God has delivered your enemy into your grasp this day.
— 1 Samuel 26: 8
Sometimes the need for revenge gets the better of our higher angels but not in today’s first reading. Saul had tried to kill David on several occasions. However, David, perhaps sensing Saul’s change of personality over the years to something we would call today, psychotic, refuses to put him to death. It is in this light, that we examine the revision to the Church’s teaching on the death penalty and human dignity.
On August 1, 2018, Pope Francis approved a new revision of paragraph number 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, according to which “a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state, thus “the death penalty is inadmissible.” On many occasions, Pope John Paul II intervened for the elimination of capital punishment describing it as “cruel and unnecessary” and Pope Benedict XVI appealed for “the attention of
society’s leaders to the need to make every effort to eliminate the death penalty.”
The Catechism text as revised reads as follows:
Recourse to the death penalty 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.
Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission ofvery serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. Lastly, more 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 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” [1] and sheworks with determination for its abolitionn worldwide.
([1] 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.)
As today’s responsorial psalm states, “God redeems life from destruction.” Advocate to end the death penalty, join Catholics for Abolition in North Carolina.
Barbara Molinari Quinby, MPS, Director
Office of Human Life, Dignity, and Justice Ministries
Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral Raleigh, NC