Pope Francis to preside at Ash Wednesday Mass and traditional procession in Rome

Vatican City, Oct 12, 2017 / 09:37 am (CNA).- On Wednesday, Pope Francis told a gathering in Rome that the Catechism of the Catholic Church should significantly revise its treatment of the death penalty.

It’s no surprise that Francis proposed a stronger theological condemnation of capital punishment.  He’s criticized the practice throughout his papacy, as did his most immediate predecessors, Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. All three popes have pled for clemency when the execution of condemned prisoners is imminent, and all three have linked capital punishment to the “culture of death” and the “throwaway culture” they’ve criticized.  All three have called for nations to abolish the death penalty.

The Church’s official position on the death penalty is nuanced. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that the “Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty,” assuming a criminal’s guilt is sufficiently established, and only when execution seems to be the only just way of protecting public safety.  

In his landmark encyclical Evangelium Vitae, issued in 1995, John Paul wrote that the punishment of criminals should focus on rehabilitation, while also ensuring the common good – public order and safety. He opposed capital punishment “except in cases of absolute necessity,” when a community would have no other means to protect itself.

Because of the resources available for modern and secure penal systems, John Paul said that today, “such cases are very rare, if practically non-existent.”

In fact, the Catechism was formally revised in 1997 to reflect the teaching of Evangelium Vitae.

The gist of the Church’s current teaching on the death penalty is this: the state has the right to execute criminals, if there is no doubt about that the crime was grave and the offender is guilty. The state cannot justly execute a criminal if it can protect the common good and public safety equally well through non-lethal means. It is the job of the state to judge its own civil conditions and capacity for punishment, in order to determine how to apply those principles, but, when doing so, it should take seriously the moral direction of popes and bishops who have repeatedly said that the death penalty seems unnecessary in the context of developed nations.

On Wednesday, Francis proposed a strikingly different vision. He said that the death penalty “is in itself contrary to the Gospel.” For many theologians, this language, and the idea that the death penalty “in itself” is contrary to the Gospel, has evoked the theological concept of “intrinsically evil acts,” a group which includes torture, rape, lying, abortion, and sexual immorality.

The distinction is important. Intrinsically evil acts are understood to be wrong in all cases, regardless of the circumstances, intention, or rationale. The morality of other kinds of acts is judged, in part, by circumstances. The traditional teaching on the death penalty puts it in the latter category; the morality of a particular execution is partially determined, as the Catechism explains, by the state’s ability to secure the common good in other ways. 

Classifying capital punishment as an intrinsically evil act would say that there are no circumstances, in any time and place, in which it can be justified.

Francis’ speech recognized this distinction. He explained that thinking about the death penalty in a new way is the result of the development of social doctrine.

“We are not in the presence of some contradiction with the teaching of the past,” he explained, “because the defense of the dignity of human life from the first moment of conception until natural death has always been found in the teaching of the Church.

“The harmonious development of doctrine, however, requires that we [now] leave out arguments which now appear decisively contrary to the new understanding of Christian truth,” namely, the circumstantial qualifiers which guide current moral reasoning about executions.

Francis proposes that because the Church has gradually developed a deeper understanding of human dignity, over time, we are now able to recognize that execution is always immoral.

The development of doctrine is a thorny theological concept. Theologians have already begun asking whether Francis’ proposal represents a development of prior positions, or a rupture from them. This debate will be complex, likely contentious, and not quickly resolved. But given increased attention to the death penalty in the last half-century, it is an important question to resolve.  

Francis did not announce which Vatican offices would be responsible for the reforms he proposed. Past revisions have included the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is likely to take a lead role in this process. But the Holy Father has a penchant for involving voices beyond traditional structures, so consultation may include some unexpected figures.

There is an additional factor of interest for American readers. In 2014, Pope Francis said that the use of long-term solitary confinement is a kind of torture. This position is also held by many psychologists, who have noted that solitary incarnation can have a profoundly negative impact on mental health. Long-term solitary confinement is the most prominent alternative to the death penalty proffered by American corrections officials, especially for habitual unmanageable inmates.

If long-term solitary confinement is a kind of torture, and thus an intrinsically evil act, it can never be morally justified. If execution also begins to be classified as an intrinsically evil act, Catholics will have to think carefully and creatively about very different approaches to criminal justice in the United States. Spurring that thinking may be a part of what Pope Francis has in mind.

Death penalty opponents across the world have cheered Pope Francis’ comments on capital punishment. But his remarks on Thursday might also reveal something about the Pope’s understanding of doctrine’s development, a theological issue with effect on many other elements of the pontiff’s teaching, including the already controversial Amoris Laetitia. That conversation will probably make fewer headlines, but for the Church, its implications could be significant.

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The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. / Credit: Jorge Lascar via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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Vatican City, May 9, 2018 / 02:46 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis said Wednesday that nothing can take away a person’s baptism or the salvation and identity they gain as a child of God, which is why the Church only allows for the sacrament to be administered once.

“Baptism is not repeated because it imprints an indelible spiritual sign: This sign is never erased by any sin, though sin prevents baptism from bringing the fruit of salvation,” the pope said during his May 9 general audience.

Just as parents give their children earthly life, the Church gives spiritual life through baptism, making each person a son of God through Jesus Christ, he said, explaining that at the moment of baptism, God tells each person that “you are my beloved child.”

“This paternal voice, imperceptible to the ear but well audible to the heart of those who believe, accompanies us for our entire lives, without abandoning us,” he said, adding that this is why the Church believes in only one baptism for salvation.

The belonging a person obtains from baptism “is something you never lose,” Francis said, even if a person sins with something as serious as murder, their belonging to God and his Church never goes away, “he continues to be a son.”

Even though everyone is a sinner and there is a great need for conversion in life of each person, “God never rejects his children,” he said, and asked the crowd to repeat the phrase with him out loud.

Speaking to pilgrims who braved a rainy forecast to join him for the audience in St. Peter’s Square, the pope continued his catechesis on baptism, focusing this week on the moment a person is actually baptized when the priest invokes the Trinity, saying “I baptize you in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

He then pointed to the biblical passage in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans in which the apostle asked: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

The baptismal font is the place where one actually rises with Christ, he said, adding that in baptism, “the old man is buried, with his deceptive passions, so that he is reborn as a new creature.”

“At the same time you die and are born, and the same salutary wave becomes for you tomb and mother,” the pope said, quoting St. Cyril of Jerusalem.

Man’s rebirth as a new creation, then, naturally “demands that the man corrupted by sin is reduced to dust,” he said, adding that the images of the tomb and of the maternal womb referred to by St. Cyril are “incisive” phrases which express the reality of what happens during baptism.

To be incorporated in the body of Christ through baptism means one must also conform to him, Francis said, adding that the action of the Holy Spirit during the sacrament purifies, sanctifies and justifies the person in order to bring them into one body united to Christ.

This dynamic is expressed when the priest anoints the baptized person with oil after reciting the phrase: “God himself consecrates you with the chrism of salvation so that inserted into Christ, priest, king, and prophet, you will always be members of his body for eternal life.”

Pope Francis closed his address saying the entire vocation of a Catholic can be summed up as the necessity to live united to Jesus Christ and his Church “in order to carry out the same mission in this world, bringing fruits which last forever.”

“Animated by the only Spirit, the entire People of God participate in the functions of Jesus Christ, priest, prophet and king, and carry the responsibility of the mission and service that derive from them,” he said.

To participate in the kingly and prophetic priesthood of Christ, he said, means above all “to make oneself a free offering to God, giving testimony through a life of faith and charity, putting them at the service of others in the example of the Lord Jesus.”

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