During a recent visit to South Korea, a high-ranking Vatican official asked the prime minister, a Catholic, to abolish the country's death penalty. "The premier replied that he would consider it," Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said toward the end of a lecture in Seoul on Oct. 31.
The cardinal was speaking on The Church's Mission for an Integral Humanism in Solidarity to about 30 members of the Committee for Justice and Peace of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Korea (CBCK).
The lecture was one event during his Oct. 30-Nov. 2 visit. Prime Minister Daniel Han Seung-soo had invited him.
The two had become acquainted when Han was appointed president of the 56th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2001. At that time, Cardinal Martino headed the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations.
On Oct. 31, the cardinal visited Han at his office. There they discussed the death penalty in South Korea, and North Korea's human rights record, food shortage and nuclear weapons, according to the prime minister's office.
Later, during his talk, he said "it is important for the Church to highlight its teachings" on social issues, such as when "human rights are being violated."
Expounding on The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, Cardinal Martino stressed the role of the laity in the implementation of the Church's social teachings, referring to them as the compendium's "privileged partners."
"The lay faithful, if they are to be salt, light and leaven in the world, must work to make ever more evident those things that are authentically human in social relations, without fear and with an openness and a hopefulness for the future," he said.
"However, the Compendium is not the solution for social justice," added the cardinal, who is also president of Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People. "It is advice, suggestion, direction, and general indication for different situations for each society. Each Church needs to interpret the teachings separately, based on its situation."
He explained that the Compendium "is a document destined to sow its seeds very extensively, to fertilize the soil of the building of society over long periods of time, to motivate and guide the presence of Catholics in history, not merely in some extemporaneous manner."
According to the Vatican official, Pope John Paul II asked the pontifical council in 1999 to come up with the book, and the council presented it to him on Oct. 25, 2004.
The Korean Catholic Church translated the Compendium into Korean and released it on Nov. 5, 2005.
Commenting on the cardinal's remarks, Fr Hugo Park Jung-woo, secretary of the CBCK Committee for Justice and Peace, told UCA News on Nov. 3, "It is obviously right that the Church raises its voice on universal values and Church teachings."
The priest noted that the Korean Catholic Church has been "sending appropriate messages to society on such issues as violation of human rights, respect for life and abolition of death penalty."
As of December 2007, South Korea had gone 10 years since its last execution, making it an abolitionist country "in practice," as defined by human rights monitor Amnesty International.
In November 2004, more than half the lawmakers in the National Assembly introduced a bill to abolish the death penalty and replace it with life imprisonment without parole or commutation.
Conservative lawmakers, however, kept the bill from coming to a floor vote and it lapsed when the term of the 17th Assembly ended last May.
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(Source: CIN)