The Death and Life of Capital Punishment

It would seem Pope Francis had a rather odd answer to the question of whether it would be justified to kill baby Hitler: he wouldn’t kill adult Hitler had he survived the war. If every pope was correct in all his deliberations, there would be no disagreements among them. If a pope preaches something potentially contrary to historical Church teaching, intrigue naturally befalls the error. The truth of yesterday suffers to the point of death; the truth of today lives without history.

Inconsistency is the mother of debate even in the postconciliar era. Whereas Francis revised the Catechism in 2018 to declare the death penalty “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” in all circumstances, the 1992 Catechism promulgated by John Paul II reads, “the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty.” While it goes on to state that such instances of necessity are extremely rare to the point of being practically nonexistent, it does not necessarily dispute key biblical verses such as Romans 13:4, which reads:

For [the ruler] is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil.

Indeed, St. Augustine and St. Aquinas, to name just two Doctors of the Church who testified on behalf of capital punishment, both understood its occasional necessity. One need not reach all the way back to the Old Testament to realize God is judge, jury, and executioner.

It is as wrong to perpetrate a genocide as it is right to be executed for perpetrating one. This statement is not the summation of a darkness ignorant to spiritual realities. Rather, it is the only conception of justice that matches the terrifying gravity of the transgression. Just as all moral roads lead to Rome, many arguments about immorality lead to Hitler.

In the Holocaust, the mentally and physically disabled were no more spared than the Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and Slavs. The rhetoric of annihilation found its home in action, and Catholics were not immune. Part of Hitler’s Generalplan Ost was “to kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish descent or language.” So-called Untermenschen were treated to the command of the Führer. Of the roughly two million non-Jewish Polish civilians killed by the Nazis during the war, most of them were Catholic. Little did we know, Nuremberg was an inadmissible evil. 

Hitler should not serve as the completion of the argument though. Dr. Josef Mengele, a torturer and murderer by trade, deserved the punishment he escaped. “The Angel of Death” should have received the reward of his deeds—which included subjecting countless children to unspeakable horrors. The late pontiff would no doubt have been aware of the infamous crimes of Mengele, who was protected in and around the late pontiff’s hometown of Buenos Aires for a decade.

God’s mercy is not granted absolutely—Hell persists as a reality regardless of its terrestrial acknowledgment—because justice would then become inconsequential. Just as killing can be evil, refraining from doing so can compound the original crime. Indeed, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and Joseph Stalin should have had as much to answer for in this life as the next.

Mercy is a wisdom susceptible to villainy. It could be said false mercy, one of the great and most pernicious afflictions currently visited upon the Church, often finds itself in sympathy with evil. In the same way one discovers death in sin, absolving certain sins of their gravity is the revenge of the original lawlessness. Love is not an anarchic creation, and to be its steward is to pursue its order.

Indeed, love is a synonym of order—virtue makes it so. Thus, when order is compromised to a horrible degree, love can suffer proportionally. Unfortunately, the response to restoring divine order has been shielded from the light of truth and simultaneously determined to be an extension of love. Yet such is the nature of love that its strength is only found in fierce conjunction with the death of monsters. Bloodlust inflicted on a mass scale summons Michael the Archangel through its own flaming sword.

One of the many projects of the devil seeks to find moral strength in moral cowardice. Divine judgment is thus accorded the shame of sin. In seeking the darkness of this lie, one finds an enticing and corrupt illusion of peace mistaken as the boundless fortune of love. In many cases, the alleged human dignity dissuading from what must be done masquerades as its own morality, as a false projection of love, and becomes weaponized against righteousness.

Love is given wings through freedom. But freedom is fated by responsibility—where responsibility for one’s freedom collapses into barbaric calamity, a terminal decree for the thug’s earthly fate becomes not simply the justice of men but the revelation of God’s will. Freedom is a treasure that renders the terrible possible. To safeguard the choices inherent to the enterprise, it can be necessary to conclude a life. This shouldn’t be understood as a person dying before their appointed hour; it should be understood as a person dying of their own volition.

As Catholics, we are tasked by God to be peacekeepers. But in the depths of our tolerance, we cannot succumb to the miseries of barbarians. In other words, the logic of our morality must contend with catastrophe. It is by way of disease that love can mutate into a gruesome facsimile. In championing the ascendence of life in all cases, a paradox emerges whereby the very preciousness of life itself becomes undervalued. This is to say that it is precisely because human life is so cherished by God, because we are created in His image and likeness, that capital punishment can be a well-deserved destiny. Should one doubt this proposition, merely turn to the Word of God and the illustrious history of His Church.