ROME — Pope Francis has called on Christians to pray specifically for the inmates on death row in the United States, asking that their sentence may be commuted.
Let us pray together “for those on death row in the United States,” the pontiff tweeted out to his more than 50 million followers in nine languages.
“Let us pray that their sentences may be commuted, changed,” he continued. “Let us think of these brothers and sisters of ours and ask the Lord for the grace to save them from death.”
While the pope has often spoken out against the death penalty, it is rare that he singles out one nation in his prayer intentions.
The Catholic Church’s teaching on the death penalty has evolved significantly over the past 25 years.
As a sovereign territory, the Vatican City State only abolished capital punishment in 1969 and for nearly all of the Church’s history the death penalty was accepted as a legitimate form of punishment for grave offenses. Over the centuries, hundreds of criminals were executed in the Papal States under the government of the popes.
Doctors of the Church, from Saint Ambrose to Augustine to Thomas Aquinas to Robert Bellarmine to Alphonsus Liguori all taught the moral legitimacy of capital punishment.
In recent years, however, the Catholic papal magisterium has shifted to a position where it no longer views the death penalty as a worthy form of punishment for today’s world. Pope John Paul II wrote in 1995 that governments should “not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity,” adding that, in the modern world, “such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”
Pope Francis has gone further still, declaring capital punishment to be “inadmissible” and “contrary to the gospel.” The Vatican’s doctrinal congregation declared that the new teaching on capital punishment “expresses an authentic development of doctrine that is not in contradiction with the prior teachings of the Magisterium.”
Importantly, however, the Catholic Church has never declared capital punishment to be intrinsically evil, like abortion or euthanasia, which would indeed be a direct contradiction of past teachings.
In 2004, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was in charge of the Vatican’s doctrinal office at the time, stated that there may be “a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.”
In that same memorandum, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that “if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion,” which is not the case regarding abortion or euthanasia.
Reactions varied to Pope Francis’s recent tweet asking for prayers that those on death row in the U.S. receive commuted sentences, with some praising the pope’s activism and others wondering aloud why he wasn’t praying instead for the criminals’ victims and their families, or for the millions of babies legally aborted every year.
