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God and the Death Penalty

02-02-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

On December 22, 2024 Debrina Kawam, a 57-year old resident of Toms River, New Jersey, was burned alive and beyond recognition on a Brooklyn F train... The alleged attacker, Sebastian Zapeta-Calil 33. Laken Riley, a 22-year-old Augusta University nursing student, was murdered while she was jogging at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Her death was caused by blunt force trauma and asphyxiation. The perpetrator José Antonio Ibarra. At his trial and in the wake of the burning of Debrina Kawan there have been calls for the death penalty for such horrendous murders. There is no doubt that recent Popes, especially Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis, have rejected the use of the death penalty. Pope Francis calls it inadmissible.

Pope Francis changed the Catechism: #2267. …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”,[1] and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide. [1] FRANCIS, Address to Participants in the Meeting organized by the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, 11 October 2017: L’Osservatore Romano, 13 October 2017, 5. Both Popes make moral prudential judgments that they see no way that the death penalty should be used in today’s world. Prudence is a virtue that directs our action to what is right. However, Popes are not responsible for the safety of individual communities and societies but rather lawful civil authority. That authority must make the judgment based on the common good. The Church’s traditional teaching was never that the death penalty must be used in certain cases, but Scripture and the Tradition of the Church allow it to be used. Popes are bound by Scripture and Tradition. Whether the death penalty is the only way for the State to protect people’s safety as an absolute necessity is a determination to be made by legitimate governmental authority as part of its competence based on specific circumstances affecting a particular society. No Pope can determine all these circumstances in advance and impose a judgment on all those circumstances.

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 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 He also pointed out years ago when he was Cardinal Ratzinger: . Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia. Letter to the Bishops of the United States 2004

An excellent summary of the Church’s Tradition along with Scripture is provided by Cardinal Avery Dulles:

  1. The purpose of punishment in secular courts is fourfold: the rehabilitation of the criminal, the protection of society from the criminal, the deterrence of other potential criminals, and retributive justice.
  2. Just retribution, which seeks to establish the right order of things, should not be confused with vindictiveness, which is reprehensible.
  3. Punishment may and should be administered with respect and love for the person punished.
  4. The person who does evil may deserve death. According to the biblical accounts, God sometimes administers the penalty himself and sometimes directs others to do so.
  5. Individuals and private groups may not take it upon themselves to inflict death as a penalty.
  6. The State has the right, in principle, to inflict capital punishment in cases where there is no doubt about the gravity of the offense and the guilt of the accused.
  7. The death penalty should not be imposed if the purposes of punishment can be equally well or better achieved by bloodless means, such as imprisonment.
  8. The sentence of death may be improper if it has serious negative effects on society, such as miscarriages of justice, the increase of vindictiveness, or disrespect for the value of innocent human life.
  9. Persons who specially represent the Church, such as clergy and religious, in view of their specific vocation, should abstain from pronouncing or executing the sentence of death.
  10. Catholics, in seeking to form their judgment as to whether the death penalty is to be supported as a general policy, or in a given situation, should be attentive to the guidance of the pope and the bishops. Current Catholic teaching should be understood, as I have sought to understand it, in continuity with Scripture and tradition. Numbers 2 and 4 seem to have been forgotten especially that God sometimes administers the penalty and hence you cannot invoke a human dignity that overrides God. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/04/catholicism-capital-punishment What follows is taken from analysis of Catholic philosopher Edward Feser : https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/04/twoproblems-with-dignitas-infinita.html He is an authority on the death penalty. See his book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment with Joseph Bessette

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 if his life lasts, hence opposition to the death penalty. But opposition can also stem from the notion that every person is inviolable since he is a self-conscious subject living out his life in the world as if temporal life were an end 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. …

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. …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 well-being, 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 …

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