Pope Leo XIV on politics and the death penalty

From a couple of posts today at Twitter/X, commenting on Pope Leo’s address to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican:

A marvelous address by @Pontifex that condemns the pathologies of both the woke left and the jingoist right. Against the left, he denounces “the so-called ‘right to safe abortion,’” warns of “a subtle form of religious discrimination against Christians” by which they are “restricted in their ability to proclaim the truths of the Gospel for political or ideological reasons,” and decries “a new Orwellian-style language…which, in an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that are fueling it.” Against the right, he warns of “excessive nationalism," affirms "the importance of international humanitarian law," and notes that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force… peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion." And he decries the fact that on every side of our political culture and social media, “language is becoming more and more a weapon with which to deceive, or to strike and offend opponents” rather than used “to express distinct and clear realities unequivocally.”

(From Twitter/X)

Another part of the superb address by @Pontifex that calls for comment is a passing remark he makes about capital punishment. He expresses the hope that “efforts are made to abolish the death penalty, a measure that destroys all hope of forgiveness and renewal.”  This is brief but significant. A few points:

First, as my longtime readers know, I think it has been a mistake for recent popes to call for complete abolition of capital punishment. The first and most important problem here is that in the case of Pope Francis in particular, several of his statements on the topic were so extreme that they seemed to imply that the death penalty is per se or intrinsically evil. That would be heterodox, because it contradicts the consistent teaching of scripture and all previous popes. Neither John Paul II nor Benedict XVI taught such a thing or said anything that implied it. And neither does Pope Leo in this recent statement. He appeals instead to a certain prudential consideration – and a very important one that I’ll comment on in a moment – without making the mistake of implying that the death penalty is inherently wrong.

Second, the reason I think that the call for complete abolition is a mistaken prudential judgment is that I think that keeping the death penalty on the books as an option in at least some cases remains essential to protecting the public. This has nothing whatsoever to do with a bloodthirsty desire to find some rationale for killing people (contrary to a crude calumny often flung at me). It has to do with a number of empirical considerations, such as the following.

Though the social scientific arguments are a matter of controversy, there remains a strong case for holding that the death penalty has significant deterrence value. There are also contexts in which the most dangerous murderers remain a threat to others even when imprisoned. For example, they sometimes murder other prisoners or guards, or (in the case of mobsters) they order murders from behind prison walls. Since they are already in prison, there is no way to deter them from such actions without the potential threat of the death penalty. There are also cases in which prosecutors find the threat of capital punishment invaluable. For example, murderers who face the possibility of execution will sometimes cooperate (by revealing the identities of dangerous accomplices who remain at large, for example) in exchange for getting a lighter sentence. Abolishing capital punishment removes this essential tool for protecting the public. And so on.

Unfortunately, churchmen these days never address such considerations. They have no response and just ignore them. Reflexive opposition to the death penalty has by repetition been so “baked in” to the standard rhetoric that they just repeat it rather thoughtlessly. I don’t expect this to change any time soon, but at least Pope Leo has so far not been as extreme and irresponsible in his rhetoric on this topic as his predecessor was. And this brings me to the next, and very important, point which is:

Third, Pope Leo does not appeal in his address to rhetoric about human dignity. John Paul II did that, though always in a qualified way that made it clear that he was not saying that the death penalty was always or intrinsically contrary to human dignity. Francis did it in a rhetorically extreme and reckless way that did imply that it is inherently contrary to human dignity. Benedict’s approach, by contrast, was to appeal to another consideration, namely that refraining from executing the offender leaves open the possibility of his repentance. And that, rather than an appeal to human dignity, is the consideration Leo raises in his address.

This is very important. The appeal to the possibility of repentance has always, in my view, been the only really serious argument against capital punishment. And it is the only one that has strong roots in the tradition. The fixation on capital punishment’s alleged conflict with human dignity is a modern innovation (and a theologically problematic one, as I have argued elsewhere).

Now, even the appeal to the possibility of repentance is not, in my opinion, an absolutely compelling argument. For one thing, it is an argument that many in the tradition have considered but reject. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas considers it but rejects it as “frivolous,” on the grounds that someone who is at all likely to repent in the first place would be more likely to be moved to repentance by the fact that he will soon be executed, not less. Another consideration is that it is not just murderers, but also their potential victims, whose repentance we need to worry about. Suppose someone would have repented of his sins had he not been murdered. If the threat of the death penalty really would (for the reasons given above) have prevented his murderer from killing him, then abolishing the death penalty also closes the door to repentance for some people (namely the victims of murder).

Hence, whether to keep the death penalty on the books remains, of its very nature, a matter of prudential judgment about which reasonable people can disagree. There is simply no good case for speaking peremptorily as if it should absolutely never be an option (much less for treating it as intrinsically evil). All the same, Pope Leo’s more sober and traditional style of opposition to it is a welcome development.

(From Twitter/X)