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Today, Attorney General William Barr announced that he was reversing a moratorium on the federal death penalty. This decision is gravely injurious to the common good, as it effaces the God-given dignity of all human beings, even those who have committed terrible crimes.
Last August, Pope Francis revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church to say that capital punishment is “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”
As it happened, I was scheduled to give a talk on capital punishment at an American Bar Association conference that very day.
Here’s some of what I said: “When the state chooses to perform executions even when there are ways to protect society, it has concluded that the right to life is conditional after all.”
“Such a state, even if it does not intend to do so, inevitably weakens the ability of its citizens to defend the sacredness of human life against all the threats that imperil life in the present day.”
“A state that refuses to use the death penalty advances a culture of life with great power of witness precisely because it protects the lives of those who have been judged least worthy of its vindication.”
I invite you to read the rest here: archchicago.org/en/statement/-…
