ByzCath:
This is your opinion and not the teaching of the Catholic Church as shown by the paragraph from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
You can not argue against an actual cite of a Magisteral Document with your personal opinion of what others say. Please provide the cites that say a Catholic may in no case support capital punishment.
As the Catechism says, there are cases were capital punishment could be applied. While those are very rare they still could exist.
If you take the time to actually READ what I wrote, you will find that I have said over and over in this thread that neither I nor our Church is calling for a blanket ban on the death penalty. Please don’t misrepresent what I say and then use the misrepresentation against me. As PRACTICED in the U.S., the death penalty does not meet the criteria of the Catechism. While the death penalty should be theoretically available, it is not necessary, thus does’t meet the Church’s criteria and thus immoral in most if not all cases. The Church leaves the door open, but at the same time says it should be practically non-existant. 3,500 people on death row and over 486 executed since 1976 is NOT even approaching non-existent.
As for documents of authority, the Catechism and the encyclical Evangelium Vitae (which also condemns abortion, euthanasia, etc.) are authoratative teachings. While you may have different personal views on the death penalty, you are bound to follow the Church’s teachings in these documents. We don’t get to pick and chose which teachings we want to follow and which ones we don’t.
And the fact that there is a standard and not an absolute prohibition is no excuse. The teachings say that the death penalty should be practically non-existent, which it is clearly not in this country.
Here are some excerpts from Cardinal Sconborn’s article (
catholic.net/rcc/Periodicals/Dossier/9-10-98/article.html) citing the relevent teachings. Cardinal Schonborn directed the development of the Catechism. EV refers to the encyclical of John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae:
**"[The Catechism] made a further step in formulating as a strict requirement, and as a moral obligation, binding public authority to make use of bloodless means in every situation where they are sufficient." **
AND
“The following number, however, introduces an important restriction the significance of which has not been sufficiently noticed. “**If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, **because these better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person” (CCC, 2267).”
AND
"The intentions of the Holy Father with respect to the death penalty are clearly shown in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae. In number 27 the **Pope lists “among the signs of hope” for “a culture of life” those who are opposed to the powers of the “culture of death,” “the growing public opposition to the death penalty, even when such a penalty is seen as a kind of ‘legitimate defense’ on the part of society. **Modern society in fact has the means of effectively suppressing crime by rendering criminals harmless without definitively denying them the chance to reform” (EV 27).
AND
It seems clear to me that if the Pope sees “a sign of hope” there, he himself shares that “opposition to the death penalty, even when such a penalty is a kind of “legitimate defense.” Two arguments are advanced to justify this opposition and are taken up again more explicitly in number 56 of the encyclical:
“Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (EV 56).
I am not sure why you think my position is my position and not our Church’s.
