NOTE: This article, originally published in 2023, is being posted now in response to Pope Leo’s equivocation of the death penalty to abortion.
In his annual meeting with the diplomatic corps of ambassadors accredited to the Holy See on January 9, 2023, Pope Francis has doubled down on his novel teaching on the death penalty: “The death penalty cannot be employed for a purported State justice, since it does not constitute a deterrent nor render justice to victims, but only fuels the thirst for vengeance. I appeal, then, for an end to the death penalty, which is always inadmissible since it attacks the inviolability and the dignity of the person, in the legislation of all the countries of the world” (source).
This article is not going to be another attempt to prove that the Catholic Church has always (and indeed infallibly) taught the permissibility of the death penalty under certain circumstances. That project has already been done many times,[1] and I have written about it at length elsewhere.[2] Rather, I would like to focus on the dilemma into which those who attempt to defend Pope Francis’s novel teaching on the death penalty—reflected in an official change to the Catechism—necessarily fall. The pro-Francis apologists can’t possibly “win” in this scenario.
For either:
(A) Pope Francis is attempting to change the constant teaching of the Church—or, more precisely, of Scripture and Tradition—that the death penalty is not intrinsically immoral, and indeed is justifiable and justified under certain circumstances; or (B) He is “merely” stating that there is no longer any possible prudential situation in the entire world in which the death penalty may be justified in order to defend the common good of society from malefactors.[3]
It’s pretty obvious that if (A) is the case, then the pope is at least materially heretical.
However, if (B) is the correct interpretation, he is equally in error, because not even the most extreme ultramontanist imaginable ever maintained that the papacy is endowed with a political prudence superior to and inclusive of the political prudence of all princes, presidents, prime ministers, parliaments, legislatures, and courts of the entire world, such that he is capable of knowing, in detail, what is right and just in every possible social circumstance. (Heck, during the era of the Papal States no one ever said that the pope was guaranteed to know what is politically expedient for the Papal States, let alone for the rest of the globe!) Moral actions are, after all, always about the particular: one can act only in the hic et nunc, with all of its circumstances. It would be nonsense to say “generally speaking, the death penalty is never admissible in any case, but there might be exceptions.”
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