The Morality of Capital Punishment

Catholic Church vs. Vatican II Sect

The Morality of Capital Punishment

The Novus Ordo Church of the Second Vatican Council has changed many Catholic teachings, such as on ecclesiology, the papal primacy, the social kingship of Christ, ecumenism, and so forth. It has also messed with the Catholic position on capital punishment. Gradually, the shift has occurred from an endorsement of capital punishment (the Catholic position) to its virtual prohibition (the Novus Ordo modernist position), citing all sorts of phony reasons. The Vatican II sect has tried to call this a “development” but it is, in fact, a corruption, for its conclusion is the opposite of what it once was – hardly a legitimate “development”.

What’s even worse is that often it is said that just as we oppose abortion, so we must also oppose the death penalty, for in both cases a human life is taken. Thus the modernist theology of the New Church refuses to acknowledge the difference between guilt and innocence and declares all human life equally worth of protection, equal in dignity, when this has never been the Roman Catholic position. Furthermore, it puts its opposition to abortion on a completely false basis, a naturalist-humanist basis (as opposed to God’s law) from which it also deduces the impermissibility of capital punishment. We have compiled some quotes and links to show the true Catholic teaching on the death penalty, as opposed to the modernist doctrine of the New Church:

Reality Check:

• “By sinning man departs from the order of reason, and consequently falls away from the dignity of his manhood.” (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 64, a. 2, ad 3)
• “The world has heard enough of the so-called ‘rights of man.’ Let it hear something of the rights of God.” (Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Tametsi, n. 13)
• “It is lawful to kill when fighting in a just war; when carrying out by order of the Supreme Authority a sentence of death in punishment of a crime; and, finally, in cases of necessary and lawful defense of one’s own life against an unjust aggressor.” (Catechism of Pope St. Pius X)
• “Another kind of lawful slaying belongs to the civil authorities, to whom is entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent. The just use of this power, far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to this Commandment which prohibits murder. The end of the Commandment is the preservation and security of human life. Now the punishments inflicted by the civil authority, which is the legitimate avenger of crime, naturally tend to this end, since they give security to life by repressing outrage and violence. Hence these words of David: In the morning I put to death all the wicked of the land, that I might cut off all the workers of iniquity from the city of the Lord.” (Catechism of the Council of Trent)
• “Even when it is a question of someone condemned to death, the state does not dispose of an individual’s right to life. It is then the task of public authority to deprive the condemned man of the good of life, in expiation of his fault, after he has already deprived himself of the right to life by his crime” (Pope Pius XII, Speech of Sept. 14, 1952 [Acta Apostolicae Sedis XLIV, pp. 779ff.])
• “The Death Penalty”: Change in Church Teaching [Catholic vs. Novus Ordo] by Romano Amerio
  (Amerio’s book, Iota Unum, from which the above article is taken, is available here.)
• Novus Ordo “Cardinal” Theodore McCarrick in 2005: “We cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing. We cannot defend life by taking life.” McCarrick isn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the Novus Ordo shack — he needs to understand that killing isn’t wrong but murder is. Execution is killing but not murder. Innocent life is very much defended by the death penalty, which takes (in principle) the life of the murderer in order to redress the injustice caused, to protect the innocent, to serve as a deterrent, to make the murderer expiate his crime, and to give him the chance of repenting of his sins by confronting him with the swift extinction of his own life.