Mercy to the Cruel Is Cruelty to the Innocent

“Nothing is more scandalous than a man who is proud of his humility.” Marcus Aurelius did not have Pope Francis in mind when he wrote this, but he could have. Francis was proud of his humility. He carried his own luggage and chose an austere domicile over the Apostolic Palace.

While these gestures were seen as innocuous, one ostentatious display of humility was pernicious. He washed and kissed the feet of imprisoned criminals—including those convicted of serious offenses or mafia ties. His April 13, 2017, ritual included two criminals serving life sentences—a remarkable display of humility and compassion.

But Pope Francis never washed the feet of crime victims. They were literally the great unwashed. The individuals chosen for the rite were inmates convicted of violent crimes, migrants, young offenders, and the institutionalized rather than victims of crime.

One must wonder how Pope Francis’ preferential option for criminals affected his judgment when he wrote in Fratelli Tutti (263): “Today we state clearly that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible’ and the Church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide.” It was an unsubstantiated assertion that gave no thought to protecting the innocent.

This past April, Pope Leo XIV reiterated his predecessor’s call to abolish capital punishment in a speech at DePaul University. Like Francis, Leo grounded his message in “the dignity of the person,” which he asserted “is not lost even after very serious crimes are committed.”

“Human dignity” is the pretext for justifying the Church’s opposition to capital punishment and life imprisonment. Human dignity is an ill-defined, nebulous term. Invoking it absent a consideration of how not punishing criminals hurts crime victims is unconscionable. Furthermore, abolitionist popes such as Francis and Leo imply that Church Fathers such as Sts. Thomas Aquinas, Alphonsus Liguori, and Robert Bellarmine were not concerned with human dignity.

Vatican pronouncements about crime and punishment lack compassion for the human dignity of victims of murder, rape, robbery, and other crimes. The abolitionist popes repeat platitudes about justice and not absolving criminals of responsibility. But the Vatican makes no powerful declarations about protecting the innocent using terms comparable to “inadmissible” or “abolish.”

Vatican apologists will say the Church does not make criminal policy. But by calling for the abolition of the death penalty, the Catholic Church has done exactly that. They have weighed in on criminal policy and tried to influence the legal policies of the various governments for 1.4 billion Catholics across the globe.

Remarkably, the Vatican declared the death penalty “inadmissible” and claimed society can protect the innocent from murderers without execution. Yet no serious evidence was offered that there are practical means to protect the innocent from cruel murderers without capital punishment. The Church replaced centuries of moral reasoning and common sense with an assertion it cannot prove.

Traditional Catholics note that this departure from centuries of Church teaching amounts to a novelty driven by contemporary secular attitudes rather than consistent doctrine. Both Leo and Francis completed a criminogenic and penological arc begun with Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes (25), which said: “it cannot be denied that men are often diverted from doing good and spurred toward evil by the social circumstances in which they live…human freedom is often crippled when a man encounters extreme poverty.” The phrasing of Gaudium et Spes adopted concepts that were used to substitute systemic blame for Thomistic personal guilt—concepts that were created in the early 20th century by people like Willem Bonger and Karl Kautsky, who crafted Marxism into a criminogenic theory later called critical criminology.

Not long after Vatican II, one of critical criminology’s earliest proponents, Richard Quinney, wrote in his landmark books The Social Reality of Crime, Critique of Legal Order, and Class, State, and Crime that crime was a function of economic structures. About the same time, Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez wrote in A Theology of Liberation that sin is not just an individual reality but a “social fact.” He maintained that sin is evident in oppressive structures. He equated liberation from sin with political liberation.

These are in stark contrast to the ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas. The Angelic Doctor viewed the criminal who commits a heinous act as having fallen below the level of human dignity, degenerating into the status of a beast. For Aquinas, the state’s authority to execute was a direct delegation of divine justice. The Thomistic tradition did not merely tolerate execution; it integrated it into a coherent framework of natural law and civic duty. Aquinas permits death when the man is “dangerous and infectious to the community.”

Modern Vatican policy, however, forbids death even when the perpetrator remains dangerous and infectious, while simultaneously seeking to abolish its functional equivalent, life imprisonment without parole. By subscribing to this hypothesis, the modern magisterium has aligned itself with a failed secular ideology: that crime is an environmental byproduct rather than a moral choice. In its rush to extend an asymmetrical mercy to the perpetrator, the Vatican does not elevate human dignity; it reduces the human being to a mere automaton incapable of moral agency.

Ultimately, by trading the timeless natural law of the Church Fathers for 20th-century conflict theory, Rome has emphasized, if not outright abandoned, the innocent victim.

The Catholic opposition to the current Vatican leadership’s progressivism wants not only a liturgical return but also a return to a social doctrine that restores the Thomistic and New Testament ideas of personal responsibility, the dignity owed to crime victims, and the dignity of punishment for the offender. They are adherents to the Midrash maxim: “Whoever becomes merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful.”