It seems to me clear that authoritative Catholic teaching forbids the use of torture under any circumstances. However, some hold that torture might occasionally permissible in extreme situations. As emerged recently, Deal Hudson is one of those who do not see why torture might be occasionally permitted, and he has written on this. The real meat of the discussion is in the comments that follow. Henry Karlson is particularly good. At one point in the comments, Hudson says: “this [Veritatis Splendor] is example of how, in my opinion, Catholic social teaching gets itself in a jam”. A rather unfortunate thing to say about a papal encyclical. But this occurs right after Hudson has been misinterpreting the intentions of the teaching (as Karlson later points out).

So the root cause seems to be Hudson’s misunderstanding of the teaching, rather than any real ambiguity in the teaching. Is a blog posting, and a set of comments a good way to resolve this? Not particularly. It needs an extended dialog to resolve such issues, and a threadful of comments doesn’t produce that. Rather, it produces even more poorly founded questions and answers. Somehow, the web  has to come up with a better technique for promoting real dialog.