THERE is no beating around the bush: Pope Francis changed the teaching of the Catholic Church on capital punishment. He did so by revising the relevant text in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the authoritative volume containing Church doctrines.

The old text in Paragraph 2267 stated: “Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.”

The Vatican announced on Thursday that in May, the Pope ordered a revision of the text, which now reads: “The Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.’”

This was an outright reversal of the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose thinking is the official Church philosophy. In Summa Theologica, the Dominican scholastic said authorities had legitimate recourse to the death penalty: “It is lawful (‘permissible’) to kill an evildoer in so far as it is directed to the welfare of the whole community, so that it belongs to him alone who has charge of the community’s welfare.”

The Pope’s decision has to be clarified further to preclude any sense of unease among believers. The teaching on capital punishment, while important enough to be included in the Roman Catechism, is not part of the Church’s dogma, or the set of infallible articles of faith, such as the divinity of Christ or the Trinitarian God. The Catechism contains the doctrines of the Church, but — as theologians would say — while all dogmas are doctrines, not all doctrines are unchangeable dogma.

The two previous pontiffs thus vigorously opposed the death penalty and called for its global abolition, even as they found it unnecessary to revise the language of the Catechism.

In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae (“The Gospel of Life”), Pope St. John Paul 2nd wrote that there was likely no situation that would justify recourse to capital punishment in the modern world: “It is clear that, for these purposes to be achieved, the nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. 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.”

In 2011, Benedict 16th, now pope emeritus, called on world leaders to recognize “the need to make every effort to eliminate the death penalty and to reform the penal system in a way that ensures respect for the prisoners’ human dignity.”

As a result, more than two-thirds of countries — including most predominantly Catholic states such as the Philippines — have abolished or suspended capital punishment.

Former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo removed capital punishment in June 2006 with her signature on Republic Act 9346, or “An Act Prohibiting the Imposition of the Death Penalty in the Philippines.”

In this full context, Pope Francis’ action may be more aptly described as an update on the Church’s teaching.

By advancing the arguments of his two predecessors, Francis merely removed the ambiguity of the previous teaching, as Fr. Jerome Secillano of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines said in reaction to the Vatican pronouncement.

This is because, as the new teaching states, “there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes.”

The Pope has spoken, though not ex cathedra, or from the Chair of Peter: death penalty no longer has a place in civilized society.

https://www.manilatimes.net/death-penalty-has-no-more-place-in-civilized-society/426849/