In one of his strongest statements against the death penalty to date, Pope Francis said that capital punishment “is inadmissible, no matter how serious the crime committed.” The Pope’s comments were submitted in a forceful call to the International Commission against the Death Penalty in Madrid.
The Pope added that the death penalty “contradicts God’s plan for man and society” and said, “Justice can never be accomplished by killing a human being.”
He acknowledged society’s need to protect itself but said that in the modern era, that does not apply to the death penalty. “When the death penalty is applied, it is not for a current act of aggression, but rather for an act committed in the past. It is also applied to persons whose current ability to cause harm is not current, as it has been neutralized – they are already deprived of their liberty.”
In a reference to the dispute over lethal injection procedures in the United States, the Pontiff went on to say that there is, in fact, no method of execution that would make the death penalty appropriate. “There is no humane way of killing another person,” Francis emphasized.
The Pope’s letter comes just over a week after his representative to the United Nations in Geneva endorsed international efforts to end executions.
Just before the Pope’s letter was revealed, all three Catholic Bishops in Nebraska came together to express their support for efforts to end the death penalty there. And in Kansas, the Bishop joined several other religious leaders in January to call on lawmakers there to end the death penalty.
Earlier in March, four national Catholic publications called for an end to the death penalty in the United States. The National Catholic Reporter; America; Our Sunday Visitor; and the National Catholic Register — representing a broad ideological spectrum — published an joint editorial urging “the readers of our diverse publications and the whole U.S. Catholic community and all people of faith to stand with us and say, ‘Capital punishment must end.'”
This weekend the New York Times recapped the process that brought these four diverse Catholic papers together in a column, “Catholics on Left and Right Find Common Ground Opposing Death Penalty.”
Photo credit: “2014 Pastoral Visit of Pope Francis to Korea” by Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service (Jeon Han). CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
