Mental reservation
It was argued in moral theology, and now in ethics, that mental reservation was a way to fulfill obligations both to tell the truth and to keep secrets from those not entitled to know them (for example, because of the seal of the confessional or other clauses of confidentiality).
Social psychologists have advanced cases[1] where the actor is confronted with an avoidance-avoidance conflict, in which he both does not want to say the truth and does not want to make an outright lie; in such circumstances, equivocal statements are generally preferred.
Fearing that as he traveled people would covet his beautiful wife and as a result kill him to take her, he counselled her to agree with him when he would say that "she is my sister".
Writers Petrus Serrarius, Giovanni Stefano Menochio and George Leo Haydock also refer to mental reservation as justification for Judith's false explanation that she intended to betray her people to the Assyrians in the deuterocanonical book which bears her name.
The common Catholic teaching has formulated the theory of mental reservation as a means by which the claims of both justice and veracity can be satisfied.
Spanish Dominican Raymond of Peñafort was a noted canon lawyer, and one of the first writers on casuistry, i.e., seeking to resolve moral problems by extracting or extending theoretical rules from a particular case and applying them to new instances.
He noted that Augustine of Hippo said that a man must not slay his own soul by lying in order to preserve the life of another, and that it would be a most perilous doctrine to admit that we may do a lesser evil to prevent another doing a greater.
Humanae aures, that had been written by Martin Azpilcueta (also known as Doctor Navarrus), an Augustinian who was serving as a consultant to the Apostolic Penitentiary.
The 16th-century Spanish theologian Martin de Azpilcueta (often called "Navarrus" because he was born in the Kingdom of Navarre) wrote at length about the doctrine of mentalis restrictio or mental reservation.
Although some other Catholic theological thinkers and writers took up the argument in favor of strict mental reservation, canonist Paul Laymann opposed it; the concept remained controversial within the Roman Catholic Church, which never officially endorsed or upheld the doctrine and eventually Pope Innocent XI condemned it as formulated by Sanchez in 1679.
[11] When caught, tortured and interrogated, Southwell and Garnet practiced mental reservation not to save themselves — their deaths were a foregone conclusion — but to protect their fellow believers.
[10] Southwell, who was arrested in 1592, was accused at his trial of having told a witness that even if she was forced by the authorities to swear under oath, it was permissible to lie to conceal the whereabouts of a priest.
Catholic ethicists also voiced objections: the Jansenist "Blaise Pascal...attacked the Jesuits in the seventeenth century for what he saw as their moral laxity.
"[13] "By 1679, the doctrine of strict mental reservation put forward by Navarrus had become such a scandal that Pope Innocent XI officially condemned it.
(Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3) See, for example Robert Southwell and Henry Garnet, author of A Treatise of Equivocation (published secretly c. 1595)—to whom, it is supposed, Shakespeare was specifically referring.
"[15] According to Alphonsus Liguori, for the licit use of a mental reservation, "an absolutely serious cause is not required; any reasonable cause is enough, for instance to free oneself from the inconvenient and unjust interrogation of another."
Also, if "a wife, who has been unfaithful but after her lapse has received the Sacrament of Penance, is asked by her husband if she has committed adultery, she could truthfully reply: 'I am free from sin.
"[18] On the other hand, Kant asserted, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, that lying, or deception of any kind, would be forbidden under any interpretation and in any circumstance.
[19] The Irish Catholic Church allegedly misused the concept of mental reservation when dealing with situations relating to clerical child sexual abuse, by disregarding the restrictions placed on its employment by moral theologians and treating it as a method that "allows clerics (to) mislead people...without being guilty of lying",[22] for example when dealing with the police, victims, civil authorities and media.
In the Murphy Report into the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin, Cardinal Desmond Connell describes it thus: Well, the general teaching about mental reservation is that you are not permitted to tell a lie.
[10] But according to the Murphy Report: The Dublin Archdiocese's preoccupations in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse, at least until the mid 1990s, were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets.
The archdiocese did not implement its own canon-law rules and did its best to avoid any application of the law of the state.Kaveny concludes: "The truths of faith are illuminated by the lives of the martyrs.
The court held that on the facts of the case, payment had been made voluntarily, and without protest,and observed thatNo secret mental reservation of the doer is material.
