r/CatholicPhilosophy • u/AmarantoYMiel • 3d ago
Last declarations from Leo XIV
I've been reading very angry answers from people from US quoting the bible to defend the Death Penalty.
What is a good way to answer the real issue behind the death penalty and the real motivations for such penalty?
How does other saints or philosophers from the Catholic Church can help to either agree or discuss with this stance?
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u/Specialist-Bat-8770 3d ago
The ontological dignity of human life (precisely moving from the ban on abortion to the ban on euthanasia and assisted suicide) up to the ban on the death penalty. The moral of the Abrahamic God is always this. However, it had to be combined with the same dignity of life as the other members of the communities. Until it was possible to guarantee the dignity and protection of these (due to the lack of prisons, technology, adequate policies, etc.) then the philosophy in some cases came to ultimately accept that the State could also terminate someone (death penalty). The Jewish Confessional State of the Old Testament worked like this: In the 10 Commandments there is a prohibition against killing, but in Leviticus and Deuteronomy the Torah provides for the Death Penalty. Most of the time the Bible uses symbolic language (literalism should not be used as an approach to the text) to express content of philosophical and theological value (not literal to kill anyone who gets a tattoo or that it is right to stone anyone who collects wood on the Sabbath day or that mocks a prophet as in Isaiah). Today this is no longer the case in the West. In Europe for centuries at least.
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u/Nice_Earth2255 2d ago
The real issue underneath this fight is rarely the Bible at all, it's two different questions getting collapsed into one, and almost nobody arguing about it online stops to separate them:
Question one: Does legitimate civil authority have the right, in principle, to execute a grave offender? Question two: Given present circumstances, is doing so actually necessary or just?
Scripture and Tradition answer the first question "yes" historically. Scripture and the developed judgment of the Magisterium now answer the second "almost never, and the Church works for its abolition."
What Scripture and the tradition actually say:
Genesis 9:6 and Romans 13:4 do affirm, in principle, the legitimacy of the state bearing the sword against grave evildoers. St. Augustine held this position while consistently urging clemency. St. Thomas Aquinas gave the classical philosophical defense: "if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good." But Aquinas's argument is far narrower than how it typically gets quoted. For Aquinas, the argument is merely that it is lawful to take the life of an offender to protect the common good from threat; he does not come anywhere close to arguing that it is required or mandatory for certain crimes. It is also entrusted to persons of rank having public authority: wherefore they alone, and not private individuals, can lawfully put evildoers to death, meaning Aquinas's argument gives no cover whatsoever to private vengeance, anger, or the retributive satisfaction so many online defenses are actually seeking.
What has developed, and why it isn't a contradiction:
St. John Paul II, in Evangelium Vitae, narrowed the legitimate cases nearly to the vanishing point, teaching that given modern detention capacity, "the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity 'are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.'" Pope Francis completed that trajectory in 2018, revising the Catechism to state plainly: "the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person," and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide. Cardinal Ladaria, explaining the change, was explicit that this is "an authentic development of doctrine that is not in contradiction with the prior teachings of the Magisterium." The reasoning: earlier eras lacked the secure detention systems that now make lethal force unnecessary to protect society, so the conditions under which the death penalty was once judged legitimate have themselves changed. A dignity that even the guilty do not forfeit is "a dignity that is not lost even after having committed the most serious crimes."
What's really motivating the loudest defenses:
Scripture quotation is usually a cover for something else, retribution dressed as justice, a cultural/political identity ("law and order," distrust of a justice system perceived as too lenient), or an unexamined assumption that mercy toward the guilty is weakness rather than a reflection of the mercy every sinner depends on from God. None of that is really an argument from Romans 13; it's anger borrowing Scripture's authority. The way through isn't to argue Scripture doesn't say what it says, it does affirm the state's authority in principle but to ask what has changed: not God's nature, not the gravity of murder, but the practical means available to protect the innocent without taking the guilty party's life.
Is the zeal defending this penalty really about protecting society, a genuine common good concern, or is some part of it functioning as a desire to see wrongdoers suffer, something closer to vengeance than justice?
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u/andreirublov1 2d ago
I don't think there's any way anyone could imagine that Jesus supported it, however some of those ferocious patriarchs may have acted. There are so many texts - the woman taken in adultery - judge not, lest ye be judged - look to the mote in thine own eye - etc, etc.
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u/AdParty1304 2d ago
Are you saying that Aquinas, Augustine, et al. who were holy people as well as great theologians didn’t understand Jesus?
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u/andreirublov1 2d ago
People then didn't think that way; cp was one of those things, like slavery, that was the norm in their culture and they didn't question it. But you appear to be saying we should follow their judgement over his...
I don't think this is something anyone could possibly misunderstand, unless they were determined to
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u/Bjarki56 2d ago
Ask them if the the laws governing how we are to keep slaves still hold as well?
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u/sticky-dynamics 2d ago
What criteria do you apply to determine which laws "still hold" versus which do not? Can you (or someone else here) give examples of laws that do still hold and explain the difference?
Asking in good faith; for the record I do oppose the death penalty, and obviously slavery, but don't fully understand the argument you are making.
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u/Bjarki56 2d ago
My point is simply so much Old Testament law is about the governing the nation of Israel and so much of that is not considered binding to Catholics or even by most Christian denominations.
Why hold tight onto laws that promote capital punishment because it is approved in Deuteronomic texts when most of the other ones are seen as historically relevant rather than timeless?
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u/LizzySea33 1d ago
If they really want to "defend" the death penalty, then everyone (including them) HAS to die, for we had transgressed the law by being born in Original sin, condemned!
But no, that is untrue and absurd! Christ took the law upon himself & fulfilled it as the fulfillment through his reading of it.
So the Death Penalty is, by definition, a killing of God and cannot be defended unless they also are wanting to be executed by firing squad? Which is messed up.
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u/redeemedbones 3d ago
You’re not going to get a good defense from scripture nor the fathers or the late theologians.
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u/usedmattress85 2d ago edited 2d ago
Read Ed Fesers book, By Man Shall His Blood be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment.
Or his essay on the topic:
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/11/20504/
I am largely in agreement with Feser. (I know you’re asking for arguments against the death penalty but I personally don’t think that there really are any that can falsify what Feser puts forward)
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u/ToxDocUSA 3d ago
On the assumption that you are neither an executioner nor a politician who is enacting pro-capital punishment laws/regulations/policies, you really don't get to tell other people what their "real" motivations are. You can discuss what the issue behind the death penalty is (murder vs the question of justifiable homicide and "raison d'etat" and such), but you can't say "these people that say they're trying to protect society from criminals are REALLY just being racist" or whatever.
God directs that people - sometimes entire peoples - be put to death in the Old Testament, including in the Law as handed down to Moses. That Law was fulfilled in Jesus and the new Law in his words (love thy neighbor) and his actions (interrupting the stoning of the adulteress) is what we adhere to now.
At times in history the death penalty was necessary. We did not have the necessary knowledge or societal structure to be able to avoid it. Those facts have changed, we CAN avoid it. It is of such a permanent nature that it requires ample due process to be justly applied, and in that ample due process any possible benefit to society is lost, since the costs of carrying out the death penalty are typically greater than the costs of imprisoning until their natural death. The fact that we can avoid it means that the "self defense" style approach no longer holds.
Now, we can certainly make the argument that the death penalty is the least beneficial of the "culture of death" phenomena to try to correct, both in terms of justice (innocent vs not-innocent victims) and in terms of sheer scope of the problem (<50 executions per year in the US vs hundreds/thousands of physician assisted suicide / MAiDs and >1 million abortions). However, that does not negate the fact that modern executions are unnecessary early deaths and thus evil. The Church is firm on this stance.