A Fresh Look at the Death Penalty

A Pastoral Exhortation

Holy Week like no other time in the year helps us to understand more clearly and appropriate more fully the depth of Christ’s love and sacrifice for us. The Passion accounts that we read unveil humanity’s capacity to disregard violently the dignity and value of each human life. We realize this when Jesus, both God and man, humbles himself to endure state-sanctioned torture and death.

When we recall the Way of the Cross that Jesus traveled, Good Friday is an appropriate time to join once again with the Bishops of the United States to reiterate the Church’s opposition to the death penalty and to urge everyone to reflect on the many implications of the death penalty.

One cannot consider the issue of capital punishment without taking into account the devastating impact that violent crime has on society as well as on individual victims. The cost of crime and violence is very real and has intense ramifications. The Church’s opposition to the death penalty in no way minimizes the horror of the actions of those who take the lives of others, particularly when they do so in a senseless and brutal manner.

We need to recognize evil and name it for what it is. As Christians, we must pastorally respond to those who have been victimized by violent crime, comfort them in their pain and grief, and seek justice.

How we respond to offenders also says much about what we value. As Christians, we must respond to them in ways that are reflective of the teachings of Christ, imitating His steadfast compassion and forgiveness. Forgiveness is a gift from God that should never be minimized. Forgiveness by its very nature impacts the lives of all involved – those who receive it as well as those who offer it. In their 2000 statement, Choose Life, the Bishops of Pennsylvania taught us that “true emotional, spiritual, and even physical healing is found in the compassionate embrace of Jesus, who practiced forgiveness and teaches us to do the same.”

We are called to recognize the face of God in everyone – even the criminal. The destruction of human life, even in the form of capital punishment, takes away a gift that is God’s alone to take. Capital punishment is irreparable. It can also turn the very institution that serves as an instrument of justice into a means of seeking revenge. The practice of capital punishment perpetuates the cycle of violence that it was intended to end.

When we execute someone, we extinguish the possibility for rehabilitation and atonement. Ezekiel tells us that God does not take “pleasure in the death of the wicked man, but rather in the wicked man’s conversion, that he may live” (Ezekiel 33.11). As Christians, we should take seriously our role to foster conversion and rehabilitation. We should never look to death as a solution.

The Catholic Church has always taught that legitimate civil authority has the power to enforce law, prosecute law-breakers, imprison convicted criminals, and even inflict the supreme penalty. Yet the Church also recognizes that less than lethal means are now available to protect society, nullifying the need to utilize the death penalty.

In addition to recognizing that societies are now able adequately to defend individuals from violent criminals, the Church has also become aware that capital punishment falls disproportionately on racial minorities, the uneducated, the poor and the disadvantaged. Too often, inadequate and ineffective legal representation has resulted in innocent people being sentenced to death and perhaps sometimes executed.

In recent years, a number of death row inmates have been exonerated, especially through the introduction of DNA evidence, revealing a disquieting fact that the capital punishment system is seriously flawed. It is misguided to use death as a punishment when it must be administered by a system that admittedly relies on a fallible human component.

All human life must be treated with respect because all life comes from God. In the long-standing Judeo-Christian tradition we speak of the sacredness of human life because we recognize that it is a gift beyond our giving. We do not bring life into the world. We can cooperate with God in generating human life but we do not create it. Once life is ended, we cannot bring it back.

At the heart of our profound respect for human life and also our need to teach that respect in word and deed is our conviction that human beings are created in the image of God who loves us beyond our imagining. It is this love which calls us to oppose the death penalty, to reach out with compassion to families of the victims of capital crime, and to promote a civilization and culture of life.

Holy Week, 2005