IMAGE: CNS photo/courtesy Jenevieve Robbins, Texas Department of Criminal Justice handout via Reuters
By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis’ recent statement that
the death penalty is incompatible with the Gospel focused less on a
government’s role in protecting its people and more on the need to defend the
sacredness and dignity of every human life.
At least from the time of Blessed Paul VI in the 1960s, the
Catholic Church has been increasingly critical of the use of capital punishment,
even while acknowledging centuries of church teaching that a state has a right
to punish offenders, including with the death penalty.
St. John Paul II, in his 1995 encyclical letter, “The
Gospel of Life,” wrote of his alarm at “the extraordinary increase
and gravity of threats to the life of individuals and peoples,” but said
one sign of hope was the increasing opposition around the world to capital
punishment.
“There is evidence of a growing public opposition to
the death penalty, even when such a penalty is seen as a kind of ‘legitimate
defense’ on the part of society. Modern society, in fact, has the means of
effectively suppressing crime by rendering criminals harmless without
definitively denying them the chance to reform,” he wrote.
Two years later, Pope John Paul had the Catechism of the
Catholic Church revised to strengthen its anti-death penalty posture. The text
now says that, “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 nonexistent.'”
Opponents of the death penalty cheered St. John Paul’s move,
and theologians recognized it as a “development” of church teaching.
Death penalty opponents also welcomed Pope Francis’ even
stronger position against capital punishment, but his words set off a debate
between those who saw his position as a further development of church teaching
and those who saw it as a “change” that contradicted both the Bible
and the traditional position of the Catholic Church.
Edward Feser, a professor of philosophy at California’s
Pasadena City College and author of “By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A
Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment,” told Catholic News Service that
St. John Paul’s teaching was “a nonbinding prudential judgment,”
which was in line with centuries of church teaching recognizing the right of
states to impose the death penalty.
And, writing in Britain’s Catholic Herald Oct. 15, Feser
said that if Pope Francis “is saying that capital punishment is always and intrinsically
immoral, then he would be effectively saying — whether consciously or
unconsciously — that previous popes, fathers and doctors of the church, and
even divinely inspired Scripture are in error.”
But Jesuit Father Jan Dacok, a professor of moral theology and
theologian at the Apostolic Penitentiary, a Vatican court, said the church always
insisted there were limits to the conditions under which a state could
legitimately impose the death penalty. St. John Paul, he said, emphasized those
limits to the point of saying that now that it is easier to keep a murderer in
jail for life, the necessary conditions for legitimacy are “practically
nonexistent.”
Pope Francis took a further step forward, Father Dacok said.
The pope “did not change church teaching, but places it on a higher level
and points out the path toward its perfection.”
“What is accomplished
with the death penalty?” the Slovakian Jesuit asked. “Do you obtain the true repentance of criminals? Do you
offer them the possibility of correcting their ways, of asking for forgiveness?”
“No,” he said. “With the execution, the
death, you irreversibly cancel the entire dynamic of hope” for repentance,
conversion and at least some attempt at reparation.
“Obviously, Pope Francis cannot change the laws of
individual countries, because that’s the competence of legislators,” Father
Dacok said. “But he can continually encourage respect for the sacredness
of every human life, because the death penalty truly is not necessary.”
Because security and justice can be served without capital
punishment, he said, the urgent matter today is to demonstrate respect for the
sacredness of every human life, “even the life of public criminals
responsible for the death of others.”
Father Robert A. Gahl Jr., a priest of Opus Dei and a professor of ethics at Rome’s
Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, said Pope Francis “continues
the recent development of doctrine regarding the centrality of mercy for the
Christian faith and the urgency to promote a culture of life in today’s throwaway culture,” where abortion and euthanasia are widely accepted.
“Pope Francis wants the church to offer a radical
example of the defense of all human life,” Father Gahl said. And “without
condemning all past practices, he vigorously demands the elimination of the
death penalty.”
The priest noted the church’s historic concern for the
impact of the death penalty not just on the criminal, but also on judges and
executioners.
In fact, the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which was in effect
until 1983, listed as those generally barred from priestly ordination “a
judge who passed a sentence of death” and “those who take up the task
of (execution) and their immediate and voluntary assistants in the execution of
a capital sentence.”
On the question of whether Pope Francis’ statement marks a
“development” or a “change,” Father Gahl said the pope probably
intended to “shake up theologians and to force us to reconsider
traditional formulations of permanent teaching in light of this new and
authoritative development of mercy and human dignity.”
Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical
Academy for Life, said Pope Francis was exercising his right and obligation to
teach on faith and morals.
“Obviously, the church does not intervene on the level
of civil legislation,” the archbishop told CNS, “but today the pope authoritatively
affirms that from a deeper understanding of the Gospel emerges the
contradiction between the death penalty and the gospel of life.”
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Follow Wooden on Twitter: @Cindy_Wooden.
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