The Silent Death of the Death Penalty

     There has been a silent shift among Catholics and maybe even conservatives more broadly on the question of the death penalty. While the death penalty had been a contentious issue in the 70s and 80s with Michael Dukakis having sunk his campaign with not answering YES! unequivocally when asked in a debate on whether he would favor its use in the circumstance of his wife being raped and killed, and then saying that that's why grieving family members shouldn't be in charge of the legal system. The Death Penalty is now one of those supplementary issues ranking somewhere between nuclear arms reduction and environmental conservation, all important issues yes, but issues that have fallen away from the public consciousness. 

     I have found, however, that there is a new talk of the death penalty less of an actual debate about the issue itself but more of a supplementary rhetorical device when someone is debating abortion. A progressive might say to the conservative "how can you call yourself pro-life, when you support the death penalty?", and instead of saying the common sense "because an unborn child is innocent and worthy of the protection of law and the death penalty is applied to those who have been found guilty of a crime warranting death by the law", they say "I don't support the death penalty". And of course it would be very easy from a pragmatic utilitarian standpoint what's the fate of few hundreds on the chopping block every year one way or another in the face of the certain death of thousands of innocents? 

    I would caution against this sort of thinking, it is very tempting to subordinate this non-pressing moral question to one of the greatest if not the greatest tragedy of our time in abortion on demand. Catholics while rightly establishing a hierarchy of moral priorities should not carelessly let this moral issue of the death penalty be discarded in thought for the sake of a debating point. More and more mainstream however, is the popular justification of this view under what's called the Consistent Life Ethic which opposes abortion, euthanasia, and you guessed it the death penalty, but this discount Buddhism that has seeped its way into Catholic thought risks trivializing all these issues all of which are important and all of which deserve individual consideration rather than an ill-conceived wholistic view that serves as a supplementary ideology to church teaching. 

    And what is church teaching on the death penalty? Surely a Catholic will follow the teaching of the church (unless it involves anything sexual). The answer is straightforward, the Catechism published in 2018 states quite categorically condemns it.

"Consequently, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”, and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide." 

    So there we go then, it's an open and shut case and we can definitively and confidently give this issue to the history books. But there is a growing resistance to the heavy handed authoritarian measures that Francis uses to fit the doctrine of the church into his own personal beliefs which have been accused of being influenced by Marxism. If the Catholic world tomorrow woke up to a church that no longer went to mass on Sundays but Saturdays instead, you will find those Francis supporting sycophants saying this was always the case and that Francis has never dreamed of changing thousands of years of church teaching and practice. But that is essentially what happened to the death penalty, not overnight but over the course of the past 60 years as have most of the ill-conceived changes in our society. 

    Historically, the Church Fathers have spoken positively of the death penalty with St. Augustine writing “The same divine law which forbids the killing of a human beings allows certain exceptions, as when God authorizes killing by a general law or when He gives an explicit commission to an individual for a limited time. Since the agent of authority is but a sword in the hand, and is not responsible for the killing, it is in no way contrary to the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill" to wage war at God's bidding, or for the representatives of the State's authority to put criminals to death, according to law or the rule of most just reason.” As well as the revered Doctor of the Church Thomas Aquinas writing "If a man is a danger to the community, threatening it with disintegration by some wrongdoing of his, then his execution for the healing and preservation of the common good is to be commended. Only the public authority, not private persons, may licitly execute malefactors by public judgement. Men shall be sentenced to death for crimes of irreparable harm or which are particularly perverted." 

    But this is not new information, the death penalty has been practiced consistently in all manner of Catholic kingdoms from France to Spain to the Holy Roman Empire where the Emperor was crowned by the Pope himself. Surely if the death penalty was so inconsistent with Catholic teaching no one ever happened to bring it up for a millennia or more, not least the Pope himself or perhaps someone very important who happened to be sentenced to death two thousand years ago. Speaking of the Pope, who until 1870 ruled over thousands as a sovereign prince under the entity known as the Papal States. Surely if the Pope was in charge of you there would be widespread mercy and no death penalty required. History however, contradicts this, as executions, many by guillotine or the especially gruesome Mazzatello where the executioner would hit a prisoner as hard as they could with a mallet to the head and then the prisoner would be knocked unconscious and have their throat slit, continued until 1870 when Rome was captured by the Italian Army. 

    Even more recently in 1952, Pope Pius XII stated that "When it is a question of the execution of a condemned man, the State does not dispose of the individual's right to life. In this case it is reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned person of the enjoyment of life in expiation of his crime when, by his crime, he has already disposed himself of his right to live." So somewhere in these past 70 years there has been a shift from a support of the practice of the death penalty to a condemnation. I would argue then that this was largely driven by the personal opinions of two men - John Paul II and Francis. 

    John Paul II worked most of his life under the threat of the death penalty, the Soviet puppet government in Warsaw would have liked nothing more than another priest in the grave. So it is with this context that perhaps we must forgive John Paul in his misguided attempts to alter church teaching in this matter but even he did not abandon the death penalty in principle the second edition of the 1997 Catechism states "today, in fact, given the means at the State's disposal to effectively repress crime by rendering inoffensive the one who has committed it, without depriving him definitively of the possibility of redeeming himself, cases of absolute necessity for suppression of the offender 'today ... are very rare, if not practically non-existent'". 

    Francis sharing a similar persecuted background in light of his tenure in Argentina in the midst of the Dirty War where it was not unheard of for Jesuits to be targeted by the military dictatorship in light of their alleged collaboration with communists. Francis has gone one step further than John Paul II and has completely done a 180 on centuries of Church teaching with his revision of the Catechism. He revokes the authority that had been given to civil authority to carry out executions for any purpose. Both John Paul and Francis build upon the interpretation that because of the recent technological or societal developments that prisoners are no longer threats to the common good of society and therefore do not need to be executed. 

    There is an emphasis on mercy and the inviolable dignity of the person and while that's all well and good, but there seems to be a de-emphasis on justice. Do the murdered not also have the same dignity as the murderer? Does the forceful deprivation of that dignity by another not constitute an offense greater than the maintenance of the dignity of the aggressor? Pope Sixtus V who famously excommunicated Elizabeth I of England, reportedly executed 5,000 bandits in the 5 years before his death in 1590, was he just wrong? If not, then if the modern state of Italy did the same thing in 2022 would they be wrong then? The current doctrine of the church teaches yes for the wrong reasons, perhaps the maintenance of the public order and the opportunity of rehabilitation has improved, but what of the fundamental point of justice? John Paul and Francis both seem to have bought into some sort of concept of the evolving morality of a society when they turn their backs on centuries of church tradition, it is a conception that is not Catholic at all but essentially Whiggish or even Marxist in nature. 

    I would encourage then that instead of letting this issue fall to the wayside, that it be studied resolutely and that whatever answer scripture and the holy tradition of the Church has led you to regarding this issue that you can hold it with the full backing of your conscience.