There does not seem to be an insignificant number of American Catholics who take very seriously the Church's teaching on abortion, yet at the same time support the death penalty. Their logic is usually along the lines that while the Church's teaching against abortion is infallible because abortion is
intrinsically evil, meaning the very act itself is morally wrong, regardless of circumstance, the Church teaches that the death penalty is not, meaning that at least theoretically the death penalty can be justified. As a result, such Catholics argue, support for the death penalty as a Catholic cannot be qualified as rejecting Church teaching in the way that supporting abortion can. I believe this reasoning to be faulty because in focusing solely on the intrinsic nature of the the moral act it fails to consider the question of gravity.
But first let's examine what the Church actually teaches regarding the death penalty. We read in Par. 2267 of the
Catechism of the Catholic Church:
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.
Too often Catholics who justify their support of the death penalty stop at the part just before the bolder section (emphasis mine), seeing there an opening that allows them to support this practice since it is at least theoretically possible to do so. But the Church makes the conditions for such support abundantly clear: only when no other recourse is available to protect society against unjust aggressors. Notice here the Church makes no consideration for the cost of supporting a criminal for life imprisonment versus the cost of execution - a strange and twisted argument too often heard in this debate - and this is because a price cannot be placed on a human life. Human life, innocent or guilty, is still life from God and cannot be measured in monetary ways.
To drive home the point of just how high a standard the Church sets regarding the permissibility of the death penalty in a just society, read what comes next from the
Catechism:
If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.
Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent."
Already it should be clear that just rooted in the Church's explicit teachings on a theoretical basis - meaning an abstract consideration of the death penalty as such in our world today - particularly in the United States with our technological advances which do in fact basically eliminate all circumstances where the death penalty is necessary to protect society against unjust aggressors - the Church's standard- it should be clear that supporting the death penalty simply is not an option for Catholics in good conscience. However, I think it goes even further than that.
One of the most troubling aspects of the manner in which the death penalty is carried out in the United States is the obvious institutional racism at work in the legal system. This racism is demonstrated in two ways: one, the rate of black defendants sentenced to death versus white defendants convicted of identical crimes; two, and perhaps even more troubling, the rate of execution sentences when the victim of homicide is white versus when the victim is black.
The statistics for the latter are nauseating. In a non-partisan study conducted by the U.S. General Accounting Office in 1990, it was discovered that in homicide cases where the victim was Hispanic, a death sentence was given six percent of the time; when the victim was black, 15 percent of the time; when the victim was white,
77 percent of the time. A white victim is five times more likely to elicit a death sentence than a black victim, and 13 times more likely than an Hispanic victim. There are many other studies which show this pattern throughout the states that currently allow for the death penalty as a legal recourse. This is blatant institutional racism, and undeniably so.
The second factor to consider is how the poverty of the defendant affects the likelihood of a death sentence. This is considered in a variety of ways. In many states, there are laws limiting the out-of-court compensation for indigent defendants, which means that a poor defendant is going to be extremely limited in what sort of legal counsel he can afford, what quality of experts he can hire, and so forth. In Alabama, for instance, this limit is $1,000. In many rural parts of Texas it is a paltry $800. The old adage, "You get what you pay for" certainly rings true here. A rich defendant not only can hire a team of lawyers, but can also pay for a wide array of expert witnesses whose testimony can be extremely persuasive to juries, thus significantly increasing the likelihood that a rich defendant will receive life imprisonment ( at most), while a poor defendant will be sentenced to death. Instead of going into more statistics here, I will direct the reader to Steven Bright's excellent essay published in 1994 in the
Yale Law Journal, "Counsel For The Poor: The Death Sentence Not For The Worst Crime But For The Worst Lawyer."
What I am getting at here I hope is obvious. On the one hand, we have the fact that the Church sets a clear and strict standard by which the death penalty may even theoretically be justified, and this standard is not met in the United States. What's more, while the theoretical possibility of the death penalty means that it is not
intrinsically evil, racism is intrinsically evil and thus must be opposed in every instance. Furthermore, the economic disparity evident in the application of the death penalty directly opposes the Church's clear teaching of a preferential option for the poor (cf.
CCC 2443-2449). What is interesting, many of my fellow opponents of abortion, myself included, will often call to mind the historical reality of the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, and her explicit support of eugenics, seeing birth control as a way of ridding the world of blacks and the poor. Yet is this not exactly what is at stake here with the death penalty in the United States? Given the racist and classist disparity in the application of the death penalty, I cannot see it as anything else but a form of eugenics - an attempt to eliminate blacks and the poor while preserving the lives of whites.
As the election season heats up, there will predictably be a resurgence of the debate among Catholics regarding whether or not Catholic politicians who publicly support abortion should be denied the Eucharist. The justification of this position is rooted in Canon 916 of the current Code of Canon Law, which reads, with my emphasis, "Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and
others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion. Let us note that this canon says nothing about intrinsic evil, but only manifest grave sin. Given all of the above, I can see no other means of classifying support for the death penalty in the United States than as manifest grave sin. While I make no argument regarding whether or not pro-abortion politicians should be denied Holy Communion, I will simply suggest that if a bishop is going to apply Canon 915 in such a way, then the same must be done for those politicians supporting the death penalty. Our bishops need to be consistent and fair in their application of canon law, and I would suggest in this instance to date they have not been.
One final point I wish to make, and this applies more broadly than just to this particular issue, but it relates specifically to it. I believe that in many cases, those Catholics who do support the death penalty are in fact placing political ideology over fidelity to the Church. While many factors go into this, I think perhaps a lot of it does go back to the abortion issue, in that because the Republican party tends to be strongly opposed to abortion (and other hot button social issues), that many Catholics have naturally gravitated to the Republican party, but in a way that now the Republican identity has become more important than the Catholic one. Thus in order to justify certain positions that are important as Republicans, Church teaching has been twisted in such a way so as seemingly to provide cover for a position that in fact is at odds with the clear teaching of the Church.
Obviously this is not simply a Republican tactic, and it is seen equally among Catholic Democrats, who because of a historical allegiance with the Democratic party over issues such as labor unions have grown into Democrats first, Catholics second, which leads then to all sorts of convoluted reasoning over issues like abortion, such as we regularly see from Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. This is a problem that we need to face as Catholics, recognizing that in fact neither party perfectly suits our Catholic ideology, but that our Catholic identity is always first, and that it must be the first teacher of our conscience. Regardless of which party we identify with, we must always be Catholic first, and within the political structure of our party's politics we must seek to work for a more just and fair society, one which recognizes the dignity of all human life.
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One of the challenges of consecrated celibate living is the frequent encounters with loneliness. Yet precisely because this is consecrated living, meaning a way of life that is set apart in a special way for the work of God, this loneliness itself is a place of ministry. By learning to experience the sacredness of our own loneliness, we as religious become better prepared to minister to the loneliness of others, which is one of the most beautiful gifts that this vocation has to offer.
That empty tomb - a reflection of our own seemingly forsaken souls - also tells us that God is not always found where we expect him to be. Mary went to the tomb expecting to find Christ, and he was not there. Yet she sat there - yes, weeping, mourning, saddened by her sense of loss and abandonment and confusion, but nonetheless she sat and waited. And then Jesus appeared, and called her by name, so that she became the witness to the resurrection - a witness of hope! This is the challenge of our own loneliness, not to run, not to perceive the emptiness of our own tomb and go seeking Christ elsewhere, but rather to sit, patiently awaiting the one who will never abandon us, no matter how confused we may be. Then we too may become witnesses of hope and can minister to the sacred loneliness which permeates our suffering our world.
Perhaps one of the most tragic ironies of the world in which we live is that an increasingly superficial obsession with beauty has assisted in so many of us failing to see how beautiful we really are. We can so often see beauty throughout God's creation - I thought of this especially yesterday walking along Lake Michigan as the first hints of autumn's crimson glory began adorning the swaying boughs of oaken scepters. Yet when it comes to our inner eye, that secret eye which gazes into the very depths of who we are, a vision which should reveal to us the incomparable and unspeakable beauty of the image and likeness of God, so often we are blind. 
I think this inability to see ourselves as beautiful often lies behind our seeing ugliness in others. Perhaps this is a too easily overlooked dimension of our own redemption in Christ. Allowing ourselves to perceive and embrace the truth - I AM BEAUTIFUL! - about ourselves sensitizes us to the beautiful reality of the person in front of us, enabling us to see the beautiful hand of the Creator in them, and to be bedazzled by the splendor of their being.