Capital Punishment and Catholicism :: Argumentative Persuasive Essays

Capital Punishment and Catholicism   2 sources cited   Among the major nations of the westbound world, the United States is singular in still having the death penalty. After a five-year moratorium, from 1972 to 1977, capital punishment was reinstated in the United States courts. Objections to the practice have do it from many quarters, including the American Catholic bishops, who have rather consistently impertinent the death penalty. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1980 published a predominantly negative statement on capital punishment, approved by a majority vote of those present though not by the required two-thirds majority of the entire conference (1). Pope John capital of Minnesota II has at various times expressed his opposition to the practice, as have other Catholic leaders in Europe.   Some Catholics, passing game beyond the bishops and the Pope, maintain that the death penalty, like abortion and euthanasia, is a encroachment of t he right to liveness and an unauthorized usurpation by human beings of Gods fillet of sole lordship over life and death. Did not the Declaration of Independence, they ask, describe the right to life as unalienable?   While sociological and legal questions inevitably trespass upon any such reflection, I am here addressing the subject as a theologian. At this level the question has to be answered primarily in terms of revelation, as it comes to us through Scripture and tradition, interpreted with the counselor of the ecclesiastical magisterium.   In the New Testament the right of the State to stupefy criminals to death seems to be taken for granted. saviour himself refrains from using violence. He rebukes his disciples for regard to call down fire from heaven to punish the Samaritans for their lack of hospitality (Luke 955). Later he admonishes Peter to put his sword in the scabbard rather than resist arrest (Matthew 2652). At no point, however, does messiah deny that the State has authority to exact capital punishment. In his debates with the Pharisees, Jesus cites with approval the apparently harsh commandment, He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him surely die (Matthew 154 Mark 710, referring to Exodus 2l17 cf. Leviticus 209). When Pilate calls attention to his authority to rack him, Jesus points out that Pilates power comes to him from above-that is to say, from God (John 1911).