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In the waning days of his administration, Joe Biden, the virtual president, spoke to Pope Francis at length on the telephone. Among the issues they discussed was the status of prisoners on Death Row, a subject “particularly close to the Pope’s heart,” reported Vatican News, the Holy See’s official news portal.
Biden and the pope spoke Dec. 19. Four days later, the virtual president reduced the sentences of 37 convicted murderers awaiting execution in federal prison to life imprisonment without parole.
Five of those inmates were convicted of murdering nine children between them. Two of those victims had been raped.
“Make no mistake,” Biden said in a statement:
I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss.
But guided by my conscience … I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.
“Conscience” is Bidenspeak for the virtual president’s Catholic faith, which he exploits as a convenient political prop. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which lobbied for such a decision, expressed its unqualified approval.
“These commutations are a significant step in advancing the cause of human dignity and respect for human life from womb to tomb in our nation,” said Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, the USCCB’s president. “As we continue to proclaim the Gospel in a broken world, this act of mercy is a step closer to building a culture of life. We encourage all lawmakers to continue to work towards the total abolition of the death penalty…” [Emphasis added]
Yet the Catholic Church’s opposition to capital punishment occupies mere milliseconds, comparatively speaking, in nearly 2,000 years of church history. But by adopting its current position, the church rejects centuries of previous teaching — especially from Scripture — changes the fundamental moral benchmark defining the issue and creates a moral equivalence between perpetrators and victims, resulting in less compassion for those victims’ survivors.
In the Old Testament, God demanded murderers to be executed through due process In Genesis 9:5-6: “I will demand an accounting for human life … Anyone who sheds the blood of a human being, by a human being shall that one’s blood be shed. For in the image of God have human beings been made.”
That command implies three theological principles. First, if God created human life, then God has the prerogative to define when and why it may be taken. Second, God demands the creation of just societies to protect the innocent. Third, murder is such a heinous violation of the divine image in humanity that execution is the only appropriate punishment.
In the New Testament, St. Paul in Romans 12 discouraged Christians from avenging themselves by quoting Deuteronomy 32:35 (“Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. I will repay!”). In the next chapter, he encourages them to rely on due process through legitimate authorities “because they do not bear the sword in vain.”
Centuries of Catholic thought reinforced those principles. St. Augustine wrote: “The same divine law which forbids the killing of a human being allows certain exceptions. Since the agent of authority is but a sword in the hand, and is not responsible for the killing, it is in no way contrary to the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ … according to the Law or the rule of rational justice.”
Thomas Aquinas opposed the idea that incarceration alone provided adequate protection: “If a man is a danger to the community…then his execution for the healing and preservation of the common good is to be commended. Men shall be sentenced to death for crimes of irreparable harm or which are particularly perverted.”
Aquinas even argued that impending execution could motivate repentance: “The fact that the evil, as long as they live, can be corrected from their errors does not prohibit the fact that they may be justly executed …. They also have at that critical point of death the opportunity to be converted to God through repentance.”
“Nowhere in the New Testament is capital punishment outlawed,” said the Rev. John Hardon, a distinguished 20th century Catholic theologian. Hardon also cited two 20th century popes, Pius X and Pius XII, who asserted that Catholic moral thinking defends capital punishment.
But Pope John Paul II changed all that.
In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (“The Gospel of Life”), John Paul subtly asserted that capital punishment was fundamentally unnecessary. Judicial authorities “ought not to 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,” he wrote. “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.”
The late pope’s words reflect the ideas of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the former archbishop of Chicago, who in 1984 devised an approach he called the “seamless garment.” Bernardin wanted to create what he called a “consistent ethic of life” encompassing abortion, capital punishment, war and economics.
John Paul’s chief theologian — Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI — thus changed the catechism: “If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority must limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person.”
Before Evangelium Vitae, the catechism read, “If, however, bloodless means…authority should limit itself….” [Emphases added].
What’s the difference? “Should” implies discretion but “must” implies a command. Ratzinger and John Paul thus changed the church’s fundamental moral criterion from the divine image within humanity to the ability to incarcerate capital felons.
John Paul used this rhetorical subterfuge to demand the abolition of the death penalty. In January 1999, during his final trip to the United States, John Paul revealed his true opinion:
The new evangelization calls for followers of Christ who are unconditionally pro-life … A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil. Modern society has the means of protecting itself, without definitively denying criminals the chance to reform. I renew the appeal I made most recently at Christmas for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary. [Emphasis added].
That November in an address to the United Nations, Cardinal Renato Martino linked opposition to capital punishment with opposition to abortion, a connection the church never made before the 20th century: “Abolition of the death penalty … is only one step towards creating a deeper respect for human life. If millions of budding lives are eliminated at their very roots, and if the family of nations can take for granted such crimes without a disturbed conscience, the argument for the abolition of capital punishment will become less credible.”
In 2018, Francis took the next logical step John Paul’s arbitrary revisionism demanded: He changed the catechism again to declare capital punishment as “inadmissible,” essentially meaning immoral.
Because of “an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes” and “effective systems of detention” that “do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption,” the catechism now states, “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.”
The embedded quote came from remarks Francis made in 2017.
But in what serious moral universe does aborting an innocent child equate to executing a convicted murderer through due process? In what serious moral universe is it fair or just for a murderer to retain his life after arbitrarily taking the lives of people who did no harm to him, thus denying them the opportunity to enjoy and use God’s gifts, and help others?
The survivors of murder victims understand those questions better than bishops or theologians. For example, John Paul wrote President George W. Bush in 2001 to request clemency for Timothy McVeigh, who murdered 168 in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. In response, Kathleen Treanor — who lost her 4-year-old daughter and two in-laws to McVeigh — told Associated Press: “Let me ask the pope, ‘Where’s my clemency? When do I get any clemency? When does my family get some clemency?’ When the pope can answer that, we can talk.”
In 1997, John Paul and Mother Teresa – another future saint – joined those advocating clemency for Joseph O’Dell, a Virginia man convicted of raping and murdering Helen Schartner in 1985. O’Dell’s fiancée manipulated public opinion in Italy to such a point that Gail Lee, Schartner’s sister, told Associated Press: “We’re all very fragile at this point. It’s just like the Italians hate us. They in essence have said to my family, ‘You are worthless. Helen’s life doesn’t matter.’ ”
Former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C. displayed his own self-righteous indifference when he spoke to the Washington Post in 2001 about McVeigh’s execution, which only victims’ relatives could see on closed-circuit television: “It is like going back to the Roman Colosseum. I think that we’re watching, in my mind, an act of vengeance, and vengeance is never justified.”
McCarrick — that moral giant who routinely abused young men and boys sexually — thus equated the grieving, vulnerable relatives of murder victims seeking closure with the hardened, barbaric masses of ancient Rome who found the bloody agony of gladiators and religious martyrs entertaining.
A poster named “Trinacrian” powerfully summarized the grievous threat to Catholicism’s moral and intellectual credibility in a reply to a 2017 article on the subject in The Remnant, a traditionalist Catholic newspaper:
If the Catechism of the Church were to be rewritten to say that capital punishment is immoral and cannot be supported by Roman Catholics, there would be no way whatsoever to defend the indefectibility of Catholicism in matters of faith and morals. Not with a straight face, anyway.
If what was previously acceptable and defensible and practiced by the Church herself (capital punishment) were all of a sudden to be redefined as unacceptable; and if something previously condemned as mortally sinful (artificial contraception) were all of a sudden to be redefined as moral and acceptable, how could Catholics defend the volte-face? The entire world would consider us to be hypocritical buffoons. [Parentheses in original]
And the world would be right.