Death Penalty

04-21-2024Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

The recent document from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) Dignitas Infinita states that death penalty violates the inalienable dignity of every person regardless of circumstances. Catholic philosopher Edward Feser, an expert on the subject of the Church’s teaching and capital punishment says the following: …This simply cannot be reconciled with scripture and the consistent teaching of all popes who have spoken on the matter prior to Pope Francis. That includes Pope St. John Paul II, despite his well-known opposition to capital punishment.

In Evangelium Vitae, even John Paul taught only: Punishment… ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent. And the original version of the Catechism promulgated by John Paul II stated: The traditional teaching of the Church has acknowledged as well founded the right and duty of the legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty. (2266) In short, John Paul II (like scripture and like every previous pope who spoke on the matter) held that some circumstances can justify capital punishment, whereas Pope Francis now teaches that no circumstances can ever justify capital punishment. That is a direct contradiction. Now, Joseph Bessette and I, in our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, have shown that the legitimacy in principle of the death penalty has in fact been taught infallibly by scripture and the tradition of the Church. (emphasis added) I’ve also made the case for this claim on other occasions, such as in this article. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/01/20/capitalpunishment-and-the-infallibility-of-the-ordinary-magisterium/. This considers the question whether these remarks about capital punishment are without error and must be believed.

Hence, if Pope Francis is indeed teaching that capital punishment is intrinsically wrong, it is clear that it is he who is in the wrong, rather than scripture and previous popes. If defenders of Pope Francis deny this, then they are logically committed to holding that those previous popes erred. Either way, some pope or other has erred, so that it will make no sense for defenders of Pope Francis to pretend that they are simply upholding papal magisterial authority. To defend Pope Francis is to reject the teaching of the previous popes; to defend those previous popes is to reject the teaching of Pope Francis. There is no way to defend all of them at once. This is in no way inconsistent with the doctrine of papal infallibility, because that doctrine concerns ex cathedra definitions, and nothing Pope Francis has said amounts to such a definition (as Cardinal Fernández, Prefect of the DDF, has explicitly acknowledged). But it refutes those who claim that all papal teaching on faith and morals is infallible, and those who hold that, even if not all such teaching is infallible, no pope has actually taught error. For that reason alone, Dignitas Infinita is a document of historic significance, albeit not for the reasons Pope Francis or Cardinal Fernández would have intended…. You can read his whole essay on his blog. The link is: https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/04/two-problems-withdignitas-infinita.html

Pope Benedict reminds us: The power that Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors is, in an absolute sense, a mandate to serve. The power of teaching in the Church involves a commitment to the service of obedience to the faith. The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law. On the contrary: the Pope's ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his Word. He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God's Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism. Homily May 7, 2005 Capital punishment is provided for in Sacred Scripture. A classic text is the following: Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind. Genesis 9:6 Note that this punishment is prescribed in this Scripture because of the dignity of the murdered person! St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that the state which is entrusted with caring for the welfare of a society (not private citizens) may put a criminal to death when it is necessary to protect the rest of society. Catholic teaching never was you had to use capital punishment but that it was permissible. Catholic philosopher Romano Amerio points out the following about capital punishment in his book Iota Unum: Until recently, the death penalty was philosophically defended, and used in practice by all countries as the ultimate penalty society imposes on evildoers, with the threefold aim of righting the balance of justice, defending society against attack, and dissuading others from wrongdoing.

The legitimacy of capital punishment is usually grounded on two propositions. First: society has a right to defend itself; second: this defense involves using all necessary means. Capital punishment is included in the second proposition on condition that taking the life of one member of the body of society is genuinely necessary for the wellbeing of the whole. The growing tendency to mitigate punishments of all sorts is in part the product of the Gospel spirit of clemency and mercy, which has always been at odds down the centuries with savage judicial customs. With a certain degree of confusion that we need not go into here, the Church has always drawn back from blood…

The controversy does not turn on society’s right to defend itself; that is the undeniable premise of any penal code, but rather on the genuineness of the need to remove the offender altogether in order to effect that defense, which is the minor premise involved.

From St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas …the traditional teaching is that the decision as to the necessity and legitimacy of capital punishment depends on historical circumstances, that is, on the urgency of the need to hold society together in the face of the disruptive behavior of individuals who attack the common good. … Opposition to the death penalty stems from two diverse and incompatible sets of reasons, and can only be evaluated in the light of the moral assumptions on which it is based. Horror at a crime can coexist with sympathy for human weakness, and with a sense of the human freedom that renders a man capable of rising from any fall as long as his life lasts; hence opposition to the death penalty. But opposition can also stem from the notion that every person is inviolable inasmuch as he is a self-conscious subject living out his life in the world; as if temporal life were an end in itself that could not be suppressed without frustrating the purpose of human existence. Although often thought of as religiously inspired, this second type of reason for rejecting capital punishment is in fact irreligious. It overlooks the fact that from a Christian point of view earthly life is not an end in itself, but a means to life’s moral goal, a goal that transcends the whole order of subordinate worldly goods. …

There is therefore a mistake implicit in the second sort of objection to capital punishment, inasmuch as it assumes that in putting someone to death, other men or the state are cutting a criminal off from his destined goal, or depriving him of his last human end or taking away the possibility of his fulfilling his role as a human being. Just the opposite in fact. The condemned man is deprived of his earthly existence, but not of his goal. Naturally, a society that denies there is any future life and supposes there is a fundamental right to happiness in this world, must reject the death penalty as an injustice depriving man of his capacity to be happy. Paradoxically, those who oppose capital punishment on these grounds are assuming the state has a sort of totalitarian capacity which it does not in fact possess, a power to frustrate the whole of one’s existence. Since a death imposed by one man on another can remove neither the latter’s moral goal nor his human worth, it is still more incapable of preventing the operation of God’s justice, which sits in judgment on all our adjudications. …

The change in teaching is obvious on two points. In the new theology of punishment, justice is not considered, and the whole matter is made to turn on the usefulness of the penalty and its aptitude for bringing the guilty person back into society, as the saying goes. On this point, as on others, the new fangled view coincides with the utilitarianism preached by the Jacobins. The individual is held to be essentially independent; the state defends itself against a miscreant, but cannot punish him for breaking a moral law, that is, for being morally guilty. This guiltlessness of the guilty goes on to manifest itself in a reduced consideration for the victim and even in giving preference to the guilty over the innocent. … The penalty for the offense seems more objectionable than the crime, and the victim is forgotten. The restoration of a moral order that has been violated by wrongdoing is rejected as if it were an act of vendetta. In fact it is something that justice demands and which must be pursued even if the harm done cannot be reversed and if the rehabilitation of the guilty party is impossible. The modern view also attacks even the validity of divine justice, which punishes the damned without there being any hope or possibility of amendment. …

To go on to assert that a life should not be ended because that would remove the possibility of making expiation, is to ignore the great truth that capital punishment is itself expiatory. In a humanistic religion expiation would of course be primarily the converting of a man to other men. On that view, time is needed to effect a reformation, and the time available should not be shortened. In God’s religion, on the other hand, expiation is primarily a recognition of the divine majesty and lordship, which can be and should be recognized at every moment, in accordance with the principle of the concentration of one’s moral life. The most irreligious aspect of this argument against capital punishment is that it denies its expiatory value which, from a religious point of view, is of the highest importance because it can include a final consent to give up the greatest of all worldly goods. This fits exactly with St. Thomas’s opinion that as well as canceling out any debt that the criminal owes to civil society, capital punishment can cancel all punishment due in the life to come. In the Catholic view, the penal system exists to ensure that the crime by which the delinquent sought some satisfaction or other in defiance of the moral law, is punished by some corresponding diminution of wellbeing, enjoyment or satisfaction. Without this moral retaliation, a punishment is merely a utilitarian reaction which indeed neglects the dignity of man and reduces justice to a purely materialistic level; …

Human dignity is something built into the natural structure of rational creatures but which is elicited and made conscious by the activity of a good or bad will, and which increases or decreases within that order of being. No right thinking person would want to equate the human worth of the Jew in Auschwitz with that of his killer Eichmann, or St. Catherine of Alexandria with Thias the Alexandrian courtesan. If one considers the parallel with one’s right to freedom, it becomes obvious that an innocent man’s right to life is indeed inviolable, whereas a guilty person has diminished his rights by the actions of his depraved will: the right to freedom is innate, inviolable and imprescriptible but penal codes nonetheless recognize the legitimacy of depriving people of their liberty, even for life, as a punishment for crime, and all nations in fact adopt this practice. There is in fact no unconditional right to any of the goods of earthly life; the only truly inviolable right is the right to seek one’s ultimate goal, that is truth, virtue and eternal happiness, and the means necessary to acquire these. This right remains untouched even by the death penalty. In conclusion, the death penalty, and indeed any kind of punishment, is illegitimate if one posits that the individual is independent of the moral law and ultimately of the civil law as well, thanks to the protection afforded by his own subjective moral code. Capital punishment comes to be regarded as barbarous in an irreligious society, that is shut within earthly horizons and which feels it has no right to deprive a man of the only good there is. http://www.catholicapologetics.info/morality/deathpenalty/depenalty.htm