Pope Leo XIV marked World Day Against the Death Penalty, observed on October 10, with the following message on X:
The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person. The common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment: effective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens while at the same time do not completely deprive those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption. #NoDeathPenalty
To all but the crustiest reactionaries among Western elites, plus some populists, the statement might well seem obvious. It is not obvious, however, for Catholics, and this needs to be explained.
The X post borrows language from Pope Francis’s 2018 revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. That revision also notes that “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.” The difficulty is that it was “considered” in this way throughout Scripture, by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and by all the popes who spoke on the subject, up to and including Pope Pius XII.
Pope Francis’s novel position on the death penalty built on foundations laid by Pope John Paul II, who developed the view that capital punishment is no longer necessary and is at least in some tension with human dignity. As he wrote in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, appealing to “the inviolability of human life”: “Modern society in fact has the means of effectively suppressing crime by rendering criminals harmless without definitively denying them the chance to reform.”
Today, the focus of attention has moved on. Great Britain, like many countries in western Europe, is experiencing an escalating crisis of identity. One cause of this is the twenty years of large-scale immigration we have experienced. The other is the attitude of the mainstream political class, who suffer from the characteristic self-hatred of Liberal Western elites. To the growing number of people who are concerned that British culture and identity are under threat, the current governing class seems to be saying: if it is, that would be a good thing. As I write, British social media is gripped by the question of whether there is such a thing as the English or British race: whether, in fact, only those members of our multi-ethnic community who can trace their origins outside the island of Great Britain are entitled to an ethnic identity of any kind.
Where this ends, I do not know. What I do know, is what we need to hold on to if we are to avoid descending into civil strife, and what we would need to escape from that strife, should it start. A political community can only function if its members feel they have important things in common with each other. In fact, it would be better to say that a collection of people can only constitute a political community if they have important things in common with each other. A functional state is one in which, when one set of people are asked to make a sacrifice to benefit another set of people within the state, they have enough fellow-feeling to consider the pros and cons seriously. Without this it is politically impossible to build a motorway or a reservoir or a power station over the houses of people in one place to benefit people in another place; to tax the rich to help the poor; or to recruit strong young men to protect the old and the weak, not just of their own sub-group, but of the other people living in the country.
They ranged in age from 12 to 90, with many young adults and many recent converts and reverts, people deepening their Faith, or discovering it, in the company of the Traditional Latin Mass. They also discovered the traditions of Latin chants and English hymnody, and some hard truths about wet socks and blisters.
A pilgrimage is a way of honouring Christ or the saints. The more trouble we go to about it, to honour them, the greater the gift we are giving them. They don’t need our gifts, but it is good for us to give them: it creates, within us, a better ordering of priorities. It is good, also, for others to see the trouble we are going to, and for wider communities to take part in these efforts. We can’t increase the glory God enjoys in heaven, but as George Herbert expressed it, “In our hearts, though not in heaven, we can raise Thee.”
