Madam, - The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 said in Canon 18 that clerics may neither pronounce nor execute a sentence of death. Nor may they act as judges in extreme criminal cases, or take part in matters connected with judicial tests and ordeals. I don't think that this is exactly a condemnation of the death penalty, as Prof Finbarr McAuley (April 26th) deduces. It just keeps clerics out of the business.
And even if it were, the point was missed by those running the Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834). Nor did it save Joan of Arc, who was tried by an ecclesiastical court at Rouen led by Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, and then burned at a stake in 1431. In 1920, St Joan was canonised by Pope Benedict XV.
The Roman Catechism (Catechism of St Pius V), issued in 1566, three years after the end of the Council of Trent (1543-1563), taught (Instruction on the Fifth Commandment) that the power of life and death had been entrusted by God to civil authorities and that the use of this power, far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to the fifth commandment!
According to Prof James J. Megivern in his book The Death Penalty: An Historical and Theological Survey (Paulist Press 1997), the practice of capital punishment continued unabated and unscrutinised during the period which began around the time of the Reformation and continued for 350 years. He identified the most revolting episode in this period as the time when Pope Sixtus V put 7,000 local "brigands" to death.
Pope Pius XII, in an address to the First International Congress on the Histopathology of the Nervous System in 1952, declared: "Even when it is a question of the execution of a condemned man, the state does not dispose of the individual's right to life. In this case it is reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned person of [ the enjoyment of] life in expiation of his crime when, by his crime, he has already disposed himself of his right to live." In fact, the Vatican City State from 1929 until 1969 had a penal code that included the death penalty for anyone who might attempt to assassinate the Pope.
Canon 2266 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Veritas, 1994) sums it up: "Preserving the common good of society requires rendering the aggressor unable to inflict harm. For this reason the traditional teaching of the Church has acknowledged as well-founded the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in case of extreme gravity, the death penalty. For analogous reasons those holding authority have the right to repel by armed force aggressors against the community in their charge."
And so to Pope John Paul II, who said in Evangelium Vitae (1995: para 57): "I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral".
One could interpret this as not condemning capital punishment, as it refers only to an "innocent" human being, and criminals are by definition not innocent. However, he also said (para 56) that cases in which putting the offender to death would be absolutely necessary were "very rare, if not practically non-existent". And in St Louis, Missouri, in January 1999, Pope John Paul II appealed for a consensus to end capital punishment because it was "both cruel and unnecessary". - Yours, etc,
GINA MENZIES, Charleville, Churchtown, Dublin 14.