Michael Liccione at the Sacramentum Vitae blog has replied to my previous posting, and his reply needs addressing here, since it did not quite seem to meet the points I raised. So, I suspect that I should say more around certain issues, to try to clarify them. Michael summarizes my posting as:

Paul insists that Catholics must submit to judgments such as Martino's, which certainly reflects the Pope's.

I am not sure how Cardinal Martino has entered this discussion. He was not mentioned in the posting by Robert Miller that I was replying to, nor did I mention him in my reply, nor was I particularly thinking of anything he himself had said. In fact, my reply had two aims: firstly, to counter Robert Miller's claims about the Church's role in the judgment of circumstances, and secondly to better describe Catholic responses to prudential claims such as the ones made about capital punishment by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical, also to be found in the Catechism.

It seems to me that Miller's argument can be split into two parts. The first part is (and these are not his actual words, but my summary of them): "Suppose that the Church authoritatively teaches that when action A is performed under circumstances C, then it is sinful. Then a Catholic must assent to that moral statement." So far, no problem. But he follows this up with: "But judging whether the circumstances C actually hold is a prudential judgment that the Church has no special authority for. So the Church's opinion on whether circumstances C do actually hold must be given respect, but it's never required to give it more than respect." And it is this part that is problematic — the first sentence is ambiguous, and the second sentence is false.

To counter Miller's very general claim, it is (following the rules of logic) only necessary to come up with some particular scenario in which the Church's prudential judgment must be given more than respect. Such a scenario can be seen by referring to the CDF document referred to in the previous posting. There is says, in relation to teachings which do necessitate the religious submission of will and intellect (which is certainly more than respect):

A proposition contrary to these doctrines can be qualified as erroneous or, in the case of teachings of the prudential order, as rash or dangerous and therefore "tuto doceri non potest".

Hence, there are some teachings of the prudential order (i.e. which require judgment of circumstances) which require more than respect. Hence Miller's claim fails.

The CDF document does say something about how a Catholic can decide which teachings of the prudential order require a religious submission of intellect and will:

one can point in general to teachings set forth by the authentic ordinary Magisterium in a non-definitive way, which require degrees of adherence differentiated according to the mind and the will manifested; this is shown especially by the nature of the documents, by the frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or by the tenor of the verbal expression.

Since the prudential judgment that the necessity for capital punishment is nowadays "very rare, if not practically non-existent" has been made both in the encyclical of a Pope, and in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it easily satisfies such a requirement.

If that were not enough, then there is always the Instruction On The Ecclesial Vocation Of The Theologian , which says:

in order to serve the People of God as well as possible, in particular, by warning them of dangerous opinions which could lead to error, the Magisterium can intervene in questions under discussion which involve, in addition to solid principles, certain contingent and conjectural elements. It often only becomes possible with the passage of time to distinguish between what is necessary and what is contingent.
The willingness to submit loyally to the teaching of the Magisterium on matters per se not irreformable must be the rule.

And that is also more than just respect.

Michael also provides two quotes from then-Cardinal Ratzinger:

There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty

But that simply does not say that all such opinions are legitimate (which is the sense that many seem to take it in).

And:

if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion

That says that disagreeing with the Pope is not, by itself, sufficient reason for being unworthy — but it does not say that there are no grounds for being unworthy. For example, suppose someone disagreed with the Pope on the necessity for some particular abortion — we would not have to investigate the circumstances before immediately concluding that they were wrong. But if they disagreed with the Pope on the necessity for some particular execution, we would have to investigate the the circumstances to see if it was a legitimate disagreement. But not all disagreements are legitimate. (To a give a concrete example: suppose some ruler made the decision that only poor people could be executed. It would be wrong to regard that as a legitimate prudential disagreement with the Pope.)

Michael also says:

Yet Paul's argument is a simple non-sequitur. From the fact that the Church must, in some cases, make empirical judgments in the course of making prudential judgments that call for religious submission, it does not follow that the empirical judgments of her duly constituted leaders today in all cases, and therefore the cases of war and capital punishment, call for such submission.

As I indicated above, the reason for finding any occasion on which an empirical judgment still necessitated religious submission was so as to destroy the generality of Miller's argument. The argument is certainly not a non-sequitur when viewed as it was intended. (And it seems that you implicitly agree that Miller's argument is not as general as he claims.)

And:

For example, supposing that the circumstances today which would warrant capital punishment are very rare, they might not be quite so rare as Pope John Paul II believed.

Even if so, that would not be grounds for negating a necessity for religious submission.

And:

The argument Paul gives to the contrary would work just as well as an argument that Catholics in the Middle Ages and beyond were obligated to render religious submission of intellect and will to the proposition, maintained by Thomas Aquinas and applied by many popes, that obstinate, public heretics should be tortured and/or executed as a necessity for the common good.

I am not aware of anywhere that Aquinas says that heretics should be tortured. Could you supply the exact reference? Aquinas did defend the execution of heretics, but did this in the context of the defense of society (a teaching which is still accepted by the Church), and not having access to today's penal techniques, he did not particularly take into consideration other defenses. (Actually, I don't understand what your counter-example is intended to demonstrate.)