Our government's use of torture puts being both American and Catholic in serious conflict, says this theologian.

Theological research doesn't often include reading detailed accounts of torture, but it did for William Cavanaugh, now a professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. "I read account after account of people's torture, and that's what I did all day," he says of his early work at the University of Notre Dame Center for Civil and

Cavanaugh didn't know then, however, that years later the war on terror would make his work on torture under Chile's General Augusto Pinochet relevant in the United States.

It hasn't been easy to get people to look at the way torture is perpetrated today. "You run smack up against a solid wall of affirmation," Cavanaugh says. "Nobody is going to say that torture is a good thing." But near-universal opposition has not prevented our government from doing it, he points out.

While confronting such a horrific and demoralizing practice can be daunting, Cavanaugh encourages religious people not to give up: "Otherwise, it becomes very depressing and lends itself to apathy and despair." He also suggests a good place to start: "The National Religious Coalition Against Torture has all kinds of information for parishes to raise awareness about torture," he says. "It's one of the most hopeful signs I've seen."

There's been a lot of debate lately about what acts count as torture. What qualifies?
The 1975 U.N. Convention on Torture defines torture as any pain or suffering, physical or mental, inflicted by public officials for various reasons, including punishment, interrogation, and intimidation.

Much of the recent debate has focused on the practice of waterboarding, a type of simulated drowning, which the United States until now has always treated as torture. It's a well-known technique used in South America during the era of military regimes in the 1970s and '80s. Then it was called "the submarine," and it certainly is torture.

What other forms of torture does the U.S government permit?
One common technique is stress positions, in which somebody's hands and feet are handcuffed together in something like a fetal position for hours. You know how it is when you're on an airplane and you can't move around. Imagine being put in a little box for 24 hours.

There's also sleep deprivation, exposing people to freezing temperatures for long periods, bombarding them with rock music for hours, head slapping, sexual humiliation, and sensory deprivation such as blindfolding, among others.

What is the effect of torture on its victims?
Torture is a deliberate, sustained assault on the integrity of the human person, and the effect of torture is the mental and physical disintegration of that person. The person's world is reduced to the body in pain. There is nothing else. Time doesn't exist. Emotional links are broken. People who have been tortured talk about this all the time.

Victims of torture find it very difficult to reestablish contact with other people because their basic sense of trust and personal integrity have been violated. They often find it difficult even to speak. Psychologists who work with victims say that a tortured person's voice has been taken away.

From a Catholic perspective, why is torture immoral?
Catholic teaching describes torture as an affront to basic human dignity. It is unquestionably immoral to take apart a person's physical and mental integrity by inflicting pain.

Some try to justify torture by acknowledging that, while it's an evil, it averts a greater evil. This has been ruled out in Catholic moral thinking. Pope John Paul II's 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor (On the Church's Moral Teaching) makes it quite clear that you cannot commit an act that is intrinsically evil for a greater good, and he lists torture as an intrinsic evil. Once something has been labeled an intrinsic evil, there isn't any kind of calculus that can justify it.

Does Catholic tradition have more to say about torture than just, "Don't do it"?
On a deeper level our tradition tells us that doing violence is not our real nature. Genesis begins with the idea that good comes first and sin follows. When the Babylonians told their creation story, the universe was bad from the start, created out of a battle between the gods. The earth was created from the body of a dead goddess, and humans were created from the blood of one of her servants.

The first creation story in Genesis, which was written during the Babylonian exile, is in many ways a response to the Babylonian myth. It acknowledges the world is messed up not because it's supposed to be that way but because something has gone wrong. Violence and fear of the other are all deviations from the norm.

I think in many ways you can divide political discourse up into Hebrews and Babylonians. Dick Cheney is the Babylonian who is saying, "That's just the way it is. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and you've got to fight fire with fire." People who would otherwise think torture is wrong justify it because the world is evil.

How can we respond to that attitude?
We need to start telling a more hopeful story about what human nature really is and the possibility of reconciliation. In some ways we need to be more realistic than the realists.

Christians think that the creation story in Genesis is more real than the Babylonian one, but we've allowed the language of realism to be co-opted by those who don't tell the story of human beings as they really are, as children of God.