The Colosseum in Rome was lit up on November 29, 2012 in honor of Connecticut’s repeal of the death penalty back in April. Former California death row inmate Shujaa Graham, who was a featured speaker at the annual conference of the College Theology Society two years ago at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York, was also in Rome to see the illuminated Colosseum and to attend what John Allen over at National Catholic Reporter refers to as a “high-profile international conference in Rome on Tuesday promoting global abolition of the death penalty, which was organized by the Community of Sant’Egidio.” The conference’s title was “A World without the Death Penalty: No Justice without Life.”
Allen notes that a dossier compiled for the conference asserted the existence of a “clear global trend toward abolition of the death penalty.”As of October, more than two-thirds of the planet’s nations have eliminated capital punishment either by law or in practice. Ninety-six nations have legally abolished the death penalty entirely; nine have eliminated it except for exceptional crimes committed during wartime; and thirty-five nations have not executed anyone in at least ten years.
This growing opposition to capital punishment was evident also on November 19 when 110 countries voted for a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions. This was a record number of votes in support of such a resolution. Among the countries supporting it were the European Union nations, Australia, Brazil, South Africa and Israel. Thirty-six countries abstained. Thirty-nine nations, including the United States, opposed the non-binding resolution. Interestingly, the U.S. is in agreement with China, Iran, North Korea, and Syria on the death penalty.
A year ago Pope Benedict XVI praised such developments: “I greet the distinguished delegations from various countries taking part in the meeting promoted by the Community of Sant’Egidio on the theme: No Justice without Life. I express my hope that your deliberations will encourage the political and legislative initiatives being promoted in a growing number of countries to eliminate the death penalty and to continue the substantive progress made in conforming penal law both to the human dignity of prisoners and the effective maintenance of public order. Upon all the English-speaking pilgrims present, including those from the United States, I invoke God’s blessings of joy and peace!” The pope believes the growing opposition to the death penalty is morally and theologically congruent with respect for the dignity of the human person as made in the image of God.
Another prominent Catholic, however, reads these abolitionist developments differently. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in an article on “God’s Justice and Ours” that appeared in May 2002 in First Things, writes: “In my view, the major impetus behind modern aversion to the death penalty is the equation of private morality with governmental morality. This is a predictable (though I believe erroneous and regrettable) reaction to modern, democratic self–government.” Scalia asserts that citizens of western democracies are now more secular and less Christian in our beliefs. We no longer, for example, believe in the divine right of kings, which included the power to execute offenders (Scalia cites Romans 13 in this connection, though recent scholarship questions its direct relevance on the subject). He claims, “Few doubted the morality of the death penalty in the age that believed in the divine right of kings.” Of course, it should be noted that in that era few also doubted the morality of conquest, slavery, and a host of other things we no longer morally and legally permit!
According to Scalia, we are, in addition, now afraid of death, given that westerners are less Christian and no longer believe in an afterlife. For “the believing Christian, Scalia suggests, “death is no big deal.” In his view, “the modern view that the death penalty is immoral…has little to do with the fact that the West has a Christian tradition, and everything to do with the fact that the West is the home of democracy. Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post–Christian Europe, and has least support in the church–going United States.”
I disagree with Scalia’s reading. He puts things too simply as an either-or here. In contrast, for John Howard Yoder the growing opposition to the death penalty is both secular and Christian: “The fact that modern secular society has abandoned the idea of expiation in its interpretation of the death penalty is a result not only of secularization and loss of faith, but also of the indirect influence of Christ on modern culture” (The End of Sacrifice: The Capital Punishment Writings of John Howard Yoder, 49). On constitutional democracy, human rights, and other similar developments, including the “striking diminution of the use of the death penalty” (123), Yoder adds, “None of these developments is directly or uniquely Christian, but in general it could be shown that they have been derived—whether by a sequence of rational arguments or by historical experience—from the impact upon society of biblically derived understandings” (121). Yoder refers to such developments “as cultural transformation under the pressure of the gospel, or as humanization” (126). All this is fine, because in his view, “The God of creation, making humankind in his image, was the first humanist. The story of the ‘humanization’ of Western culture—limping, imperfect as it is, but real—is part of the work of the God of Abraham, Father of Jesus, partly done through his body, the church” (126). I suspect Pope Benedict XVI would pretty much agree with Yoder’s over Scalia’s reading of the growing global opposition to capital punishment.
Moreover, recent polls are showing that active Christians, including Catholics, are—contrary to Scalia’s claim—becoming increasingly critical of the death penalty. A recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, released on January 6, 2012, indicates that a majority (62 percent) of Americans—including 59 percent of Catholics and 67 percent of Protestants—favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder. These percentages for Catholic and Protestant Christians who support capital punishment are slightly lower than was the case in a Gallup Poll several years earlier in 2004, when 66 percent of Catholics and 71 percent of Protestants viewed state-sanctioned executions as morally justified, so there may be a bit of a decline in support for the death penalty trending at this time. Interestingly, according to the 2004 Gallup Poll, there was less support for the death penalty among those Americans who attend religious services on a regular basis. Those who worship weekly were less likely to support the death penalty than those who worship on a monthly basis, and those who worship on a monthly basis support capital punishment less than those who worship seldom or never. Likewise, in March 2005 Zogby International published a national poll of Roman Catholics revealing that regular churchgoers are less likely than those who attend Mass infrequently to support capital punishment. Most recently, the Public Religion Research Institute released a 2012 American Values Survey with similar data.
Of course, more distinctively theological arguments are also being mustered against the death penalty. A new book, Where Justice and Mercy Meet: Catholic Opposition to the Death Penalty, edited by Vicki Schieber, Trudy D. Conway, and David Matzko McCarthy, looks promising. There was also the statement signed by almost 400 Catholic theologians, scholars, activists, clergy, and religious posted here a little over a year ago. I also was asked by Sojourners magazine to write an article that theologically addresses the topic, and I attempted to do so in connection with a conversation between Gandalf and Frodo about Gollum. So stay tuned, because there is more to come, I’m sure, on the subject of capital punishment!
Japan, in the top ten safest nations and a very aesthetic culture to boot, is never mentioned with the short list of horrifying nations like North Korea that use the death penalty. Nor are the alleged civilized, anti death penalty countries of Europe ever examined as to their relationship to abortion in this list moments. Catholic lay opinion is garnered herein but is always dismissed as an irrelevancy if that same group of laity have great numbers in favor of contraception. My point…none of this voting is relevant to a moral topic. As Cardinal Dulles once pointed out in First Things, God gave over 34 death penalties in the Bible. I’d add…pity the writer who links God to Syria and North Korea.
Neither of the last two Popes has said anything about this topic as to deterrence of murder. We know that gang murderers have ordered murders out on the street from prison via court mandated rights to communicate by phone or letter. We know that both Jeffrey Dahmer and Fr. Keoghan were murdered in non death penalty states by lifers who did not have to fear execution if they
murdered in prison. We know that in death penalty states the removal of the death penalty can elicit confessions and elicit the whereabouts of a victim’s remains. We see no Pope expressing any
awareness of such issues. We do see Pope Benedict in section 42 of Verbum Domini saying that
” the prophets… challenged every form of violence”. They did not…they challenged unjust violence at times but the psalms actually are better at that. The prophets prior to Christ bringing sanctifying grace were dealing with graceless mankind and in that dispensation were mandated by God to use violence. Elijah in I Kgs.18:40 slit the throats of 450 prophets of Baal; Samuel “hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal” because Saul did not do it as ordered by God; Eliseus cursed 42 children who were killed by bears; and Jeremiah curses the Chaldeans if they do not massacre the
Moabites in Jer.48:10. “Cursed are they who do the LORD’s work carelessly, cursed those who
keep their sword from shedding blood.”
Christ no longer wants his representatives doing such things to religious enemies because He brought grace and because He reduced satan’s power for even non believers. But Romans 13:4 is a synecdoche that includes execution ( the same machaira is used by Herod on James in Acts 12)… execution not for religious enemies as in Elijah’s and Jehu’s killings…but for people like the narcotics kingpin in Newark years ago who ordered a 12 year old black male witness killed and he ordered it by court mandated rights to phone calls and the boy was killed. Research someday the number of California street gang murders that are ordered by lifer gang members from prison.
The Church for centuries did kill for religious reasons and that was wrong and is part of its current guilt motivated opposite error in this area.
Opposition to the death penalty seems to be based on the premise that a life (or long) sentence is a more humane punishment. It seems reasonable to question whether this is true.
In many, perhaps most countries of the world the prisons are unspeakably horrible. We could argue for sweeping global prison reform. But this would be asking many countries to make their prisons more appealing than their streets, which would seem to undermine or destroy the purpose of prisons, to serve as a disincentive.
To fix this problem we’d have to upgrade not just the prisons in these countries, but entire societies. Surely this is a worthy goal, but one that’s likely to take centuries.
If we set these concerns aside, we are still left with the question of whether denying someone their freedom for decades is more humane than a quick and painless death.
If we answer yes, we then face the question of expense. Should we spend tens of thousands of dollars a year for decades on the criminal, or to benefit their victims? Our moral focus should extend to all parties involved in the crime, not just to the criminal.
This very inconvenient question should be faced squarely. We can not make a claim to humane compassion if our discussion of the death penalty makes no mention of the victims, as it usually doesn’t.
For those not yet exhausted, we come to the very large question of hell.
If we should conclude that God will somehow forgive those born defective, or who made very bad choices in the whirlwind of a human life, we could argue that ending the prisoners life and saving them from decades of confinement is an act of mercy.
If we believe in eternal damnation, then it could be argued that decades in a prison cell is a humane relative respite before an eternity of torment.
How do we as Catholics argue against the death penalty, but for the existence of hell, an infinitely worse fate?
The death penalty is clearly not a simple question, and humility might guide us away from seeing it merely as a way to quickly grab a piece of satisfying moral high ground.
There may be practical reasons to eliminate the death penalty but I don’t believe there are any moral ones, at least none that can be proposed without rejecting the Traditional teaching of the Church on this subject. Since this site is about Catholic Moral Theology I will ignore the practical arguments and stick solely to the moral ones.
The Church at least since Innocent I in 405 through the first edition of the new Catholic Catechism in 1992 consistently taught that states have the moral right to execute criminals and that this was a just punishment for (at least) the crime of murder. The claim in the 1997 catechism that this right was conditional on whether it was necessary to protect the public is inaccurate: Church tradition never had such a restriction.
Nor is there any reason to believe that the death penalty is contrary to human dignity. The source of man’s dignity comes from the fact that he is made in the image of God, an allusion made above by both BXVI and Yoder, but it is useful to recollect that what was said was not simply that man’s life has dignity because he is made in the image of God but rather that a murderer is to lose his life because man is made in the image of God. That understanding was given to us as an explanation for why God himself called for the death penalty. To claim now that the life of a murderer is protected because his life is sacred is to reverse the plain meaning of Gen 9:6 that states the life of a murderer is forfeit because the life of his victim was sacred.
Whatever one can make of the growing popular opposition to capital punishment does not change the fact that the death penalty was almost universally supported by the Early Fathers, approved by various popes over a period of nearly two millennia, supported and embellished by the great Doctors of the Church, and unapologetically set forth in every catechism prior to 1997. To oppose capital punishment on moral grounds now is to unequivocally repudiate that Tradition. In the past the rejection of capital punishment on moral grounds was a heresy. Do you suggest it should now become doctrine?
JM Cabaniss