Greg Daly
Pope Francis blesses a prisoner during his visit to the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility in Philadelphia. CNS The Pope’s’ decreeing capital punishment ‘inadmissible’ follows in papal footsteps, writes Greg Daly
There’s change and there’s change. To listen to some of the more feverish reactions to news last week of Pope Francis’ decision to change the Church’s teaching on the death penalty, one might think that change means one thing and one thing only: a sharp u-turn, a denial, even a rejection of the previous road. This, though, is neither common sense nor what the Church believes.
The Church has always held that doctrine can change, or, as it tends to be put, it can develop. In his 1845 An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, the future Blessed John Henry Newman, then an Anglican cleric, explained that there are, broadly, two ways of understanding change or development.
Clarification
True development, he said, is a kind of organic growth, a clarification or refinement through which a doctrine present in Revelation becomes more precisely expressed or more deeply understood, all the while remaining true to itself – he cites the parables of the mustard seed and the leaven as scriptural pointers to how seemingly immense change can happen naturally, gradually, and genuinely.
Against this false development, perhaps best expressed as corruption or mutation, is a more dramatic affair, one that is genuinely at odds with what came before; we might think of how someone can change, and somehow cease to be themselves, rather than growing in a way that they become more themselves.
Cardinal Luis Ladaria, prefect of the Church’s doctrinal watchdog, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, has made it clear that Pope Francis’ decision is firmly in the category of ‘authentic development’.
As he noted last week, when the Pope spoke last October on the 25th anniversary of St John Paul II’s promulgation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, he had asked that the Church’s teaching on the death penalty be “reformulated so as to better reflect the development of the doctrine on this point that has taken place in recent times”.
It is worth revisiting the Pope’s October address, in which he called for the Catechism to treat of the death penalty in a way that is clearly focused – in line with the document’s stated aims – on God’s love.
“This issue cannot be reduced to a mere résumé of traditional teaching without taking into account not only the doctrine as it has developed in the teaching of recent Popes, but also the change in the awareness of the Christian people which rejects an attitude of complacency before a punishment deeply injurious of human dignity,” he said, describing the death penalty as essentially contrary to the Gospel through its deliberate suppression of human lives that we recognise as sacred and the gift of God.
“Here we are not in any way contradicting past teaching, for the defence of the dignity of human life from the first moment of conception to natural death has been taught by the Church consistently and authoritatively,” he added.
Sanctity of life
His point, in essence, was that the key Church teaching in this area is the sanctity of human life.
The Church had previously supported capital punishment, even using it in Italy’s Papal States, but while the justification for this rested on the notion that condemned criminals had disposed themselves of their right to live, the right to end their lives was still reserved to the state, to the public power: the death penalty was never something ordinary private people could execute.
It had then seemed sensible and even necessary to protect human life, whether from murderers or from those who would threaten society in other ways, through the use of the death penalty, and there was scriptural sanction for this, but over time the Church has come to recognise the contradictions in this approach.
The key developments in this area were introduced by St John Paul II, building on the teaching of previous popes and especially the Second Vatican Council which in 1965’s Gaudium et Spes stressed the inviolable dignity of the human person as the cornerstone of Catholic social teaching.
In 1992, St John Paul’s catechism centred its discussion of the death penalty not on the need for just punishment but on the question of how human life and dignity can best be cherished and protected, permitting capital punishment only when there was no other way of protecting society.
“Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor,” it said.
In practical terms the Polish Pope had seemed to be saying that that Church could accept the necessity of the death penalty, but only in very rare circumstances. Lest anyone miss just how rare these circumstances might be, in Evangelium Vitae, his 1995 encyclical on the sanctity of human life, he made this even more clear.
Maintaining that the death penalty should be considered in the context of a system of penal justice increasingly aware of human dignity and in tune ultimately with God’s plan for man and society, he ran through what punishment is intended to achieve and said it “ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society”.
Such cases are very rare today, he continued, “if not practically non-existent”.
As he said in the US city of St Louis, Missouri, in 1999, the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil. “Modern society has the means of protecting itself, without definitively denying criminals the chance to reform,” he said, describing the death penalty as “cruel and unnecessary”.
His calls for the global abolition of the death penalty were repeated by Pope Benedict XVI, notably in November 2011, when, echoing the Catechism, he told a group working for the end of the death penalty that their efforts would help initiatives around the world “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”.
Pope Francis, then, is building on the work of his predecessors in rewriting section 2267 of the Catechism to remove any ambiguity that some might claim in this area, spelling out that there is an increased awareness today that a person’s dignity is not lost even after committing serious crimes and that today’s prison systems allow for the protection of society without denying convicts chances of redemption.
Given this, the Catechism continues, “no matter how serious the crime that has been committed, the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and the dignity of the person”.
In describing the death penalty as now “inadmissible”, the Pope has been careful not to overstep what his predecessors had said or to contradict or in any way overturn previous Church teaching; he has, after all, not even come close to describing the death penalty as ‘intrinsically evil’ or anything like that.
No, he has simply followed his predecessors’ recognitions that all human life is sacred, even that of the worst criminals, and that modern societies virtually never need to kill to protect themselves from criminals, by teaching that since modern societies can protect themselves from criminals without taking sacred human life, capital punishment is no longer acceptable.