Earlier this month, Pope Francis positioned the Catholic Church against the death penalty. Amending the Catechism, which summarises the major tenets of the faith, the Church doctrine now holds the death penalty “inadmissible” – in other words, it is never to be used.
The news came as no surprise. Francis has long maintained that the death penalty is “contrary to the Gospel.” Last October, to an audience of cardinals and ambassadors marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of the Catechism, he said “however grave the crime that may be committed, the death penalty is inadmissible because it attacks the inviolability and the dignity of the person.”
So far, the announcement has garnered little reaction, though is generally seen as welcome. Those for whom the announcement is not welcome – the governments of the fifty plus countries that retain the death penalty – have largely remained silent. After all, the Pope’s pronouncement does not have the force of international law, and, as Stalin once pointed out, the Pope has no “divisions”.
But is their silence entirely cynical? The much respected Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, Vice President of the US Conference of Bishops, in welcoming the change added that “many good people will continue to believe that our society needs the death penalty to express its moral outrage and to punish those who commit the ultimate crime of taking human life.”
Those same people would probably already have been at odds with Pope John Paul’s revision of the Catechism in 1992, which stated that the cases in which the death penalty was absolutely necessary in order to protect society were “practically non-existent.” As the then Cardinal Ratzinger (subsequently Pope Benedict XVI) pointed out, disagreement did not place them seriously at odds with Christian teaching. That, however, was ultimately because the Catechism permitted the theoretical possibility of the death penalty being necessary, and therefore a matter for the civil power, whose duty it was to protect society.
That theoretical room for manoeuvre has been removed with Pope Francis’ revision – and it has huge implications. For a start, it appears to put the Vatican on a collision course with those countries who retain the death penalty, not least the United States, but also China, where Pope Francis has been making a major – and controversial – effort towards rapprochement.
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