For or against capital punishment?

[Prebe]

I meant every criminal regardless of offense sgtnull.

[Avatar]

So does the good Sgt probably. (Joking. Mostly. )

--A

[sgt.null]

life in prison for : murder, rape, child abuse, selling 'hard' drugs, manufacturing 'hard' drugs, treason, robbery, weapons charges, dwi/dui

legalize grass, make cars that only go 50 mph.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

What does the church teach about the death penalty? [Explainer]

(Source: Unsplash/Emiliano Bar)


All lives are sacred and worthy of a chance for repentance and reconciliation.


From 2015–2020, 136 people were executed by state or federal government in the United States. Even if judgments of their guilt were correct, is death an acceptable punishment? The Catholic Church today says no, because their lives were sacred and worthy of a chance for repentance and reconciliation.

Much like the development of other doctrine concerning issues of freedom and life — teachings on slavery and war, for example — the emergence of the Catholic Church’s opposition to the death penalty developed in recent centuries. Generally, before the conversion of the emperor Constantine, Christians were known (and often rebuked) for refusing to participate in the taking of human life for any reason.

Some Christian leaders, such as Lactantius and Pope Nicholas I, opposed use of the death penalty, while others, such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, allowed it when the security of the larger community was at stake. Augustine argued against the widespread use of the death penalty but justified it in cases where the lives of innocent people in the community were at stake. Aquinas justified the death penalty when no other means could protect the common good. Similar theological arguments for the death penalty are found in the writings of Duns Scotus, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Thomas More, and Francisco Suarez.

For centuries, when the church itself acted as the civil authority, as for example in the Papal States, it employed its own executioners. A notorious example is the Vatican’s chief executioner, Giovanni Battista Bugatti, who recorded more than 500 executions in decades of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, often gruesomely performed on the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the bridge over the Tiber River, just outside the Vatican walls.

How is it, then, that in little more than one hundred years the church shifted from directing executions on the Ponte Sant’Angelo to opposing capital punishment in all cases?

Throughout the 20th century the church took increasing exception to the use of the death penalty, in part due to the monstrous evil of the incalculable number of executions by totalitarian and authoritarian states. St. Pope John XXIII and St. Pope Paul VI were intimately witness to these state executions and to those who shockingly cited theology to claim that those executed were dangers to the community.

Encyclicals like Pacem in Terris (“Peace on Earth�, 1963) and Humane Vitae (“Of Human Life�, 1968) as well as documents from the Second Vatican Council, such as Gaudium et Spes (“Joy and Hope�, 1965), elevated a new appreciation of the infinite dignity of the human person vis-à-vis the authority of the state. In the wake of Vatican II, Paul VI quietly removed any allowance for the death penalty from the Holy See’s own code of laws and the Vatican spoke out prophetically against executions in Francisco Franco’s Spain and Nikita Kruschev’s Soviet Union.

It was, however, during the papacy of St. Pope John Paul II that the specifics of the church’s opposition to the death penalty crystallized. As a young man in Poland, John Paul II was witness to both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism and to their respective widespread executions. His personalist theology, formed against the horror of those executions, celebrated both the infinite dignity of each person and the infinite opportunities for salvation that divine grace provides each person, regardless of sin.

These two elements of John Paul II’s personalist theology came together in his important 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Gaudium (“The Gospel of Life�), to form the church’s theological argument against the death penalty. There John Paul II maintained that the modern state has sufficient means to protect the community, short of capital punishment.

Four years later, in 1999, while celebrating Mass in St. Louis, John Paul II publicly demanded an end to the death penalty. Pope Benedict XVI, following his many personal appeals opposing death sentences around the world, extended the arguments of his predecessor, in his 2011 apostolic exhortation Africae Munus (“Africa’s Commitment�) calling on world leaders “to make every effort to end the death penalty and to reform the penal system in a way that ensures respect for prisoners’ human dignity.�

In the summer of 2018, the Catholic office for all matters of doctrine, the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, took steps officially to forbid support for the death penalty by faithful Catholics, adding a new directive to the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “the Church teaches, in light of the gospel, that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and the dignity of the person.’�

Pope Francis in October 2020, in his landmark encyclical ‘Fratelli Tutti’: On Fraternity and Social Friendship, went further to insist that the church cannot allow “stepping back� from this doctrinal injunction against capital punishment, insisting that “the church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide.�

With change in the Catechism in 2018 and Pope Francis’s binding teachings in Fratelli Tutti in 2020, the faithful are today morally obliged to oppose the death penalty, may not promote or support executions, and may not in good conscience endorse laws that allow capital punishment.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+


Stephen “The Upsetter� Cooper👨��⚖� @SteveCooperEsq | Twitter



--> --> Nitrogen gas execution: An abomination in Alabama [Analysis, Opinion]

[Fist and Faith]

The whole thing perplexes me. There are ways of killing people that are quick and painless enough. Firing squad, guillotine, hanging (when done with enough drop to break the neck). Maybe the goal is to actually increase physical or psychological suffering?

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

The whole thing perplexes me. There are ways of killing people that are quick and painless enough. Firing squad, guillotine, hanging (when done with enough drop to break the neck). Maybe the goal is to actually increase physical or psychological suffering?

I'm sure it could be argued that cruelty is baked-into ultimate State Violence. The Malefactor — those Othered by the State — must be overwhelmed with shock-&-awe to make an example. IOW, "the cruelty is the point", as has recently been said in other contexts.

It prolly should be noted that Catholic doctrine would still refuse Capital Punishment on a fundamental level, considering it inadmissible under any and all circumstances — even if 'twere done with the cultured gentility of Sol Roth's (E. G. Robinson's) assisted suicide in Soylent Green.

Nonetheless, public displays of gratuitous cruelty can bring powerful subsidiary considerations to the convo, adding real-world texture and immediacy buttressing the aforementioned more-fundamental ones.

[SerScot]

I think it can be justified in very rare circumstances. For example Pee Wee Gaskins. The man was a serial killer and killed another inmate while in prison for life. His death was necessary to prevent him from killing again.

[Zarathustra]

I don't think our justice system can ever be 100% perfect, therefore there's always a chance that we arrested the wrong guy. So I object to capital punishment on purely pragmatic reasons. If we could be 100% sure, and the crime was great enough (room for debate there), then I'd have no problem with it.

However, the idea that all lives are sacred and worthy of redemption/reconciliation is a poor reason to object. Isn't redemption an issue of heaven and hell? Redemption in these terms doesn't mean you escape the earthly consequences of your actions.

It also contradicts the idea of hell and eternal punishment. If everyone is worthy of redemption, what about Satan? What about all those cooking in the lake of fire? Why does redemption have a time limit based on our mortal lifespans?

What about the Flood? Sodom and Gomorrah? God seems to contradict himself. A lot.

[SerScot]

I don't think our justice system can ever be 100% perfect, therefore there's always a chance that we arrested the wrong guy. So I object to capital punishment on purely pragmatic reasons. If we could be 100% sure, and the crime was great enough (room for debate there), then I'd have no problem with it.

However, the idea that all lives are sacred and worthy of redemption/reconciliation is a poor reason to object. Isn't redemption an issue of heaven and hell? Redemption in these terms doesn't mean you escape the earthly consequences of your actions.

It also contradicts the idea of hell and eternal punishment. If everyone is worthy of redemption, what about Satan? What about all those cooking in the lake of fire? Why does redemption have a time limit based on our mortal lifespans?

What about the Flood? Sodom and Gomorrah? God seems to contradict himself. A lot.

Agreed. But in cases where we are certian, Pee Wee Gaskins, and we know they will kill again. It seems, to me, to be warranted to protect other lives.

[Fist and Faith]

I may have already said this in one of the previous pages. I do not believe a society should solve any problem by killing its people. Individuals might feel fully justified in killing someone. I would if somebody killed or raped my child. I don't imagine I would care about spending the rest of my life in jail for killing the person cruelly over a very long period of time. But that's a father who is filled with rage, and is acting from that emotional state.

A society should not make policy from that emotional state.

SerScot, I understand your example is not coming from that emotional state. But Gadkins killed the other prisoner with C4 explosives. Null can certainly speak to this better than I can, but I suspect those around him could have been kept safe without killing him.

[[Syl]]

As I've said for years (hell, decades) here at KW, my problem with the death penalty is not that the punishment doesn't fit the crime, but that the rights of a just government derive from the people that create that society. If people do not have a right to kill other people just because they think the condemned deserve it, the government of the people does not have that right. War crimes, sure, as everyone has the natural right to defend themselves, but for the individual, petty outcomes of human life... It's just revenge dressed up as justice. Killing individual people does not solve societal problems.

[SerScot]

SerScot, I understand your example is not coming from that emotional state. But Gadkins killed the other prisoner with C4 explosives. Null can certainly speak to this better than I can, but I suspect those around him could have been kept safe without killing him.

And I do appreciate your POV. However, the day Gaskins was to be executed he was attempting to arraign to have Dick Harpootlian’s (the one Representing Alex Murdaugh right now) daughter kidnapped and held hostage to force his release. Harpootlian was Solicitor who successfully got Gaskins convicted and the death penalty applied. The man would have found a way to kill again. It is who he was.

I absolutely do not like capital punishment. It is something that should only be used in incredibly rare circumstances. I simply offer Gaskins as an example. Ted Bundy is another example… how many people did he kill after escaping prison? Some people are to dangerous to be allowed to keep breathing.

[SoulBiter]

I am for capital punishment but I certainly get why some people are not.

Is it justice we are looking for or vengeance? There is certainly a difference.

[Fist and Faith]

There's no way it's not vengeance. It may or may not be justice. I guess it depends on how you define justice.

[Savor Dam]

There are those who also cite deterrence as an argument in favor. I do not concur with that view (yes, it deters, but that does not suffice as a justification), only mention it lest the "why capital punishment" discussion overlook this aspect.

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

It's a sticky wicket. On the one hand, there are no repeat offenders. On the other, do we want the government killing people?

I look at people like Dahmer, Bundy, and the like and think that they're irredeemable....And maybe they are, and there's no point in prolonging their lives. But is that really a power we want to cede to the government?

I'm really torn on this.

[Savor Dam]

I'd started an edit to my earlier post, but got caught up in making dinner. In the meantime, Nihilo made very similar points to what I'd meant to say.

Here's the core of it:

Some people are to dangerous to be allowed to keep breathing.

I completely get that; some are unremediable. To quote Linden "Some infections have to be cut out."

A study-partner (I aspired to more at the time, but never pursued it...) of mine in the late '70s, Karen Mandic, fell victim to Ken Bianchi of Hillside Strangler infamy.

Still, Bianchi remains in Washington State Penitentiary some 40+ years after his conviction. His next parole opportunity is 2025.

[wayfriend]

Aye. The problem is not about whether there are people who deserve to be punished with death. The problem is about who do we trust to decide? This is not hypothetical - the power has been abused often enough.

[SerScot]

Aye. The problem is not about whether there are people who deserve to be punished with death. The problem is about who do we trust to decide? This is not hypothetical - the power has been abused often enough.

Indeed. Which is why I would limit capital punishment to serial killers.