CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

The state’s authority to put a criminal to death for serious crimes has long been accepted by the Church. In recent decades, without denying this authority, the Church has increasingly urged governments to use nonlethal forms of punishment, and Pope John Paul II has said that the death penalty is seldom or never needed in modern society (encyclical The Gospel of Life, Evangelium Vitae, 55-56 [1995]).

Scriptural Background • The Old Testament takes for granted that death may be inflicted upon someone who has deliberately violated God’s most fundamental laws. Among the nomadic tribes of ancient Israel, a genuine prison system was out of the question. Moreover, the laws of Israel were seen as handed down directly by God, who is Lord of life and could rightly demand a wrongdoer’s death. Thus the list of crimes punishable by death resembled the list of the Ten Commandments: idolatry or apostasy (Dt 13 and 17:2-7), working on the Sabbath (Ex 31:14-15, 35:2), cursing or incorrigibly defying one’s parents (Ex 21:17; Dt 21:22), murder (Ex 21:12ff.; Dt 19:11-13), adultery and other sexual sins (Lv 20:10-21), and bearing false witness against an innocent person in a capital case (Dt 19:16-21).

Offenses against persons were punished in accord with the lex talionis, or “law of retribution”: “Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth” (Dt 19:21; cf. Lv 24:17-21). Only by forfeiting one’s life could one sufficiently atone for maliciously taking another’s life. In cases of accidental killing, the guilty party might be able to seek refuge until the victim’s family no longer sought vengeance (Dt 19:1-10).
In an especially striking act of mercy, the Lord himself protects Cain, mankind’s first murderer, by placing a mark on him “lest any who came upon him should kill him” (Gn 4:15). St. Ambrose (c. 339-397) commented on this passage: “God, who preferred the correction rather than the death of a sinner, did not desire that a homicide be punished by the exaction of another act of homicide” (cf. Evangelium Vitae, 9). Ambrose’s comment is a later Christian interpretation, but his emphasis on God’s mercy for sinners can also be found in the later prophetic books of the Old Testament: “As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn back from his way and live” (Ez 33:11).

The prophetic writings also provide a different perspective on capital punishment in another way. By this time Israel’s political leaders are often defying God’s will, and some even try to silence God’s prophets by the unjust use of the death penalty (cf. Jer 26:7-15).
In the New Testament, Jesus rebukes Israel for killing its prophets (cf. Mt 23:31). Through his crucifixion he becomes the ultimate innocent victim of capital punishment. Luke’s Gospel, without questioning the just use of this penalty, shows Jesus forgiving a repentant criminal crucified beside him and promising him paradise (Lk 23:39-43). The New Testament reports the killing of the deacon Stephen by people who thought they were imposing a just sentence of death; one man who assisted, Saul of Tarsus, later converted to Christianity and was himself martyred in Rome as the Apostle Paul (cf. Acts 7:57-8:2).

Even more important than Paul’s personal experience is his theology of sin and forgiveness. All people are sinners who fall under the sentence of death earned by Adam; through his death on the cross, Jesus has saved us all from the power of death (Rom 5:12-21). If we are conformed to his death, we can share in the power of his Resurrection (Phil 3:10-11).
Thus, while the New Testament casts no specific judgment on the morality of capital punishment, it intensifies the message of forgiveness and conversion found in the Old Testament’s prophetic books. This message runs throughout the life and teaching of Jesus, who set himself against the lex talionis by teaching his followers to love their enemies and return good for evil (Mt 5:38-48).

Historical Development • The New Testament acknowledged the state’s authority to use force, teaching that civil authority “is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer” (Rom 13:4). The idea that government wields God-given authority received more emphasis after the emperor Constantine (c. 288-337) converted to Christianity and the new religion acquired an official role in maintaining civil order. Especially in time of war, rulers saw no way to prevent desertion from the army except by threatening the same penalty of death that soldiers feared from the enemy; and when wars claimed a religious justification, as in the Crusades, Church leaders saw all the more reason to help the state enforce order.

In the fifth century, St. Augustine (354-430) provided a theological justification for capital punishment: God has exempted such punishment from the commandment against killing, by delegating governments to preserve the common good through the enforcement of just laws (City of God, I, 21).
In the Middle Ages, heretics called Waldensians taught that it is gravely sinful to kill criminals condemned to death. (This opinion was based not on respect for human life but on opposition to the idea that God delegates authority to humans; this sect also reviled the human body and rejected the sacredness of marriage and the hierarchical structure of the Church.) In response, Pope Innocent III expressed what had become the generally accepted teaching: “We assert concerning the power of the state, that it is able to exercise a judgment of blood, without mortal sin, provided it proceed to inflict the punishment not in hate, but in judgment, not incautiously, but after consideration” (Profession of Faith Prescribed to the Waldensians, A.D. 1210).

In the thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas justified capital punishment using arguments borrowed in part from Aristotle. He wrote that each human being can be seen as part of the whole organism of human society; when one part endangers the whole body, it must be amputated for the good of all. He added that while human beings have inherent dignity, criminals forfeit that dignity when they abandon the order of reason and become enslaved to their passions; society may kill them as it would kill dangerous beasts (Summa Theologiae, II-II, 64.2). This power could only belong to the civil authority, which has responsibility for the health of the whole community; no private person may inflict the death penalty (Summa Theologiae, 64.3).

Throughout this period, the use of capital punishment was also seen as beyond the purview of the Church, which wields only spiritual authority. Canon law prohibited clergy from involvement in such punishment. Interestingly, St. Thomas’s explanation for this limitation was that ministers of the Gospel should imitate their Master, who returned good for evil even when attacked by others (Summa Theologiae, 64.4; cf. 1 Pt 2:21-23).
The teaching on capital punishment was reaffirmed in the sixteenth-century Roman Catechism commissioned by the Council of Trent: “The just use of this power, far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to the Commandment which prohibits murder. . . . [T]he punishments inflicted by the civil authority . . . give security to life by repressing outrage and violence” (Pt. III, “The Fifth Commandment”).

Here the death penalty was not embraced without reservation – it could not be used out of malice or a thirst for revenge, but only when judged to be the sole adequate means of ensuring public safety.
Modern Development • The development of a more critical assessment of capital punishment in recent times has several sources.
First, at a time when the Second Vatican Council has given new emphasis to the lay vocation and the call to holiness directed to all believers, it seems strange that only clergy should imitate Jesus by abstaining from involvement in executions. Surely the call to forgive enemies and return good for evil is addressed to all Christians.

Second, the development of the Church’s social teaching has deepened her understanding of the inherent dignity of the human person – a dignity that is inalienable and hence cannot be absent even from evildoers. Nor can that dignity be sacrificed in the alleged pursuit of a social good. Contrary to Thomas Aquinas’s idea, borrowed from Aristotle, no human being can be seen simply as a part to be sacrificed for the sake of a larger organism. The Church’s experience of totalitarianism in its horrendous modern forms has helped to clarify her thinking on the role of the individual in the state: “The social order and its development must constantly yield to the good of the person, since the order of things must be subordinate to the order of persons and not the other way around” (Vatican Council II, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, 26). With the development of modern secular democracies, the state can more readily be seen to derive its authority from the consent of the governed, not from a divine mandate giving it powers over life and death qualitatively different from those belonging to individuals and smaller groups.

Third, at a time when some modern societies seem increasingly willing to destroy even helpless and innocent life, the Church has seen a need to reemphasize the inviolability of innocent human life. The “consistent ethic of life” proposed by some on the basis of this insight seeks not to equate the convicted murderer with, for example, the helpless unborn child threatened with abortion, but to insist that respect for life should be the starting point for discussing both issues.

The development of modern prison systems has also produced workable alternatives to capital punishment capable of effectively preventing a criminal from endangering other people. From a Christian viewpoint, such alternatives take the better course of “rendering criminals harmless without definitively denying them the chance to reform” (Evangelium Vitae, 27).
For these reasons, several modern Popes have praised developed nations’ move away from the death penalty and have sometimes urged clemency in individual cases.

Two recent developments underscore this trend. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says public authority should limit itself to “bloodless means” if these are “sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons” (CCC 2267). Pope John Paul’s encyclical on human life similarly teaches that punishment “ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society.” He also takes the argument a step further by adding that today, “as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases [where execution is needed] are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (Evangelium Vitae, 56).

The Holy Father’s statement does not change the teaching of the Catechism, but applies it to the reality that modern nations can virtually always punish criminals and protect society from harm without resorting to the death penalty. The encyclical and the Catechism recognize an urgent need to place the power of the modern state within clear moral limits.
While the moral command “Thou shalt not kill” is often expressed as a ban on direct killing of the innocent, the root meaning of “innocent” here is “not attacking” rather than “not guilty of crime.” Individuals have a right to defend those under their care from unjust attack, even using deadly force if necessary; but any deliberately lethal act beyond what is needed to stop the attack is gravely wrong, because the person’s death is then willed directly instead of being the accepted but not intended side effect of a legitimate act of self-defense. Pope John Paul holds the state to this same norm against directly intended killing: If imprisonment can render murderers incapable of doing further harm, the state should not insist on a further right to directly take their lives.

One may envision undeveloped societies or a future state of the world in which penal systems are fragmented and society cannot protect its people without shedding blood. But the modern practice of the death penalty by developed industrial nations is difficult to justify. The practice is all the more ominous when, in the search for “humane” methods of execution, the state enlists medical professionals to administer lethal injections and thus violate their oath to use their medical skills only for healing.

Some secular objections to the death penalty may arise from indifference to the grave evil of violent crime, hostility to law enforcement, or psychological theories that deny personal responsibility for criminal acts. The Church’s measured critique of the modern use of capital punishment has nothing in common with such views or with the Waldensian heresy. That critique rests on the same principle often used to justify the death penalty – the dignity of human life – but suggests that a fully civilized society will give witness to that dignity even in the case of the convicted murderer. The issue is not only whether some acts deserve a penalty of death but whether a society hardens itself to the taking of life by choosing to inflict that penalty when there are nonlethal alternatives.

See: Authority; Homicide; Human Life, Dignity and Sanctity of; War.
Suggested Readings: CCC 2266-2267. John Paul II, The Gospel of Life, Evangelium Vitae, 9, 27, 40, 55-56. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 64, a. 2-4. G. Grisez, “Toward a Consistent Natural-Law Ethics of Killing,” American Journal of Jurisprudence (1970), pp. 67-70. J. Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics, pp. 128-131.

Richard Doerflinger




Russell Shaw. Our Sunday Visitor's Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine. Copyright © 1997, Our Sunday Visitor.

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Last Updated: Sunday, April 01, 2001 03:24:19 PM