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.”
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