www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Dead wrong: Catholics must no longer support capital punishment

The most important point is the one after the one you bolded in the quoted passage which affirms that there has been no change. "The end of the Commandment� is the preservation and security of human life." We have prisons, and interring people in them is capable of preserving and securing human life. Therefore, as the pope says, it is difficult to envisage a circumstance in which resorting to capital punishment is necessary.

Anybody who thinks the death penalty is anything but retribution is kidding themselves.

It solves nothing, prevents nothing, and was not taught by Christ. It is State-sanctioned murder.

The chain gang for life accomplishes the same thing without man coming up with reasons to kill another.

Not a particularly good answer to my arguments, jjp. In fact, it addresses none of them.

I addressed the issue of prisons, too (as did Gelernter). To recapitulate:

1. Life imprisonment does not fully address the community's revulsion at the taking of life; it is a punishment that does not set out murder as something qualitatively different from other crimes.

2. Life imprisonment seldom means life imprisonment. Outside of the United States (harshly condemned by more enlightened folk for its use of life without parole), life typically means fifteen years or less. Even in the U.S., the time served by most murderers is just twelve years. You can get more time for counterfeiting. That most European states now consider life without parole to be barbaric shows how we are slouching into passive acceptance of murder.

3. Life imprisonment does not keep the murderer from being a threat to others. He remains a threat to his fellow inmates, and a threat to his guards; man murderers kill again while imprisoned. Moreover, escapes are not uncommon, and many escaped murderers continue killing until re-apprehended.

4. Rehabilitation does not work. The recidivism rate among murderers is almost as high as it is for sexual offenders (the two categories often overlap). That's why murderers kill while in prison, and why they kill after they get out.

Therefore your statement--and those of past and present Popes--is naive, and indeed, perversely wrong. It would be better to say that, despite changes in our attitudes, in technology, and in penal philosophy, it is hard to imagine a situation in which resorting to capital punishment would not be necessary for deliberate murderers.

I wasn't specifically replying to you earlier but I'll give it a crack here.


This presupposes that the community must somehow have its revulsion "expressed." Is killing justified by this? I'm not convinced. Also, it could be asked, which community are you speaking for? A flimsy argument for the morality of State-sanctioned killing.


If societies are unable to carry out their sentences, it is a shortcoming and fault of those societies, not an argument for the morality of State-sanctioned killing.


Again, this is a potential argument for prison reform, not for the morality of State-sanctioned killing.


I don't believe rehabilitation is necessary. If a murderer finds salvation in prison, amen. Salvation was never promised to be a release from Earthly consequences to our actions, however.


I don't see a debatable necessity being a sound enough moral argument in favor of State-sanctioned killing.

A question: what crimes would you say are morally deserving of State-sanctioned death?

Murder? Treason? Preaching the Gospel? The line begins to blur.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

There is many arguments pro and con regarding Capital Punishment. Regarding scripture, the Old Testament mostly has upheld it but recall in Genesis that God forbid the killing of Cain for the murder of his brother. Instead he was cast away. I can't think of any New Testament verses which justify capital punishment; perhaps someone can find some and post them.

In the past 40 years human life has been cheapened, respect for human life is declining. Mothers pay doctors to kill unborn babies and call it a constitutional right. Doctors become mercanaries who kill those whose "quality of life" doesn't meet some undefined standard. The media daily broadcast murders, fatal accidents and natural disaster which sweep people. Most police/detective tv programs show a brutally murdered person.

As some have stated we have the means to protect society from those convicted of murder. Can CP ever be justified? The Church still says yes.....but in our society it is rare. Perhaps the killing of Osama binLaden is one of these examples; I don't believe the Vatican condemned this killing.

I have changed my thinking; I oppose capital punishment under current conditions. If we are to "an eye for an eye" philosophy then we should be convicting a lot of doctors and politicians.

AMEN!!!

I oppose capital punishment but mainly on the basis of the fact that the state must apply it and the state is currently run by half-wit commie boobs.

How interesting that nobody even bothered to pretend to have looked at the Gelernter article. Understandable--it challenges all the comfortable cliches about capital punishment as vengeance, retribution, deterrence, etc., and instead rightly puts it in its place as the ultimate affirmation of the sanctity of human life.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Only the bit by St Paul about the state and the sword and punishment. Certainly all but the last few decades of Christianity agreed that he was talking about the death penalty.

Stuart makes a very cogent argument argument, one based in history and Church Teaching. And while it is clear that recent popes have moved to further develop the Church Teaching on this they have not yet forced the teaching onto the Church. A number of the posts in this thread appear to be rooted in emotion. Emotion is never a way to convince anyone of anything.

I will note to Father Paul that you can't reduce the issue to an "eye for an eye". The protection of the innocent is important here, perhaps more important that punishing the guilty. We find fairly often that convicted murders escape and kill again. To say that we should not allow them to escape is nice but not realistic.

To JDC, your argument is just plain silly. The logical outcome is that you can't trust the State to do anything, be it pave roads or capture criminals and put them on trial.

To jjc, who wrote: "Murder? Treason? Preaching the Gospel? The line begins to blur." This is just silly. Society must always work to keep the government moral according to the natural law. But the government of the United States has not and does not consider preaching the Gospel to be a capital crime, the equivalent of murder or treason. Advocating the use of the death penalty does not directly or indirectly lead to evangelzation being a capital offense. [And it is very unfair to suggest that we in America are the equivalent of Iran and the Islamic countries which execute people converting to Christ or evangelizing him.]

In an argument about a topic like the death penalty one should offer a well constructed argument, based on Church history and theology, and the equivalents in society. Emotion or "pope said to a reporter" is not the sound basis for an argument.

I know the logical outcome. It's also the reality. Funny you picked the examples you did. I had included but deleted something specifically about their inability even to pave roads. Here in Canada, we have no death penalty, and given the sorry state of the federal and provincial governments and bureaucracies, I oppose giving them any more power to mess up important things than they already have. That's not silly. It's a recognition of fact. This isn't a doctrinal argument. It's a prudential judgment of circumstances.

I didn't say the US is. I said once you give the State the authority to kill its own citizens, I hope you are comfortable with who is making those decisions. I am not.

The burden of proof is not on those who oppose State-sanctioned killing, it is on those who say killing upholds life. (War is peace?) Thus far I'm unconvinced, but perhaps another look at Stuart's article will provide justifications.


Agreed, and I would include "society's revulsion must be expressed" as an emotional appeal that doesn't hold much weight.

Mark Tooley has an article at "The American Spectator" that surveys this subject, with summaries of the teachings of various Christian denominations: Churches Debate Troy Davis [spectator.org].

Excerpt containing the explanation of the Catholic position by the late Avery Cardinal Davis:

Roman Catholicism's teaching on capital punishment is more complex but popularly portrayed as uniformly opposed. The late Avery Dulles, an American Cardinal and highly respected teacher, was a key interpreter of his church's stance. "Self-defense of society continues to justify the death penalty," Dulles said in 2002. "One could conceive of a situation where if justice were not done by executing an offender it would throw society into moral confusion," he said. "I don't know whether that requires any more than that it remain on the books, symbolically, that it be there for society to have recourse to." A year earlier, he noted that capital punishment's decline in the West reflected an "evaporation of the sense of sin, guilt, and retributive justice, all of which are essential to biblical religion and Catholic faith."

Cardinal Dulles, who died in 2009, wrote that the early church and doctors of the church were "virtually unanimous in their support for capital punishment." He insisted that Roman Catholicism has "never advocated unqualified abolition of the death penalty" and there is "no official statement from popes or bishops, whether in the past or in the present, that denies the right of the State to execute offenders at least in certain extreme cases." Dulles observed that Pope John Paul II taught that "as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system," cases mandating execution "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent." He explained that the Pope, with the church's bishops, had concluded that modern states, although rightly authorized to execute the guilty, should mostly avoid it, "if the purposes of punishment can be equally well or better achieved by bloodless means, such as imprisonment."

Dulles perceptively explained that modernity is confused over capital punishment because it wrongly interprets it as the angry popular will enacting vengeance. But historic Christianity has understood capital punishment as the state acting as God's instrument for justice. Absent a few voices like Mohler's, such careful reasoning rooted in Christian tradition is mostly absent in today's' religious debates over the death penalty and likely will remain so.