Here is my homily from Thursday, February 21st on what the Church teaches on Capitol Punishment and Genesis 9:6.
As we continue to read the Book of Genesis, we come to the remarkable section in which God sets up certain basic rules for our relationship with creation and, indeed, with our fellow man.
Following not too many days from our reading of the story of Cain and Abel, the scriptures are rather explicit about the taking of a human life: “If anyone sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; For in the image of God has man been made.”1
Now that seems like a pretty explicit endorsement of the Death Penalty, and, indeed the Church and the world, endorsed the Death Penalty, in the word of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “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.”2
In our own lifetime, however, the last several Popes have pointed out that something has changed. For, again in the words of the Catechism as revised just a year ago, “there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes.,” and “effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.”
“Consequently,” the Catechism concludes. “the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,’ and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.’3
So, is the Death Penalty permitted as a last resort? Yes, as it always has been. But in the presence of secure and lifetime incarceration, the Church holds it to be the wrong choice.
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1- Genesis 9:6.
2- Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2267.
3- Francis, Address to Participants in the Meeting organized by the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, 11 October 2017: L’Osservatore Romano, 13 October 2017, 5.
