While Catholicism today, in the era of felt banners and “dialogue”, is known for being eminently humanistic, it might surprise the contemporary world to learn that the Church for a long time knew that man’s rights had limits.
Justice meant more than mere rehabilitation.
It was also retribution, sometimes fierce, upon the wicked.
In continuity with the understanding of the Old Testament and St Paul’s teaching that the state does “not bear the sword for no reason” but with “wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer”, Church Fathers to nineteenth century popes were entirely concordant in their support for the death penalty.
In Rome today, capital punishment is a distant memory. As the Enlightenment swept across Europe, it was abolished shortly after Italian unification in the nineteenth century.
Yet few Romans or Catholics might realise that, had they visited the Eternal City to see the Holy Father on pilgrimage down the centuries, they might have been greeted by a very different sight indeed.
Executions were not uncommonly carried out in the Papal States, under the aegis of the Roman Pontiff, regularly and lawfully, frequently within a stone’s throw of St Peter’s.
The faithful ought not to be scandalised when they learn that a complete record of this practice is found in the writings of Giovanni Battista Bugatti, the official executioner in Rome from 1796 to 1864.
Over nearly seven decades, Bugatti served under successive popes, Pius VI, Pius VII, Gregory XVI, and Pius IX, and recorded 516 executions in a personal notebook that survives to this day.
His entries assiduously record the names, crimes, dates, locations, methods, and even the last words of the prisoners condemned to die by his hand.
Each is further corroborated by judicial and police records.
Bugatti was known at home and abroad colloquially as Mastro Titta. A short man with a grim reputation, he lived in Trastevere, on the western bank of the Tiber, which he would only cross when summoned to carry out an execution.
On those days, he walked openly through the city to sites such as Castel Sant’Angelo or Piazza del Popolo, escorted by guards.
Executions were public events, attended by crowds and noted in diaries, travelogues, and contemporary Roman newspapers.
The Papal States, which governed much of central Italy from the Middle Ages until 1870, operated as a conventional European state.
They maintained courts, prisons, police forces, and penal codes. Capital punishment was applied primarily for murder, violent banditry, and crimes considered grave threats to public order.
Methods were little different from those prevailing across Europe. Early in Bugatti’s career, beheading by axe or sword was standard. During the French occupation of Rome, the guillotine was introduced.
When papal rule was restored, the guillotine was retained and remained in use until the end of Bugatti’s service.
Hanging was also employed. None of this was historically unusual. France’s last guillotine execution was that of Hamida Djandoubi, a torturer and murderer who forced his victims into prostitution, in 1977, more than a century after Bugatti’s death.
Britain abolished the practice somewhat earlier, hanging its final prisoner in 1964.
Papal involvement in the death penalty was, however, direct. In serious cases, death sentences required papal confirmation, but a few caveats should be kept in mind.
The death penalty was recognised as an, albeit unfortunate, service to the common good. As John L Allen recounts, Roman fathers would bring their offspring to spectate Mastro Titta on the days of his work.
When the deed was done, they would give a paternal slap on their son’s back, warning: “This could be you.”
Rome had been rife with crime in the sixteenth century. As a European capital it attracted the ambitious and was notoriously full of murderers and robbers, to the point that St Philip Neri felt compelled to re evangelise the city’s inhabitants. He later became known as “the Second Apostle of Rome”.
In this context, sources record that the vast majority of those condemned were not political opponents or heretics, but the most heinous criminals, deemed a threat to both their own souls and public order.
Moreover, Bugatti’s 516 executions may seem a bloodbath, but for perspective this would constitute around seven working days per year over the course of his very long career.
While the death penalty seems beyond the pale for many of us now, and some Christian writers suggest it to be in many ways the antithesis of our religion, this was not a sentiment shared by our forebears, and we should not be so quick to attribute this to ignorance.
The process did not wallow in a crude love of cruelty, death, violence, or gore. Many aspects of it were movingly humane.
Bugatti appears to have been personally pious and a frequent Mass goer. And while neither Titta, the people of Rome, nor the papacy expressed significant scruple about the line of work, they did not treat it lightly either.
Papal law mandated that executioners were paid a meagre wage, to “mark the vileness of the work”.
There existed an entire liturgy and process, steeped in Christian reconciliatory mercy and charity, which preceded any execution. It began with notices posted to Roman churches, asking Catholics to pray for the condemned.
On the day of the execution, the Pope himself would pray from his private chapel with special intention for the soul of the condemned.
A special order of monks, the Arciconfraternita della Misericordia, or Brotherhood of Mercy, which once counted Michelangelo among its members, would stay with the condemned for the final twelve hours of their life.
They would talk to and console the prisoner and pray with them, encouraging repentance, acceptance of God’s forgiveness, and reconciliation with their Creator and the Church through the sacraments, which were always offered.
To give the soul the best chance of avoiding the fires of hell, papal law decreed that no execution could take place until sundown if the penitent had not confessed. Bugatti’s diary shows that he was keenly interested in whether his victims died absolved or not.
Despite the fact that he was a local celebrity in his home city, and was observed in the flesh by figures such as Charles Dickens, Bugatti retired in 1864 and received a papal pension.
He spent his final years selling umbrellas and painted souvenirs near Castel Sant’Angelo. His list of executions sombrely ends with the comment: “So ends the long list of Bugatti. May that of his successor be shorter.”
What might seem to us barbaric and draconian was animated by a society which, unlike the naturalistic, materialist humanism of our age, did not hold this short earthly life to be all there is.
Though executions were not a desirable outcome, a mors bona Christiana, a good Christian death, was understood as a victory rather than a tragedy.
While Christ himself in the Gospel intervenes to protect the adulterous woman from being stoned to death, he also praises the Roman centurion, a violent agent of death on behalf of the state, as possessing greater faith than any in Israel.
St John the Baptist likewise never instructed the soldiers who came to him to abandon their posts. The Old Testament, meanwhile, on many occasions prescribes the death penalty.
While there was debate in the early Church about what proper Christian practice entailed in this matter, from very early on figures such as Pope Leo I and St Augustine taught in defence of the death penalty.
The Church’s Angelic Doctor, St Thomas Aquinas, expanded upon this. The Catechism of the Council of Trent taught that civil authorities could impose capital punishment without violating the Fifth Commandment, which prohibits murder rather than killing, as did the Catechism of St Pius X.
Even the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England state: “The Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences.”
In the twentieth century, Catholic teaching increasingly emphasised the dignity of the human person, the availability of non lethal means of protection, and the risk of judicial error. Recent revisions to the Catechism reflect these concerns, framed in light of contemporary circumstances.
Is it possible that we have lost the charitable sense of the era of Mastro Titta? We advocate for criminals to escape the gallows, but do comparatively little for the sake of their immortal souls.
Have we become too humanistic, forgetting that this life is temporary, that the worst criminals ought to be deterred from terrorising the innocent, and that punishment is deserved for the gravest offences?
One could argue that today we place too great an importance on this world, but not enough on the one beyond.
The death penalty once served as a stark reminder of our last end, encouraging victims and observers alike to reflect upon the fate of their souls and to set their houses in order.
“Fear not those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Mt 10:28).
What remains beyond dispute is the historical record. For centuries, the papacy governed territories in which capital punishment was lawfully imposed, publicly carried out, and theologically defended within the parameters of Catholic moral teaching.
Giovanni Battista Bugatti’s long and well documented career provides an unusually precise account of how popes and faithful Catholics alike recognised the legitimacy of the death penalty not merely in theory, but in prayer and on the streets of Rome itself.