For individuals like myself who believe that the preservation of tradition is a core part of a functioning society, it can sometimes be tempting to assume that an institution is good merely because it is old. This view, for obvious reasons, is implicitly flawed, and can in many cases lead to confusion about God’s law.
One recent and highly concerning example of this seems to be a misunderstanding of where the Church stands on the issue of dueling. While calls for the revival of dueling are often formed in the context of jokes, they represent a deeply-seeded misapprehension of the nature of God’s teachings on this matter. So, to help counter what I see as a dangerous an deeply anti-Christian trend, I have prepared this article to clearly explain the Church’s stance on dueling.
The Church’s first statement on dueling occurred during the Second Lateran Council in 1138, during which the Catholic Church declared that the practice of jousting and similarly violent and fatal activities to be sinful. It was declared that anybody who was killed in a joust or in a tournament melee would be denied a church burial. They would be able to receive their Last Rites and similar sacraments before they passed, but if their death was the result of injuries incurred in these brawls, they would not be able to be buried in consecrated ground.
This prohibition was expanded on further in the 16th century with the Council of Trent, in which the Church not only banned the practice of dueling under penalty of excommunication, but also proclaimed that any governor who allowed duels to occur without legal sanction, or any who bore witness to a duel without properly discouraging it, would similarly be subject to immediate excommunication. This prohibition was further reiterated in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII in an encyclical addressed to the German bishops, in which he affirmed that dueling is unquestionably a moral evil, one that cannot be allowed in Christian nations — and one that places the soul of an individual in grave danger of damnation.
These prohibitions against dueling are derived from the Catholic Church’s view that all human life is deserving of dignity and respect. The spilling of blood in the name of honor, or merely for entertainment in the case of jousting, is thus regarded as a deeply immoral attack on the fundamental value of human life. Life is a dear commodity, irreplaceable when taken, and to sell it so cheaply in the service of worldly compulsions — like honor or pleasure — is a sacrifice to the prince of this world, whom we all know does not have our best interest at heart.
When we engage in dueling, and more broadly, when we endanger our lives in the pursuit of useless ends, we open ourselves up to the possibility of eternal damnation, and in doing so we betray God for no reward. Dueling is wrong, and modern attempts at countermanding this objective truth, even in jest, is violence against our Church’s teachings.