The recent friction over Pope Leo’s comments concerning the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago and his plans to award Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois an honor for his efforts on behalf of immigrants, despite supporting abortion throughout his career, probably mark the end of a “honeymoon” period for the new pontiff.
Durbin’s refusal to accept the award ended the controversy, but it represents the first time our new pontiff has stepped into controversial territory, and it is notable for that reason, among others.
I am not at all surprised His Holiness intervened to provide cover for Cardinal Cupich, since he is both a friend and, by all accounts, a benefactor—as Cupich is believed to have played a role in his rise to the throne of St. Peter.
But his comments are revealing for other reasons.
In them, His Holiness repeated opinions about the death penalty which confirm that, at least on that issue (and others), he is indeed a “progressive” who appears to equate the death penalty with abortion in terms of moral gravity.
It is also revealing because of the way he framed the issue using political terms, “prolife” being a term associated with public policy and not Catholic doctrine.
This is one of the most notable things to me about the way Catholic opponents of the death penalty discuss the issue. They do not normally put the issue in terms that have to do with salvation and the eternal fate of our souls. If they did, they would say something like this: “Once the Church may have endorsed the death penalty, but its understanding has progressed to the point where it understands now that the death penalty is wrong because it violates human dignity. Therefore, it is a mortal sin, and therefore no one can receive Communion without repenting of it; and if they die without having repented such a heinous sin, they will merit eternal damnation.”
The problem is that this is clearly not what Catholic opponents of the death penalty—at least many of them—mean when they condemn it.
Most death penalty abolitionists do not really believe it is a mortal sin and that a Catholic governor who executes a convicted criminal must repent of it in confession. No, what they really mean is that the death penalty somehow violates the person’s political rights as a member of society—that every person has an absolute right not to be executed no matter how awful their crimes, presumably because this would detract from or remove altogether their human dignity.
Rarely do such advocates ever explain why the execution of a person removes this dignity, at least in ways that I have found convincing.
Often, they frame their opposition to the death penalty in terms of affiliation: “You can’t be Catholic and support the death penalty,” or, as the pope recently opined, support for the death penalty cannot be considered “prolife.”
Pope Francis famously altered the Catechism to say that the death penalty was now “inadmissible” in Catholic teaching, a term that has no precedent in Catholic theology and no real theological meaning. It sounds like a legal term, like that in Anglophone legal systems regarding the admissibility of evidence.
Popes since John Paul II have created the impression in the minds of many Catholics—and many outside the Catholic Church—that the Church believes the death penalty to be intrinsically immoral.
But they have done so while using language that does not convey a clear theological rationale for such opposition.
One reason they do not use such terms is that doing so would damage the credibility of the Church’s teaching authority. Anyone with a knowledge of Church history knows that the Church has taught the liceity of the death penalty for most of her history.
The Papal States also once had their own executioner, and the death penalty was still part of Vatican City law until 1969.
To come out and say that the death penalty is a sin would be too obvious a contradiction with past teaching. This is one practical reason why those opposed to the death penalty use so many circumlocutions to explain their opposition.
This is especially true of those figures—you can guess which ones—who claim that the death penalty is immoral precisely because it would upend Catholic moral teaching. If you can contradict the Church’s historic teachings on the death penalty, you can do it on more sensitive matters.
The ones motivating most of these people are almost certainly the “pelvic” issues which have consumed Catholic progressives since the 1960s. Such advocates sometimes even make the connection explicit if you pay close attention to them.
I do not mean to impugn the motives of honest opponents of the death penalty in saying this. John Paul II and many others who came of age in Europe during the first half of the 20th century and its attendant traumas cite the horrors of that era as having informed their opposition, and many sincerely are repulsed by the idea of taking a person’s life in light of the devastation men have visited upon each other in the modern era. This is understandable and, in some ways, admirable.
The problem with such good souls (I know a few) is that they use the same logic to make their case that proponents of any number of heresies use: the modern world is so different from what preceded it, society has changed so much, our experiences are so different from that of our ancestors (there are numerous variations on this theme) that the Church must change or alter its teaching on (fill in the blank).
No matter how you nuance it—and popes like John Paul II tried very hard to say the death penalty was no longer necessary but still not necessarily sinful—the message that reaches most people is that the Catholic Church condemns the death penalty.
Of course, the Church has never taught that every application of the death penalty is licit; but on morally charged issues, most people are seemingly incapable of understanding them in anything but the most simplistic and absolute terms.
The push to delegitimize the death penalty without declaring it to be a sin is part of the wider effort to convince “enlightened opinion” that the Church has caught up to modern society which has so occupied Church leaders since the 1960s.
(This is ironic given that so much of the criticism of the death penalty is directed against countries like the United States and very little against the People’s Republic of China, which uses it far more often, though statistics are not available since the PRC never provides them.)
Leo’s embrace of the moral equivalence of abortion and the death penalty is a sign that the Church is still mired in the debates of the 20th century.
I have written before about the “Truce of ’68,” the informal agreement that has kept the Church from falling to pieces since Vatican II, which allows dissent from Church teaching as long as one does not openly push for formal, doctrinal changes.
Pope Francis clearly wanted to put an end to this arrangement, but Pope Leo is a very different person, and it appears he wants to renew that truce, with all that entails.
This should not surprise anyone. Progressives rejoiced at his election for a reason, and they hope he will allow them to consolidate the institutional gains they made under Francis while not further stirring up divisions in the way Francis did.
Whereas Francis appeared impatient with the kind of verbal gymnastics the “Truce of ’68” required, Pope Leo appears to value them as a means of maintaining the status quo.
That truce cannot last forever, but if it does come to an end in Leo’s pontificate, he is not likely to be the cause of it.