On Thursday, Kevin Ray Underwood was executed in Oklahoma, after having been convicted of the horrific murder of a ten-year-old girl. Oklahoma City’s Archbishop Paul Coakley lamented the murderer’s death at the hands of the justice system, writing on social media, “Sadly, Underwood was put to death, becoming the fourth Oklahoma inmate executed this year, continuing a disturbing trend in our state.”

However, the Church has long endorsed the use of the death penalty, at least in certain circumstances.
Coakley continued to say that “the death penalty — the intentional taking of another life — stands as an inhumane method of punishment, going against the respect for human life and dignity that is so necessary, bringing harm to society.”
Over the past half century, Catholic leaders have become increasingly critical of the death penalty. Starting in the late 1970s, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) declared that “non-lethal options” for punishing violent crimes should be preferred and began advocating for the abolition of the death penalty. In 1992, Pope St. John Paul II revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church and, regarding the death penalty, wrote:
If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.
In 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae, the Pontiff continued that train of thought, arguing that legal 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.” The subsequent 1997 revision of the Catechism reflected this firmer opposition to the death penalty:
The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertainment of the identity and re...