Catholic teaching on the death penalty is best understood by viewing it through two lenses: what it is; and what it is not.The Church’s critique of capital punishment is not an evasion of justice. Victims and their survivors have a right to redress, and the state has a right to enforce that redress and impose grave punishment for grave crimes.
It is not an absolute rejection of force by the state. The death penalty is not intrinsically evil. Both Scripture and long Christian tradition acknowledge the legitimacy of capital punishment under certain circumstances. The Church cannot repudiate that without repudiating her own identity.
It is not an idolatry of individual rights — in this case, the rights of the murderer. Catholic social teaching rests on two equal pillars: the dignity of the individual person, and the common good. The right to life of the convicted murderer must be balanced against society’s right to justice and security.
Finally, it is not a false equation of related but unequal issues. Catholic teaching on euthanasia, the death penalty, war, genocide and abortion are rooted in the same concern for the sanctity of the human person. But these different issues do not all have the same gravity or moral content. They are not equivalent.
War can sometimes be legitimate as a form of self-defense. The same can apply, in extraordinary circumstances, to the death penalty. But euthanasia is always an inexcusable attack on the weak. Genocide is always the premeditated murder of entire groups of people. And abortion is always a deliberate assault on a defenseless and innocent unborn child. It can never be justified. It is always — and intrinsically — gravely wrong.
What Catholic teaching on the death penalty does involve is this: a call to set aside unnecessary violence, including violence by the state, in the name of human dignity and building a culture of life. In the wake of the bloodiest century in history, the Church invites us to recover our own humanity by choosing God’s higher road of restraint and mercy instead of state-sanctioned killing that implicates all of us as citizens.
I am grateful for Chaput's column, because while it advances JPG's teaching, it also serves as a corrective to some of the glib or extreme comments Catholics usually make about the death penalty when they write or comment on it. (If I see one more columnist solemnly intone the death penalty's necessary connection to crimes of vengeance, I will scream. That's not Church teaching, it reveals total ignorance of the contributions of political philosophy to the subject, and it's insulting to everyone from Thomas Aquinas to my old prof, Walter Berns --who wrote a seminal book on the topic.)
Something I've discussed with many folks, but never seen argued in print, is that JP II's prudential teaching about the death penalty assumes that imprisonment is more humane than death, and incarceration offers a real possibility for repentance and reform. In our inmates-running-the-asylum system of jails, I seriously doubt that's the case. Certainly if I were offered the choice between death by lethal injection and a lifetime of daily shiv-fights and gang rape, I'd take my shots!
Which is not to say I don't accept JPG's teaching--I do-- but to argue that if Catholics are going to oppose the death penalty, they have a concommitant responsibility to take on the more arduous work of prison reform. John Paul II always insisted that the dignity of the human person means that every person --even the murderer-- must be treated as a subject, not as an object. It is no defense of the humanity of the person to say his dignity requires we not kill him, but it's ok to herd him into the dehumanizing and inhumane conditions described in Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full.
Remember the terrible case of James Bird Jr., who was chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged through the streets until dismembered and dead --for the sole crime of being black and "there"? One of the papers carried an interview with the father of one of the perps. The broken-hearted father said that his ne'er-do-well son was never violent or racist until he'd been sent up the river for some non-violent crime (grand theft auto, if memory serves). He believed the prison experience, far from reforming his son, turned him into a beast. It's just an anecdote, but something any serious discussion of punishment in conformity with human dignity must take into account. Otherwise, seems to me, Catholic opposition to the death penalty comes a bit cheap.
The death penalty is on my mind these days because it's become a key issue in Virginia's hotly contested Governor's race. I wouldn't have thought you could make an entire campaign hinge on the death penalty, but R. Jerry Kilgore is scoring big points against D. Tim Kaine by running ads with the heartbroken loved ones of murder victims saying they don't trust Kaine to apply the death penalty. Must be hurting, 'cause Kaine saw fit to issue a response ad saying his religion (he's Catholic) opposes the death penalty, but he'll apply it because it's the law. (Same stance on abortion; Kaine's an interesting example of a Dem with national ambitions trying to find some traction with "people of faith.")
