, the Catholic apologist for torture who seems to entirely ignore his own church's stance against torture, is particularly impressive: "May The Judgement Not Be Too Heavy Upon Us."

The notion of the integrity of the human person, of human dignity, is integral to the Catholic faith. We are all made in the image of God, imago Dei. The central and divine figure in our faith, Jesus of Nazareth, was brutally tortured. He was also robbed of dignity, forced to wear a mocking crown of thorns, sent to carry a crippling cross through the streets of Jerusalem, mocked while in agony, his body exposed naked and twisted in the stress position known as crucifixion - which was often done without nails by Romans so that the death was slow and agonizing in the way stress positions are designed to be. Ask John McCain. That the Catholic church in the Inquisition deployed these techniques reveals the madness and evil that can infect even those institutions purportedly created to oppose all such things.

Read the whole essay.