Inadmissible: The Church and the Death Penalty

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COZ164: Should anyone be allowed to watch an execution live online? When US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan would face a firing squad on December 3, streamed for the world to see, politicians across Australia’s usually divided parties moved to block it. The stream has since been called off. The execution has not.

Lindsay Sant, Caroline Knight and Lino Saubolle use the case to ask what the Catholic Church actually teaches about the death penalty, and how that teaching developed. Lindsay starts with the Scripture passages used on each side: Genesis 9:6 and Romans 13 for capital punishment, and “You shall not kill,” Christ’s command to turn the other cheek, and the woman caught in adultery against it.

From there the history moves through the Fathers. Tertullian doubted a Christian could hold an office that sentenced people to death. Lactantius allowed no exception at all. St Augustine granted the state’s power but pleaded for the lives of the men who had attacked Catholic clergy in North Africa. St Thomas Aquinas defended execution by public authority only to protect the common good from grave danger, never as revenge.

The modern chapter answers a common complaint that Pope Francis changed Church teaching. St John Paul II wrote in Evangelium Vitae that cases justifying execution were “very rare, if not practically non-existent,” and called the death penalty “both cruel and unnecessary.” Benedict XVI urged leaders to work for its elimination. The 2018 revision of Catechism 2267 completed the development: human dignity is not lost even after the gravest crimes, modern prisons can protect the public while leaving room for repentance, and the Church now calls the death penalty inadmissible and works for its abolition worldwide. Lindsay closes with statements from Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the US bishops’ conference, and Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Military Services, who asked Catholics assigned to the firing squad to request to be excused.

Caroline and Lino respond from the heart: whether people who take a life can be released, stories of conversion on death row, the cruelty of a botched execution, and the long road to forgiveness for victims’ families. Caroline adds a quick tour from Hammurabi to the Tudors, when executions were staged as warnings.

Then the conversation takes off, literally. Caroline reports on Tesla’s next-generation Roadster, unveiled at SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas site with cold-gas thrusters borrowed from rocket technology, a sub-one-second sprint to 60 mph, an upside-down drive and a midair barrel roll. Is this the flying car The Jetsons promised, or an air-show stunt?

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Catholics of Oz