Christianity and the Death Penalty

"[I]n 1992 the Catechism suggested current Catholic thought on the death penalty was not what strong proponents of capital punishment wish it to be. Then in 1996 further changes were made to the Catechism to bring it in line with Evangelium Vitae. It was at a press conference announcing these changes that Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, used the phrase “a development of doctrine” to describe how the death penalty was being perceived in Rome.

The “development” is less clear than it may seem. Through the Middle Ages, Christian philosophers and theologians developed a set of careful distinctions concerning courts and penalties, and one of their central aims was to limit the punishments that might be imposed by otherwise unconstrained rulers. But something odd happened during the Enlightenment. Voltaire came across the anti-death-penalty arguments of an Italian criminologist named Cesare Beccaria and promptly used them, with enormous success, as yet another weapon in his war against Christianity. The traditional Christian teachings, which had typically functioned to restrict the severity of criminal sentences, were suddenly declared to have been teachings in favor of torture and the death penalty.

So successful was the attack that many commentators today still accept Voltaire’s terms. Whether they defend or reject the death penalty, they all seem to believe the patristic and medieval writers accepted capital punishment not merely as necessary at the time but as required by justice at all times. The current position of the Catechism thus appears a radical change from earlier positions—as it may be, from the positions of some theological figures, but not as many as the historical commentaries on capital punishment would lead us to suppose."

Lv Commonwealth Conservative