Nobody loves killing people more than “pro-life” MAGA Catholics like Ron DeSantis. They will spit on Holy Church and the Eucharist if only they can murder 4 perfectly innocent people out of 100 in order to slaughter 96 people who do not need to be killed. They thirst for blood and will find the flimsiest pretext to shed it.
It all takes me back 20 years to those halcyon days when white, conservative “pro-life” Catholics were the most passionate champions of torture and unjust war in the US, screaming for it in larger percentages than the general population and zealously defying those namby pamby bishops and their wussy appeals to the dignity of the human person.
If you call yourself “pro-life” but keep getting into discussions on-line about the death penalty, police violence, just war, and ICE arrests where you find yourself continually asking impatiently, “…well then, when do we get to kill people?”, you are not “pro-life”. You are a legalist with a fetish for deadly violence searching for a loophole you imagine you can brandish at the Pearly Gates to evade damnation.
You don’t get to kill people any more than you get to have your right arm amputated. You may have to kill somebody just as you may have to have your arm sawed off. But it’s a question of desperate last resort that you should want to crawl over broken glass to avoid, not a prize for ingenious sophists.
There are certain questions it is a sin to even ask, much less try to answer in practice. “When do I get to kill somebody?” is (like “How close can I get to my hot secretary before it is technically adultery?”) among them.
Inevitably, when such discussions arise, somebody will object that “Catholics of good will can disagree on the death penalty” and invoke the words “prudential judgment” to mean “If something is not a dogma, you can just blow it off and do whatever you like, including ignore the Church and kill people when that state gives you a 007.
Wrong. “Prudential judgment” concerns how best, not whether to obey the Church’s teaching. Here is the Church’s teaching. Obey it:
CCC 2267. Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good.
Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.
Consequently, 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”,[1] and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.
Still another line of assault on the obvious teaching of the Church is to pit the undeveloped teaching of the Church against its developed teaching. For instance,
“But in e.g. the Roman Catechism the Church taught that capital punishment can be applied justly and that doing so is in service to, not contrary to, the Commandment against killing. Pius XII said those who commit crimes for which the death penalty is justified lose the right to life. But in either case, Trent or Pius XII, and plenty in between, were they in moral error? It’s not a rhetorical question, I am asking if moral error was taught as truth? If the teaching is erroneous, then what is the nature of the error/s? If it’s a matter of “was true then, but is not now true”, then how so? Surely it can’t be just because a later pope/catechism said so? If it was untrue even back then, what is an argument that explains the nature and extent of the error/s that is not an appeal to later authority?”
Note that the reader is still pushing to retain the death penalty by appealing to the Church’s undeveloped teaching in order to trump its developed teaching.
The logic of the Church is simple: Don’t kill people if you don’t have to. We don’t have to, so stop it. Doctrine develops. The slaughter of the 20th century made extremely clear to the Magisterium that giving the state the power to kill people–never a particularly great thing to license–was now definitively a bad idea due to the immense expanded technological resources of the state to kill on an industrial scale and should end. Moreover, a deepening grasp by the Church on the dignity of the human person makes it more and more difficult to license the death of even the guilty when there is hope for their repentance. So since it is documented that we have a 4% wrongful conviction rate, why would anyone continue to push for murdering 4 innocent human sacrifices in cold blood just so you can kill 96 people who do not need to be killed?
There is not and never has been a necessity for the death penalty. It was morally permissible, but there has never been a time the Church insisted we absolutely must kill every person guilty of a capital offense. That is why, all through history, the Church has urged that capital offenders be spared. If God demanded the death of every capital offender, such clemency would be a sin. It is not. That’s why ancient penances included prescriptions for murderers, some of them last years and years. So the idea that capital punishment is required by divine law is rubbish. It was permitted by the Church sometimes, just as leniency was urged by the Church sometimes.
Now the Church says, “Given a deeper understanding of the dignity of the human person and the immense danger of a state with the power to kill its own citizens, it is better to always be lenient and not to kill even the guilty.” It’s not a question of “error” any more than the New Testament’s failure to describe the Son as “one in being with the Father” makes the apostles the erronesous “opposite” of the Council of Nicaea. Doctrine develops as times change.
The real question people who persist in such lines of attack on the Church’s developed teaching on the Death Penalty need to ask themselves is “Why am I still working so hard to defend killing people when the Church is telling me to prefer mercy?
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