What does the Catholic Church teach about torture?
The teaching is most clearly found in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor #80, which says:
Reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature “incapable of being ordered” to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image. These [...]

At Obama’s Notre Dame talk, he at one point refers to the value of conscience:
Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded not only in sound science, but also in clear ethics, as well as [...]

Over at Catholic and Enjoying It!, Mark Shea has again insisted that he has indeed defined what torture is — though once again indicating that anyone wanting a definition of torture is somehow being deliberately obtuse, or worse.
One of the funnier falsehood current is the claim that I “refuse to define” what torture is and [...]

So, a long chain of missing-the-points: on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart first comes out against the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, then later backs out of that point, and then at Instapundit they point to a claimed evisceration of even the slightest idea that Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been big mistakes.
But, [...]

Torture, as well as being in itself an evil thing, helps to train the enemy. I don’t mean that the enemy learns how to prepare for particular torture techniques (though that will happen), but that it gives the enemy precisely the right incentive to fight more cleverly.
Because, if any enemy wants to avoid the discovery [...]

What on earth does the New York Times think a “scientific convention” is? (H/T Amy Welborn) In the course of describing the first Sunday sermon by the new New York archbishop, the NYT writer writes:
He did not refer to it, but

Which is a wonderful way of being able to write about almost anything at all [...]

Why does it seem entirely predictable that a post containing the phrase “With respect, Holy Father” is in fact not going to show respect to the Pope? This time it comes from Damian Thompson on his Holy Smoke blog. The post came about because it is time for another attempt at a United Nations conference [...]

Steve Schmidt, the operations chief of the 2008 McCain presidential campaign, gave a talk to the Log Cabin Republicans, recommending that the Republicans should support gay marriage. The talk was problematic, since neither the moral rationale given for supporting gay marriage, nor the possible political consequences were given more than a muddy, and partial focus.
In [...]

Last Tuesday Obama gave a speech on the economy, containing an explicit reference to religious texts. So, how well did his speech-writers stick to the context of the original words, while adapting it for current circumstances?
Here’s the reference, in Obama’s words:
Now, there's a parable at the end of the Sermon on the Mount that tells [...]

The hymn America the Beautiful seems to be controversial when sung within a Catholic church. But it is hard to discern why:
O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain!

America contains many good things; it would be hard to contest that. And if it were contested, [...]

The cafeteria model of Catholicism (i.e. look at the line-up of official teachings, pick up just the ones that look tasty to you, and leave the rest untouched behind the counter) is radically flawed. It's all dessert and no vegetables: flawed because since it's through the Church that salvation arrives to us,  picking and choosing like that risks missing out some substantial [...]

The Catholic Answers website deals with various kinds of Catholic apologetics, and one of its resources is a Voter's Guide, which has occasionally been controversial. For example, a posting on the new blog Vox Nova recently complained about the Guide, though those complaints were rather outdated,  since they were aimed at what a version of the Guide used to say a few [...]

The Catholic Church has declared that torture is intrinsically — always — wrong. But it is not totally clear what constitutes torture, and what does not. The subject regularly crops on on places like Mark Shea's blog, which has still not come up with a useful definition. Instead, Mark offers four suggestions for coming up with [...]

Wheaton College, being evangelical and finding itself containing a professor who had decided to convert to Catholicism, fired him. The college has a twelve-point mission statement, clearly written from an evangelical point of view. But the professor had claimed that he could agree with all twelve points. Could a Catholic reasonably agree with Wheaton's twelve [...]