The Church’s Surprising Stance on Capital Punishment – Part 3

Editor’s Note: This is the final installment of a three-part series. You can read Part 2 here.

The matter, however, does not end there. It is clear that John Paul II would have liked to go even further by declaring the death penalty immoral per se. In his homily at Saint Louis on January 27, 1999, which he did not impose upon the universal Church, the Pope said:

The new evangelization calls for followers of Christ who are unconditionally pro-life: who will proclaim, celebrate and serve the Gospel of life in every situation. 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 (cf. Evangelium Vitae, 27). I renew the appeal I made most recently at Christmas for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary.

The conclusion is inescapable: Speaking as a private theologian, the John Paul II believed that to be “unconditionally pro-life” one must oppose the death penalty as intrinsically immoral, for what is “cruel” is by definition immoral. But this is nothing other than the late Cardinal Bernadin’s “seamless garment”—a liberal notion whose primary effect is to retard the pro-life movement by chaining the cause of the innocent unborn to the cause of sparing guilty murderers from a justly imposed penalty.

John Paul II apparently believed that no crime whatsoever, no matter how heinous, deserves capital punishment. Accordingly, the Pope sent a letter to the White House seeking clemency for McVeigh, who admitted to murdering 168 men, women and children in cold blood. (“White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said that a letter from John Paul requesting clemency was received this week. She would not reveal the details of the letter.” ABC News, April 27, 2001). Had the Pope’s plea for clemency been heeded, however, McVeigh might have died the agnostic he was instead of calling for the ministrations of a Catholic priest in his last moments on earth.

John Paul II’s personal campaign against the death penalty was joined by numerous bishops. Perhaps the most surprising example was Archbishop Chaput’s statement following the McVeigh execution: “[I]n executing Mr. McVeigh we’ve answered violence with violence and compromised our own human dignity … The same needle that kills the condemned murderer poisons us with the habit of violence. May God grant us the conversion to see that—for our own sake, and for the sake of our children.” “Statement on the Execution of Timothy McVeigh, June 11, 2001.”

So, according to Archbishop Chaput, Catholics who believe that mass murderers deserve capital punishment are advocating “violence” and are in need of “conversion.” It is as if 2,000 years of Church teaching rooted in divine revelation had vanished overnight. But neither the Archbishop nor the late Pope had any authority to declare immoral in all circumstances a form of punishment the Church has always declared not only morally licit, but divinely sanctioned as a just penalty.

Where, then, do we stand? Clearly, the Church has no authority to abandon the radical moral distinction between capital punishment of the guilty and the killing of an innocent. To reject that distinction is to undermine belief in divine justice itself, which demands the supernatural death of unrepentant souls for all eternity. It is manifestly impossible for Catholic doctrine on the death penalty to “develop” from an approbation based on revealed truth to a condemnation based on the teaching of the last Pope. And, if we are not discussing the immorality of capital punishment in itself, when all is said and done it is not a question of “development” of doctrine, but only the debatable application of a morally legitimate penalty. Here Catholics, and civil authorities, remain free to make their own prudential judgments.

Christopher A. Ferrara (B.A., J.D. Fordham University) is a civil rights attorney who represents pro-life activists in state and federal courts across the country. He is founder and Chief Counsel of the American Catholic Lawyers Association, a religious organization devoted to the pro bono defense of the rights of Catholics in the courts and in public discourse. His fifth book, The Church and the Libertarian, has been praised as “a fine exposition of Catholic social teaching” and a “joy to read” (Catholic Herald) and “a future classic… required reading for the layman and seminarian alike” (The Distributist Review). Mr. Ferrara is a frequent contributor to The Latin Mass Magazine and The Remnant, and his articles and essays have appeared in numerous other publications.