On the Death Penalty, and the Consistent Life Ethic

The discourse is on the death penalty again.

My veteran readers know that I am against the death penalty because I’m a Catholic who tries to hold a consistent life ethic. That’s what Catholics are supposed to do, and I’m doing my best. So I wasn’t at all surprised when Pope Leo XIV reiterated what we already knew last Tuesday: “The Catholic Church has con­sis­tent­ly taught that each human life, from the moment of con­cep­tion until nat­ur­al death, is sacred and deserves to be pro­tect­ed. Indeed, the right to life is the very foun­da­tion of every oth­er human right… the death penal­ty is inad­mis­si­ble because it is an attack on the invi­o­la­bil­i­ty and dig­ni­ty of the per­son.”

There are no surprises in that statement. Pope Leo is reiterating what Pope Francis already stated, which is an understandable evolution of our doctrine about the sanctity of life. And for those of you who don’t remember how doctrine works, I’ll repeat what I said when discussing just war theory recently: doctrine is a thing that evolves. That means that we’re constantly refining and evolving the way we express a truth and apply it to what we learn about the world around us. The truths of our faith and the things God expects of us don’t actually change; we change when we realize we’ve been expressing the truth or acting in accordance with it in the wrong way. For awhile, the Church did execute people and permit secular governments to do the same. Now, we’ve evolved our doctrine on that point to better respect the sanctity of human life. We know we ought to respect the sanctity of life, and we’re now articulating a way we can do it better. Something that used to be considered permissible sometimes, is now forbidden. That’s not a contradiction to what we used to believe. It’s an evolution of doctrine. Direct killing is always wrong, and now we accept that the death penalty is direct killing.

Of course, the pope’s unsurprising statement led to all kinds of commentary on the internet. Many people were pleased. Some were confused. And a handful were downright angry. It’s those angry people I can’t understand.

I can’t wrap my brain around people who get ANGRY when the Church declares the death penalty inadmissible.

It’s not that the death penalty isn’t something that should inspire strong emotions, of course. I completely understand the people who are angry that the death penalty exists and are doing everything they can to stop it. I share that position. I think the thought of human beings deliberately killed ought to make you sick. I can also understand the people who say that, regrettably, there are times when we simply must execute a dangerous convicted criminal for the good of society, but killing in itself is never in itself a GOOD thing. That’s an ethical position which I do not share, and it’s not the Church’s position at this point in history, but I see where they’re coming from.

But I can’t understand people who get offended and upset when told the death penalty is inadmissible.

The people who get so angry are not, themselves, executioners. I’ve never met one who was the family member of a murder victim with the perpetrator on death row either (though I’m sure those exist). The people who get so angry are not, in any way, affected by whether there’s a death penalty or not. If every single prisoner on death row had their sentence commuted today, it would not change their day to day life at all. They don’t have a personal stake in this issue. And yet they’re angry. They are angry that somebody they don’t know, has been deprived of being allowed to inject lethal chemicals, break the neck, or shoot bullets into somebody else they don’t know.

Why?

If you care about other people in a normal way, you’ll probably say that nobody should ever be executed, or you might say there’s an exception and a reason why a handful of people must be killed for the greater good. We can have a debate about that because we’re both arguing with the same goal in mind: the good of human beings. If you don’t care about other people at all, you might say that you don’t mind if somebody you’ve never met dies in a building you’ve never been to before, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience you personally. I can’t really argue with you about that, because we have such drastically different worldviews, but I can see where you’re coming from. But if a person gets angry and offended because someone who has no bearing on their life whatsoever  ISN’T going to be strapped to a gurney and killed, I don’t even know what to say about that. It’s not just that it’s evil. It also makes no sense.

It makes even less sense that these vehemently pro-death-penalty Catholics invariably identify as pro-life.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t be. I’m also against abortion. Remember, I’m talking about a consistent life ethic here. But bear with me. These people stridently insist that every pregnant woman has to carry that baby to term, even if they have hyperemesis gravardium and can’t get out of bed for months, or if they’re fleeing a violent man who might try to control them by getting custody of the baby, or if they’re so young they’re not a woman at all but only a girl whose body might not be able to give birth properly.  There’s no exception to that. When it comes to a woman or girl with a baby inside of her, they believe that that person must do everything she possibly can to keep the baby alive or she’s in mortal sin. If I didn’t know any other position these people held, I’d assume that their ethical belief was that every human being must do everything they can to safeguard the life of every other human being, no matter how much it hurts or what we risk, or else we’re in mortal sin. In that case, they ought to be against the death penalty. But they’re not only not against it, they’re adamant that it ought to happen.

How do they reconcile those two beliefs?

They expect a woman, or sometimes a girl, to go through all of that suffering to keep a person alive. But they are angry at the thought of another person who costs them nothing and isn’t bothering them NOT getting killed.

Why?

Do they just really like the thought of other people suffering?

Is it not LIFE they care about, but rather being as harsh and demanding to as many people as they can?

That’s the only conclusion I can come to, and it makes me sick.