Trent Horn briefly outlines the Church’s teaching on capital punishment and how it differs from other end-of-life issues such as abortion and euthanasia.
Transcript:
Host: So why do you reject Catholic morality? That is the question. We go now to Doug in Michigan listening on 990 AM. Doug, why do you reject Catholic morality?
Caller: Well first, thanks for taking the call, it’s not so much I reject the morality as I have a question about how the Church approaches capital punishment. We seem to be very vocal when it comes to assisted suicide or abortion, but am I missing the conversation, the dialogue, on how we view natively the capital punish—or what the right moral teaching is on capital punishment.
Trent: Sure, what I would say is that when people get the impression of the Church is “not as strong” quote-unquote on capital punishment, I would say that’s because capital punishment is not intrinsically wrong. It’s not something that is wrong in and of itself like abortion and euthanasia. It’s always wrong to directly kill a baby who’s growing in the womb. It’s always wrong to directly kill someone who is in the process of dying just so they can die. Now, it’s okay to discontinue life support if a person is near the end of life and that’s not helping them, but you can’t just simply inject someone with poison and end their life because they’re in pain or you just can’t directly kill a baby in the womb. You can’t directly kill innocent people in that way.
However, it’s not intrinsically wrong for the state to use its authority to protect society by ending the life of someone who’s committed a very serious crime like murder. So the Church has supported capital punishment in the past and the Catechism says there may be cases where capital punishment is acceptable today; though the Catechism and people like Pope St. John Paul II have offered prudential judgments about moving away from capital punishment, it’s not intrinsically wrong and there’s other theologians who put forward very strong cases that capital punishment can be used morally by the Church and actually should be promoted. A good book on that that just come out is called “By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment” by Edward Feser and Joseph Bessette, so if you’d like to look at a great treatment of the issue from that perspective, “By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed” by Ignatius Press, the authors are Feser and Bessette. I think you would find that to be very helpful. So thank you very much for calling in.