Author: Jimmy Akin

A friend was asking me about the Church’s teaching regarding narcotics, and so I pulled up this passage from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

2291 The use of drugs inflicts very grave damage on human health and life. Their use, except on strictly therapeutic grounds, is a grave offense. Clandestine production of and trafficking in drugs are scandalous practices. They constitute direct co-operation in evil, since they encourage people to practices gravely contrary to the moral law.

The term “drugs” in this passage has to be understood properly. Obviously, the Catechism isn’t meaning to say that the use of any drugs inflicts grave harm on human health and life. I mean, surely it isn’t thinking of aspirin–a drug so useful that, for many of their patients, many doctors recommend they take a low dose of it every day.

The Catechism is referring to the drugs commonly made illegal in many countries–i.e., narcotics.

But the use of the bare term “drugs” made me wonder: What’s in the original on this passage?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church was originally composed in French, because that was the language that the principal drafters had in common. It was later translated into Latin to produce the authoritative root edition (known in ecclesiastical language as the “typical” edition or editio typica).

This makes it useful, when one is trying to check the precise meaning of a Catechism passage, to check both the French original and the Latin typical.

According to the French version:

2291 L’usage de la drogue inflige de très graves destructions à la santé et à la vie humaine. En dehors d’indications strictement thérapeutiques, c’est une faute grave. La production clandestine et le trafic de drogues sont des pratiques scandaleuses ; ils constituent une coopération directe, puisqu’ils y incitent, à des pratiques gravement contraires à la loi morale.

Okay, the usage “de la drogue” inflicts grave harm on human life and health. Not much additional clarity there. “La drogue” is a fairly straightforward (and obvious) cognate for “of drugs.”

It’s easy to see that, in the process of writing the Catechism, they grabbed a common, modern, imprecise term for a modern social phenomenon. But when they put it into Latin, would that force any additional clarity?

Here’s the Latin version:

2291 Stupefactivorum medicamentorum usus gravissimas infligit valetudini et vitae humanae destructiones. Extra indicationes stricte therapeuticas, gravis est culpa. Clandestina stupefactivorum medicamentorum productio et mercatura operationes sunt scandalosae; cooperationem constituunt directam, quoniam ad usus legi morali incitant graviter contrarios.

Wow!

Stupefactivorum medicamentorum!

There’s a couple of $10 words! And right in a row!

They do, however, provide additional clarification (at least for Latinists) on what kind of drugs are meant and why we aren’t talking about aspirin.

Medicamentum means “drug, remedy, medicine,” and stupefactivum means “stupefying,” so stupefactivorum medicamentorum usus means “the use of stupefying drugs.”

In other words: drugs taken precisely in order to produce a stupefying effect (i.e., without an adequate alternative reason like needing anesthesia so that a therapeutic operation can be performed; it’s okay to stupefy people for those purposes).

Still . . . gotta love the way they say it.

It’s positively precocious.

Incidentally, judging from what’s on screen, the people who wrote the song in this video may have been engaged in the use stupefactivorum medicamentorum (a phrase which, coincidentally, fits quite well into the meter of the song).