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 [...]

In a recent post on the First Things blog, law professor Robert T. Miller complains that Catholic bishops are going beyond teaching about faith and morals, stepping into the arena of prudential judgments about empirical circumstances, and thus — Miller claims — leaving their legitimate area of authority. Yet Miller's arguments are not well founded, [...]

The discussion of Catholic teaching on capital punishment — particularly relevant because of the recent execution of Saddam Hussein — has not always been precisely focused. And even an article by Cardinal Dulles does not necessarily help provided that needed focus. Catechism 2267 and the papal encyclical Evangelium Vitae are quite clear that capital punishment [...]

Discussion on the issue of Catholic teaching on capital punishment is reoccurring (here and here). What the Catechism says about this is quite straightforward and easy to understand.
Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this [...]

 The discussion between Mark Shea and Jimmy Akin on the subject of torture continues to go astray. I think Akin has not yet seen that his approach to intrinsic evils in fact ends up with them being subjective — in a way that does not line up with Catholic teaching.
Akin claims that there is an element [...]

 When discussing issues around the concept of intrinsic evils, I have noticed over the years that there is a common confusion over the meanings of the English word 'intention' that can easily lead to all kinds of strange conclusions contrary to Catholic teaching.
An example: if someone performs some action, understanding both that the action will be accomplished, [...]

There has been a concerted discussion in various blogs (for example: here, here, here, and here) over Catholic teaching on the issue of torture. Having given this more than a little thought, I make various conclusions:

whatever the definition of torture is, it is certainly an intrinsic evil, since both an Ecumenical Council, and a Pope [...]

In response to the death penalty being passed on Saddam Hussein, Cardinal Martino has commented:
"For me, punishing a crime with another crime, which is what killing for vindication is, would mean that we are still at the point of demanding an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"

This has upset Jimmy Akin (and [...]

In the process of examining what then-Cardinal Ratzinger (now the Pope) might think about evolution, John Allen provides the following quote from Ratzinger, which can be found included in Ratzinger's book Truth and Tolerance:
No one will be able to cast serious doubt upon the scientific evidence for micro-evolutionary processes. R. Junker and S. Scherer, in [...]

The controversy over the recent approval by the FDA of Plan B, an "emergency contraceptive", has taken an interesting twist. An otherwise strongly pro-life Catholic blog, Ales Rarus, has protested that Plan B is emphatically not an abortifacient (and thus not morally objectionable on that ground), despite that being exactly what the controversy is all [...]

Several blogs (1, 2, 3) have been somewhat taken aback by some recent words of the Pope, going so far as to complain that the Pope is uttering error. Yet I do not think this is so. The words that have caused this occurred during an interview with the Pope, when he was asked a [...]

A commentator to my previous posting claims that the interpretation I give is not based on the literal meaning of the psalm, but only on an allegorical one, and he makes an appeal to St. Thomas Aquinas for a teaching that the sense of Scripture must always be based on the literal.
It is certainly true [...]

A meandering dispute has broken out in Mark Shea's blog concerning Biblical interpretation. Like most discussions there, it ends in no single or firm conclusion, but trickles out in patches of both fertile and infertile soil. As individual stand-ins for a host of issues are the usual passages: Psalm 137's apparent call for the dashing [...]

Luc Bovens has written an interesting article entitled The rhythm method and embryonic death (alas not freely available, and sometimes inaccurately summarized in the press, so I will be quoting from the original) in the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) on a hypothetical side-effect of the "rhythm" method of contraception. The article has numerous flaws, [...]