Capital punishment is not fundamentally unjust

THE EDITOR: Please accept this letter to your newspaper. The Editorial of the Catholic News have misrepresented the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church in its editorial of Sunday July 8, 2004: “the death penalty is fundamentally unjust and can no longer be defended.” It quotes the second edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) where it states that capital punishment should be a “rare” occurrence, but it omitted to quote the whole Section 2267. “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 an unjust aggressor.”

The CCC goes on to say that if non-lethal means are adequate to protect people’s safety, the civil authority should limit itself to those means. It is wrong for the Catholic News editorial to state that the death penalty is fundamentally unjust. As a careful reading of the CCC reveals, the church acknowledges the right of the state to inflict capital punishment. We can never equate capital punishment with an intrinsic wrong like abortion. It is unfortunate now that we should all be united in the fight to defend the innocent lives of unborn babies that the Catholic News writer should champion the cause of convicted murderers. Human pity is both a beautiful and dangerous emotion. Unless it is subjected to the sharp critique of moral judgement it may, and often does, pout our sympathies on the side of the murderer instead of on the side of the victim and the widow and children he has left behind. Unholy sympathy moves starry-eyed ladies to send flowers to the criminals awaiting execution while the innocent child he may have raped and mutilated scarcely rates a fugitive (short) impulse of pity.

Thus uninformed and unreasoning sympathy tends to take sides with the fallen and rebellious race of men against the Most High God. That He gave men life and intelligence, that He has been patient with them while they defied His laws, killed His only begotten Son and scorned His dying love, is overlooked completely. That men use their gift of free will to reject God, choose to murder with wide open eyes, persistently work to prepare themselves for the gallows and ultimately hell, seems not to matter to some people. In a welter of uncontrollable emotion they throw themselves on the side of God’s enemies. This is unbelief masquerading as compassion. I support the State’s right to capital punishment even though there are tears in my eyes as I see a grown man’s life snuffed out. I believe that the criminal is more likely to repent and gain an eternal life in heaven when faced with certain death rather than life in prison where he may die unexpectedly and have no time to repent.

In Summary: a) The Church has not changed its teaching on the right of the State to capital punishment; b) Capital punishment is a deterrent for criminals. We do not have to wait for a “study” to tell us so. I will end with Pope Pius XII (1952) “Even when it is a question of the execution of a man condemned to death, the State does not dispose of the individual’s right to live. Rather it is reserved to the public authority to deprive the criminal of the benefit of life, when already, by his crime, he has deprived himself of the right to life.”  Yours in Jesus and Mary

MICHAEL FITZPATRICK
Port-of-Spain