Church’s teaching on death penalty changes to ‘inadmissible’
Pope Francis has changed Catholic Church teaching to fully reject the death penalty, the Vatican announced yesterday, saying it would work to abolish capital punishment worldwide.
The change addresses several sentences of the catechism, the compendium of Catholic beliefs, and it sharply amplifies the church’s opposition to a policy that is heavily debated around the world and used in parts of the United States.
The church’s updated teaching states that capital punishment is ‘‘inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.’’ Previously, the church allowed for the death penalty in very rare cases, only as a means of ‘‘defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.’’
Francis has for years been a vocal critic of the death penalty, calling it an ‘‘inhuman measure,’’ but his latest move places the issue towards the forefront of his efforts to overhaul and modernise the Roman Catholic Church, even as it struggles to contend with a new wave of sexual abuse allegations. The move could also reshape discussion about the issue in the United States, where some Catholic politicians – such as Texas Governor Greg Abbott, whose state carries out the highest number of executions – have supported the death penalty.
‘‘There is no doubt the pope wants politicians to pay attention to this,’’ said John Gehring, the Catholic programme director at Faith in Public Life, an advocacy group in Washington. ‘‘He is not just speaking internally. The pope wants to elevate this as a definitive pro-life issue.’’
The Argentine pontiff, who had hinted last year that such a change might come, has described the church’s stance on the death penalty as evidence of how the Vatican can evolve – in this case, over the course of a generation. The church had for centuries permitted executions, but in 1997, John Paul II dramatically narrowed the standards for when the punishment was permissible. Since then, the number of nations that use capital punishment has decreased. More than 80 per cent of the 993 executions recorded in 2017 by Amnesty International were carried out in the Arab world – led by Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. –