Capital Punishment: It’s About Both the Penalty and the Death

National Catholic Register, 22 December 2020

It matters if the penalty is just or unjust, although it could be argued that today capital punishment is ‘inadmissible’ because the modern state is no longer competent to administer it

In the 25 years since Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), Catholic teaching on the death penalty has been more and more about the death, and less and less about the penalty.

A recent tweet from Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas, demonstrated that quite vividly: “How was the execution of Brandon Bernard any different from Herod’s state sanctioned execution of John the Baptist?”

Brandon Bernard was executed on Dec. 10, the latest federal execution after a moratorium on the federal death penalty was lifted in the summer. He was convicted of the killing 22 years ago of two youth ministers and torching their bodies. He had a religious conversion while in prison; Catholic bishops, as per usual with any execution, asked for clemency.

If the death penalty is about the death, and not the penalty, then all executions by the civil authority are alike; John the Baptist is Brandon Bernard is Thomas More is Anne Boleyn is Dietrich Bonhoeffer is Adolf Eichmann. 

But if one considers the penalty, then it matters whether the penalty is just or unjust, and who is administering it. To be executed for dissenting from a criminal regime is quite different than being executed for being part of that regime. Herod did not think that he was doing justice; those who sentenced Bernard thought that they were. 

Bishop Flores is too sophisticated a thinker — the recently elected chairman of the USCCB doctrine committee — to be contained by Twitter, so he expanded upon his thinking for America.

Bishop Flores argues, like St. John Paul II and Pope Francis, against the death penalty by addressing secondary reasons, passing over the primary reason, the propriety of the penalty. I hope he might find my arguments here a friendly disagreement on the argument, even as we agree on the final position.

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