Dear Friends,
In the social media spectrum, there has been a lot of discussion this past week about Pope Francis and what he said about Catholic teaching on the death penalty. Many have made the mistake of saying that Pope Francis has changed 2,000 years of Catholic teaching. Pope Francis did not change the teaching; he simply removed the exceptions that were there and said with present day abilities and situations they no longer applied. The change has come to society, not to the teaching. The death penalty was always an exception, not the rule.
Catholics have always tried to model our lives on the teachings of Jesus Christ. What does Jesus teach about killing? About anger? About forgiveness? About his own death? Jesus takes the Old Testament teaching of justice – an eye for an eye – and changes it to say that we cannot even get angry with our brother. In the early Church, it was understood that Christians could not serve in the military or in the police force because they would be asked to kill and Christians could not kill. It was not until the point in history where the Church was one of the few institutions left to govern the populace that the Church had to deal with the work of policing, jails and punishments.
People who are for the death penalty will often quote St. Thomas Aquinas who argued that leaders had the ability, without the threat of divine punishment, to protect the society – like a limb that needs to be amputated to protect the body, so a leader could execute a person to protect the society from further harm. However, they should also note that Aquinas argued the following: what human reason recognizes as good or evil should, according to the natural law, be either pursued or avoided. Human reason regards the preservation of human life as good and worthy of pursuit while that which is contrary to human life is bad and worthy of avoidance. One way of determining whether an action is good is whether a good is intended. The conclusion is that the intentional harming or destroying of human life is not good and should be impermissible. Incarceration does not violate this norm.
If you would like to read more about this, there is a good book on the history of the Catholic Church’s teaching about the death penalty by E. Christian Brugger. As Brugger notes concerning the above argument, “Punishment, therefore, can deliberately inflict harm without deliberately harming basic goods. One can intend the good end of restoring the order of justice and adopt means such as censure, fines, imprisonment, or exile, and yet never will as an end or means the destruction of or harming of a person’s life, pursuit of knowledge, relationships of friendship, and so forth.”
The Pope who most wrote about human life and the death penalty was John Paul II. In his famous encyclical on human life, he said, “Man’s life comes from God; it is his gift, his image and imprint, a sharing in his breath of life. God therefore is the sole Lord of this life: man cannot do with it as he wills…The biblical text is concerned to emphasize how the sacredness of life has its foundation in God and in his creative activity: “For God made man in his own image.”
Human life and death are thus in the hands of God, in his power: “In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind”, exclaims Job. “The Lord brings to death and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up.” He alone can say: “It is I who bring both death and life.” But God does not exercise this power in an arbitrary and threatening way, but rather as part of his care and loving concern for his creatures…”God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living. For he created all things that they might exist”…Thus the deepest element of God’s commandment to protect human life is the requirement to show reverence and love for every person and the life of every person.
…This should not cause surprise: to kill a human being, in whom the image of God is present, is a particularly serious sin. Only God is the master of life! Yet from the beginning, faced with the many and often tragic cases which occur in the life of individuals and society, Christian reflection has sought a fuller and deeper understanding of what God’s commandment prohibits and prescribes…
This is the context in which to place the problem of the death penalty. On this matter there is a growing tendency, both in the Church and in civil society, to demand that it be applied in a very limited way or even that it be abolished completely. The problem must be viewed in the context of a system of penal justice ever more in line with human dignity and thus, in the end, with God’s plan for man and society. The primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is “to redress the disorder caused by the offence”. Public authority must redress the violation of personal and social rights by imposing on the offender an adequate punishment for the crime, as a condition for the offender to regain the exercise of his or her freedom. In this way authority also fulfils the purpose of defending public order and ensuring people’s safety, while at the same time offering the offender an incentive and help to change his or her behavior and be rehabilitated.
It is clear that, for these purposes to be achieved, the nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and 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. 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.”
Peace,
Fr. Damian