The Church Needs to Regress on the Death Penalty

On Thursday, Kevin Ray Underwood was executed in Oklahoma, after having been convicted of the horrific murder of a ten-year-old girl. Oklahoma City’s Archbishop Paul Coakley lamented the murderer’s death at the hands of the justice system, writing on social media, “Sadly, Underwood was put to death, becoming the fourth Oklahoma inmate executed this year, continuing a disturbing trend in our state.”

Coakley continued to say that “the death penalty — the intentional taking of another life — stands as an inhumane method of punishment, going against the respect for human life and dignity that is so necessary, bringing harm to society.”

Over the past half century, Catholic leaders have become increasingly critical of the death penalty. Starting in the late 1970s, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) declared that “non-lethal options” for punishing violent crimes should be preferred and began advocating for the abolition of the death penalty. In 1992, Pope St. John Paul II revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church and, regarding the death penalty, wrote:

If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

In 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae, the Pontiff continued that train of thought, arguing that legal punishment “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.” The subsequent 1997 revision of the Catechism reflected this firmer opposition to the death penalty:

The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertainment of the identity and responsibility of the offender, recourse to the death penalty, when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor. If, instead, bloodless means are sufficient to defend against the aggressor and to protect the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

The late Pope Benedict XVI also called for an end to the death penalty in 2011, although, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he clarified in 2004 that a Catholic may legitimately “be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war” without being “unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion.”

Ratzinger said that while non-violent policies are, of course, to be encouraged and promoted, “it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment.” He added, “There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.”

Pope Francis has taken the most stringent stand yet against the death penalty. The incumbent Pontiff has advocated abolishing the death penalty and commuting death sentences to less final punishments. In 2015, Francis stated, “Today the death penalty is inadmissible, no matter how serious the crime committed.” He insisted that the death penalty is an offense “against the inviolability of life and the dignity of the human person, which contradicts God’s plan for man and society” and “does not render justice to the victims, but rather fosters vengeance.”

In 2018, Pope Francis revised the Catechism to declare the death penalty “inadmissible.” He acknowledged, “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.”

However, the Pope noted that “more effective systems of detention” and “an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes” render the death penalty morally obsolete. He concluded, “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,’ and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”

Church Support for Death Penalty

However, the Church has long endorsed the use of the death penalty, at least in certain circumstances. St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the great Doctors of the Church, advocated for the death penalty in theory, although he was often critical of its use in practice and personally intervened in several cases to request mercy for those sentenced to death.

In The City of God, Augustine wrote that “there are some exceptions made by the divine authority to its own law, that men may not be put to death.” He argued that when the death penalty is used in accordance with just law, then legitimate authorities “have represented in their persons the public justice or the wisdom of government, and in this capacity have put to death wicked men; such persons have by no means violated the commandment, ‘You shall not kill.’”

In his treatise On the Sermon on the Mount, Augustine cited the example of holy men, like the prophet Elijah, who had utilized and even carried out the death penalty. He wrote, “But great and holy men … punished some sins with death, both because the living were struck with a salutary fear, and because it was not death itself that would injure those who were being punished with death, but sin, which might be increased if they continued to live.”

At the dawn of the fifth century, Pope St. Innocent I upheld the legitimacy of the death penalty in Ad Exsuperium, Episcopum Tolosanum. He wrote that “power was granted by God, and to avenge crime the sword was permitted; he who carries out this vengeance is God’s minister,” according to Scripture. He continued, “What motive have we for condemning a practice that all hold to be permitted by God? We uphold, therefore, what has been observed until now, in order not to alter the discipline and so that we may not appear to act contrary to God’s authority.”

In both the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologicae, the ingenious St. Thomas Aquinas, yet another Doctor of the Church, proffered one of the strongest Catholic defenses of the permissibility of the death penalty. The death penalty, Aquinas explained, first protects the common good. It may also serve as a means of redressing “crimes of irreparable harm or which are particularly perverted.”

Aquinas wrote, “If a man is a danger to the community, threatening it with disintegration by some wrongdoing of his, then his execution for the healing and preservation of the common good is to be commended.” Additionally, the death penalty may be an instrument of justice, in which case it is not only morally permissible, but actually virtuous. The death penalty may also, Aquinas observed, be a means of achieving the salvation of whomever has been sentenced to death, confronting the hardest hearts with their own mortality and forcing them to either accept or reject finally God’s mercy.

Pope St. Pius V, in the Catechism of the Council of Trent, Pope St. Pius X, and Pope Pius XII have all endorsed the moral permissibility of the death penalty.

Returning to present day Oklahoma, Underwood was convicted of the murder of ten-year-old Jamie Rose Bolin. He had abducted the girl, who lived in his apartment building, and bludgeoned her to death with a cutting board. He then raped her corpse and dismembered her body and stored it in a plastic container in his bedroom closet. According to police, Underwood planned to behead the dead girl in his bathtub and cook and eat her remains.

Surely, Aquinas would argue, this man has debased the human dignity which God had entrusted to his care, making himself no more than an animal. Butchering a ten-year-old girl and raping her dead body before chopping it up into pieces would seem to fall under the Angelic Doctor’s criteria for “crimes of irreparable harm or which are particularly perverted.” While Archbishop Coakley is no doubt following the lead of the Holy Father in addressing the use of the death, he could perhaps have chosen a different case to emphasize publicly.

READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy:

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