Pope rules out death penalty in change to church teachings
VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis has decreed that the death penalty is “inadmissible” under all circumstances and the Catholic Church should campaign to abolish it, a change in church teaching that could influence Catholic politi- cians and judges in the US and across the globe.
The change, announced Thursday, was hailed by anti-death penalty activists and scorned by Francis’ frequent conservative critics, who said he had no right to change what Scripture revealed and popes have taught for centuries.
The Vatican said that Francis had amended the Catechism of the Catholic Church – the compilation of official Catholic teaching – to say that capital
punishment can never be sanctioned because it constitutes an “attack” on the dignity of human beings.
Previously, the catechism said the church didn’t exclude recourse to capital punishment “if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.” Past popes have upheld that position, though St. John Paul II began urging an end to the practice and stressed that the guilty were just as deserving of dignity as innocents.
The new teaching says the previous policy is outdated because there are new ways to protect the common good, and the church should instead commit itself to working to end capital punishment.
“Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good,” reads the new text.
Today “there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes,” it said, adding that society now has effective ways to detain prisoners so they aren’t a threat and even provide the possibility of rehabilitation. “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,” reads the new text, which was approved in May but only published Thursday.
The death penalty has been abolished in most of Europe and South America, but it is still in use in the United States and in countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This week Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said the death penalty could soon be reinstated in Turkey, where it was abolished in 2004 as part of its bid to join the European Union.
Within hours of Thursday’s announcement, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo vowed to introduce legislation to remove the death penalty from New York state law.
Francis’ new teaching is also likely to feature in the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a church-going Catholic who, if confirmed, would join four other Catholic justices on the bench.
One of their former Catholic members, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, famously said that he didn’t find the death penalty immoral, and that any judge who did should resign.
Sister Helen Prejean, the anti-death penalty campaigner whose ministry to a death row inmate inspired the book and film, “Dead Man Walking,” said the pope’s new teaching would be more acutely felt in an upcoming planned execution in Nebraska under Gov. Pete Ricketts, who Prejean called “a pro-life Catholic.”
“If we say we are for dignity of all life, that includes innocent and guilty as well,” she said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.
She said she was “high as a kite” over Francis’ decision to close what she said were loopholes in previous church teaching that failed to recognize that when a prisoner is strapped to a gurney, he is rendered completely defenseless before his executioner.
“We can’t claim anymore that’s the only way you can defend society,” she said.
Francis has long denounced the death penalty and even opposes life sentences, which he has called “hidden” death sentences.
He has also made prison ministry a mainstay of his vocation, and on nearly every foreign trip he visits inmates to offer words of solidarity and hope. He remains in touch with a group of Argentine inmates he ministered to during his years as archbishop of Buenos Aires.