Even in these latter times, tons of safeguards have been added to our penal system, so that instances of capital punishment aren’t seen as barbarism. Doubtless, even some people who in some objective moral sense deserved it were people who reformed their lives—such as they were—and took responsibility for what they did.
Let me back up and say that it could never have been intrinsically evil, that is, evil in its very object. Holy Mother Church executed enough notorious murderers that she wasn’t about to impugn her moral authority. By God’s grace, the Catholic Church remains the last best hope for humanity, not only for eternal salvation in Christ, but for a society worth living in.
Too many people think even high-level theology and ethics is a Choose Your Own Adventure Book. And that Church discussion is just politics with a longer timescale. I have no time for that, re: capital punishment. We’re even caught between the dignity of the condemned, and the barbarism of their acts. That’s why it’s so ritualistic. It’s been simulated on TV and feature films enough that ordinary folks know what they would see. Why don’t we honor the dignity of people by not doing what they did to someone else? Is that a mercy you don’t think you could show? That’s exactly why we should.
This doesn’t even account for the psychological damage that results from participating in this dark liturgy. And people might say that it represents how soft we’ve become. Irrelevant, in the end. Because we have to deal with what we have, not with what we wish we’d have.
Any Christian who believes in Hell, by the way, needs to think deeply about why they want the particular judgment to happen faster. Hell is hell. It’s what stupid people compare wars to, though to be fair, that might be the closest human beings can get to it, without literally dying and facing the wrath of God for all eternity.
I have to deal with Genesis 9:6. Google it. I don’t want to quote it. But I have to answer that verse and its interpretation as a timeless moral principle. You know the timeless part? The dignity of a human being. That in aggression, if you take a life, you deserve to bleed out and die right there. But people don’t get what they deserve all the time. Thank God.
Ancient Israel became a theocracy. I still have the phrase “Church-state nexus” rattling in my brain from days in seminary.
We don’t have to do that.
I can absolutely promise that Jesus isn’t mad at the long series of popes who led the Church to this conclusion. Even if somehow you’re right, and Pope Francis is the John Kerry of popes, you’re still wrong. I’m offended that I wrote that sentence. And if keeping a person locked in a room is harder for a nation than killing them, that’s not a nation; it’s a mob with some land.
Isn’t it weird? Doesn’t it sound weird: you take a person out of the not well furnished room where they live—pretty close to a bunch of other bad people of dodgy character—it is a prison—to another room, where a guy says some words over him/her like he’s a priest, and some strong men strap him to a table or a chair, and he/she’s invited to say some words—What are we waiting to hear, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”?—and then the State takes the life of an otherwise healthy person. Meanwhile, people are watching this person die! Like, Pete’s sake, if you need to watch an execution, go to Mass/Divine Liturgy. Jesus doesn’t mind. He won. Funny’s not the word, but it’s way more joyous. As it should be!
It never did fix anything, executing people. Some people are so into it that they behave like the moral law will collapse, if we simply acknowledge that this always had more costs than benefits. “Limited government, except for the ritualistic killing” should sound crazy.
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