Pope Francis Changes Roman Catholic Catechism on Death Penalty

First, the facts which Crux spells out well.

The Vatican announced on Thursday Pope Francis approved changes to the compendium of Catholic teaching published under Pope John Paul II.

“The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church now says on the death penalty, adding that the Church “works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”

This is a departure from what the document, approved under Pope John Paul II in 1992, says on the matter: “Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.”

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As it’s been re-written, the Catechism now also says that “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.”

Yet today, “there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very 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,” says the Catechism now, as it was approved by Pope Francis.

It’s for this reason, and “in light of the Gospel,” that the Church teaches that the practice is now inadmissible.

Let me say that I consider capital punishment an issue on which faithful Christians can differ.  However, the weight of Scripture and of the Fathers leans very much for capital punishment in certain instances.  Steve Skojec reviews that background well.

Thus for the Pope to change the Catechism so that it is dead against all capital punishment is the height of arrogance, dismissing much scripture, the Fathers, and the consciences of many faithful.  That the Catechism is then twisted into a lobbying tool, e. g. the church “works with determination for its abolition worldwide” is outrageous and an attack on the consciences of those faithful who are convinced that there are times when capital punishment is appropriate. 

As Rorate Caeli points out, this is at the very least an egregious abuse of authority:

The current Pope has far exceeded his authority: his authority is to guard and protect the doctrine that was received from Christ and the Apostles, not to alter it according to his personal views. We are reaping the rewards of an unchecked hyper-clericalism: the same hyper-clericalism that allowed for abuses of people like Theodore McCarrick to go ignored and unpunished and now allows for the recklessness of the alteration of established doctrine received from Christ and the Apostles…. He is in open violation of the authority recognized to him by Christ and His Church throughout the ages: he has abused his authority by pretending to have an authority that he has not.

I cannot add much to that at this time. Well, I could rant and rave. But, looking at the bigger picture, it reveals a grave weakness of the Roman Catholic Church that such a man as Bergoglio could become pope and then be very hard, if not impossible, to depose.  I fear that he is now doubling down on his tyranny against the faithful in his final years.  This arbitrary change in RCC teaching on capital punishment, bad enough in itself, could be the beginning of something even more awful.