I have to at least partially agree with Ed Peters (and I’d say it is usually prudent to try to agree with him):
As a Catholic squarely in line with the Catholic tradition that […] supports the just administration of the death penalty for capital crimes, I have grown used to having my motives for such support reduced to: my thirst for vengeance, my disdain for mercy, my obliviousness to Christ’s salvific will, my despair about conversion, and my contempt for compassion. I apparently do not understand that the death penalty does not bring murder victims back to life (gee, whodathunkit?) but that’s not to worry, because my support for the death penalty can be excused (and then dismissed) on purely demographic grounds (I am, after all, white, male, middle-aged, and usually vote conservative, so who cares what a heartless jerk like me thinks about anything?)
[…] So argue, if one will, the prudence of the death penalty—there are some very good prudential arguments against it, as Häring noted fifty years ago—but do not read the Catechism as making any principled points against the death penalty beyond those that have long been part of the Church teaching on the death penalty, that is, for the last 20 centuries during which no Catholic thinker, let alone any Magisterial pronouncement, asserted the inherent immorality of the death penalty. To the contrary, as Long points out, acknowledgment of the moral liceity of the death penalty justly administered, is the Catholic tradition.
(source: Okay, what about Catholics and the death penalty? | In the Light of the Law)
And I also agree with Dr. Peters that following reply merits some consideration. This line of reasoning is why I would not consider myself a part of any of the “law-and-order” crowd that are sometimes aggressive “pro-capital punishment” advocates, although I am also a long way from joining hands with Sr. Prejean (who I interviewed, once, though the interview never made print):
Well, let me put it this way. The Church, we are told, is mater et magistra. The way we relate to a mother is not simply to obey abstract commands, but to serve her and to let ourselves be shaped by her and her mentorship and her thinking. This is part of what we refer to when we talk about the sentire cum Ecclesia. It is not just “What do I have to believe and what do I have a right not to believe?” It is, “Shaped by charity, how can I follow the Church where she beckons, educate my conscience so that it is more conformed to the mind of the Church, and serve her work of lighting the world on fire with the Gospel of Jesus Christ?”
(source: The Death Penalty, The Catechism, The Living God)
I agree. To the extent possible, I shape my thinking by what is consistently being taught, not only by what is dogmatically defined.
BUT in just exactly that same movement, I have to expect that what is finally intended–when all bywords and truly local concerns, all expressions referrable only to the milieu, all mistaken underlying science, and all degrees of emphasis are sifted by history and Providence–is going to be consistent with what has come before; and that it will move, however steep the grade and with whatever degree of vibration or acceleration or braking, down the rails of the depositum fidei without jumping the tracks. “Gates of Hell shall not prevail,” etc.
And therefore I cannot accept the justice or wisdom of any rhetoric that simply equates opposition to the death penalty with opposition to abortion. We must speak more clearly than that.
For these reasons, I agree with the distinction in a post by Steven Long that Dr. Peters refers to:
It is altogether fitting that–given the overriding circumstance of the rejection of higher law and the widespread determining circumstance of the culture of death–there be a prudential reservation in applying this penalty. But this is an entirely different thing from the joint editorial’s barely concealed anathematization of the penalty, which itself proceeds from a failure to understand, and a lack of due theological regard for, the transcendence of the common good.
The editorializing journals fail to understand that Evangelium Vitae does not reduce penalty to defense, but adverts to defense largely because of the failure of states to subject themselves to higher law and to acknowledge their subjection to the common good,
(source: Four Catholic Journals Indulge in Doctrinal Solipsism — thomistica)
Exactly. It is a serious mistake to indulge the idea that somehow capital punishment is or has become evil in itself, or that modern culture has somehow evolved beyond the need for a clear understanding of capital punishment as the final expression of well-ordered police power:
If you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience.
(source: Romans 13:1-7 RSVCE – Being Subject to Authorities – Let – Bible Gateway)
Such overstated “pro-lifers must oppose capital punishment” rhetoric also creates a false equivalence between support for abortion and support for capital punishment, creating a grave moral hazard for those who cannot adequately reason in support of their intuitions about justice (i.e., that killing innocents is sin worthy of death, while killing murderers is to be restrained by legal process, for the good of all).
It raises the spectre of political “balancing acts” that put innocence and guilt to one side while playing the constituency-pleasing games mass-market democracy prefers to justice.
It undermines one of the gravest reasons Christians have an obligation to support actually just and humane governments, actually just and humane societies, by suggesting erroneously that economics and technology have led us “past all that” into the sunny uplands of history, where we can afford to stash people away inhumanely for life–because at least we didn’t use our inhumane methods to kill them.
And in the process, such misguided absolutism-by-hyperbole undermines the strongest imaginable reasons that Christians of every stripe should be opposed to the use of the death penalty by nearly every regime we live under, today: the utter improbability that it actually serves the purposes of justice.
Understand, I am convinced of a legitimate regime’s right to execute capital criminals under the conditions long set out in Catholic teaching (and not only in Catholic teaching; they are, in whole or in very large part, commonly found in most developed codes of justice). I do not think Genesis 9 or Romans 13 need much supplementing, and I see no evidence whatsoever that the idea that there is no such thing as just killing, or that regimes are forbidden to adjudicate the justice of killing, is taught in Scripture or anywhere else in Sacred Tradition. It is simply not something that unfolds in that form from the depositum fidei, nor can it be honestly attributed to the sensus fidelium fidei in that form. It is positively unjust to teach as though capital punishment were intrinsically evil.
However, I am fully persuaded that a regime that treats the killing of unborn innocents as a “human right,” and mandates our support for it, and publicly funds and promotes it, has no moral capacity to make justice appear to be done when it comes to matters of guilt and innocence.
I am fully persuaded that we ought to oppose the expanding power of any radically secularizing regime, even while we push for its transformation into something capable of public justice.
I also think that challenging the justice of the regime’s practice of the “power of the sword” is a valid proxy for directly questioning its moral and material legitimacy, because it is true that merely pragmatic justifications for killing do not hold up–and therefore the regime will either need to appeal to principle, or concede its power. But understand that this is a dangerous strategy, as regards the common good, for whatever restraining use of force does not take place through explicit, publicly administered justice becomes diffuse, easily-abused, hard-to-correct use of force in prison yards, jailhouses, SWAT teams, and corrupt regulatory agencies. Helping the regime deconstruct itself by calling into question its basic police powers may well be just, even necessary–but it is probably not compassionate.
I am not at all persuaded that our laws are particularly just, our courts particularly incorruptible, our advocates and juries particularly interested in truth, or our prisons especially humane. On any merely situational analysis, then, I think either speedy execution on undoubted facts or imprisonment for set terms shorter than life would be preferable to our current morass of a life spent on death row or in a “penitentiary” system that functions as though designed to maximize hopelessness and corruption.
I think that our methods of execution are themselves barbaric, and should be replaced with less pseudo-hygienic and more efficient methods.
And I think that until we can have a humane method of execution based on undoubted facts under a legal system that can manage to clearly differentiate “guilt” and “innocence” in those whose killing it sanctions–until we can manage to legally distinguish killers from babies, enemy soldiers from hit-list targets–we have no business executing anyone.
Make mine moratorium. And then, when we have a reasonably just society, check back and see whether I am willing to take a chance on a “no executions, ever” constitution. I’d like to think it could be done.
…
A final note for those who, so very unjustly, characterize support for capital punishment as mere vengeance or counsel of despair. Which–tell the truth–is more likely to provoke repentance: A lifetime of tedium, surrounded by corruption, with occasional reasons to hope and fear that a change in laws or policies, or an appeal however meritorious or meretricious, will radically alter one’s station–or the definite prospect of death?
Which one works on all of us, and our neighbors?
Do not assume that life imprisonment without possibility of parole is more just, more compassionate, or more likely to lead to repentance.
And let us have no more of the language of progressivism, folks: the Church does not concede that humanity is done with the need for capital punishment forever, because the Church is not millenarian and does not believe that human nature evolves. Therefore, there is never going to be a time when we can say that “never again will it be necessary for a society to defend itself by using capital punishment.” In fact, we can’t even say that such a time has ever existed for humanity in general.
But we can probably say that here, now, in the USA, in Oklahoma, we can’t really be sure we’re doing the just thing when we punish by death: so let’s not be too hasty to deal it.