A posting by canonist Edward Peters at In the Light of the Law — later repeated at American Catholic — argues that Bishop Hubbard of Albany is guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil, by approving the use of a needle exchange program for drug addicts. The argument by Peters is, however, substantially lacking.
For formal [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The year before Barack Obama declared his intention to seek the office of US President, he gave a keynote speech at a conference sponsored by the progressive religious organization, Sojourners. It described Obama’s view of the relationship between politics and religion. To look at such a delicate subject in anything more than a cursory or [...]

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 [...]

Beware scientific summaries and abstracts in controversial issues!
It is currently uncertain how much Plan B — the “morning-after” pill, which is a type of emergency contraception — works because of effects that take place after fertilization (i.e. a method ethically completely unacceptable to many, since it would be viewed as destroying a human), rather than [...]

There is a troubling claim being made over on the Zippy Catholic blog. Consider the case of someone who has chosen to be permanently sterilized (for example, by a non-reversible vasectomy) so that they can have sex, but not children. The claim is being made that even if this person repents, they will never be [...]

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 [...]

A recent article by Stephen Bainbridge in TCS Daily goes into some of the teaching of the Catholic Church on the death penalty, but does not really clarify things quite fully enough. For example, he says:
…the Catechism does not ban the death penalty per se. Instead, it leaves open room for the exercise of prudential [...]

In reply to a follow-up here, another posting on Sacramentum Vitae raises a rather large number of issues, but I will confine myself to replying only to what seem to me to be the substantial ones. Michael says:
Now I had also asserted that Aquinas justified the "torture" as well as the execution of heretics. [...]