Pope rules out death penalty in new change

Vatican: Capital punishment is an ‘attack’ on dignity

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has decreed that the death penalty is “inadmissible” and the Catholic Church should campaign to abolish it, a change that could influence Catholic politicians and judges in the U.S. and across the globe.

The change, announced Thursday, was hailed by anti-death penalty activists and scorned by Francis’ 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 — 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 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 the guilty were just as deserving of dignity as innocents.

The new teaching says the previous policy is outdated and the church should instead commit itself to working to end capital punishment.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 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, approved in May, but published Thursday.

The death penalty has been abolished in most of Europe and South America, but is still in use in the United States, and in countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

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.