Catholic teaching on the death penalty is best understood by viewing it through two lenses: what it is and what it is not.
The Church's critique of capital punishment is not an evasion of justice. Victims and their survivors have a right to redress, and the state has a right to enforce that redress and impose grave punishment for grave crimes.
It is not an absolute rejection of force by the state. The death penalty is not intrinsically evil. Both Scripture and long Christian tradition acknowledge the legitimacy of capital punishment under certain circumstances. The Church cannot repudiate that without repudiating her own identity.
It is not an idolatry of individual rights " in this case, the rights of the murderer. Catholic social teaching rests on two equal pillars: the dignity of the individual person, and the common good. The right to life of the convicted murderer must be balanced against society's right to justice and security.
Finally, it is not a false equation of related but unequal issues. Catholic teaching on euthanasia, the death penalty, war, genocide and abortion are rooted in the same concern for the sanctity of the human person. But these different issues do not all have the same gravity or moral content. They are not equivalent.
War can sometimes be legitimate as a form of self-defense. The same can apply, in extraordinary circumstances, to the death penalty. But euthanasia is always an inexcusable attack on the weak. Genocide is always the premeditated murder of entire groups of people. And abortion is always a deliberate assault on a defenseless and innocent unborn child. It can never be justified. It is always " and intrinsically " gravely wrong.
What Catholic teaching on the death penalty does involve is this: a call to set aside unnecessary violence, including violence by the state, in the name of human dignity and building a culture of life. In the wake of the bloodiest century in history, the Church invites us to recover our own humanity by choosing God's higher road of restraint and mercy instead of state-sanctioned killing that implicates all of us as citizens.
"The Catechism of the Catholic Church" explains it in these words: If "non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor [i.e., the convicted murderer], authority [should] limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person" (2267).
John Paul II, writing a decade ago in "The Gospel of Life," stressed that "the nature and extent of the punishment [for capital crimes] must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not to 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 to the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent" (56).
In modern industrialized states, killing convicted murderers adds nothing to anyone's safety. It is an excess. It cannot be justified except in the most extraordinary conditions. Moreover, for John Paul II, the punishment of any crime should not only seek to redress wrong and protect society. It should also encourage the possibility of repentance, restitution and rehabilitation on the part of the criminal. Execution removes that hope.
Government has the obligation to embody the highest ideals of a people. As a free people, Americans are better, more decent and more humane than the needless executions we carry out every month. We're better than the dozens of needless executions we plan to carry out in the months ahead.
As citizens, our choices and our actions matter, because they create the kind of future our families and our nation will inhabit. What we choose, what we do, becomes who we are. In God's own words in Deuteronomy: "I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live" (30:19).
Choosing against the death penalty is choosing in favor of life. We need to end the death penalty, and we need to do it soon.