Pope Francis has changed Catholic teaching to reflect major Christian doctrinal development on the question of the death penalty.
Building on the teachings of his predecessors Benedict XVI and Saint John Paul the Great, Pope Francis revised official Catholic catechesis to make the death penalty “inadmissible” in all circumstances.
Paragraph 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church will henceforth remind the faithful that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”
Luis Cardinal Ladaria, who announced the change on the second day of August said the new text reaffirms Saint John Paul who had preached against the death penalty in his encyclical “Evangelium Vitae” and had ensured that the Catechism reflected Catholic opposition to capital punishment though it considered such punishment morally permissible under certain conditions.
“Ending the life of a criminal as punishment for a crime is inadmissible,” Cardinal Ladaria said, “because it attacks the dignity of a person, a dignity that is not lost even after having committed the most serious crimes.”
Leaving out any room for confusion, the Holy Father, Vicar of Christ to at least a billion Catholics across the world, ordered that the text of the Catechism state that Church “works with determination for [death penalty’s] abolition worldwide.”
Public Christians like Senate President Vicente Sotto III and Sen. Emmanuel Pacquiao should listen and reconsider their hardline stance for the reimposition of capital punishment in the Philippines.
These legislators and their supporters are crying out for blood, especially for the most heinous crimes, like being involved in illegal drugs, the nemesis of President Rodrigo Duterte.
The issue in fact became one of the dividing points in the Lower House, when erstwhile Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez removed from committee chairmanships representatives who opposed the death penalty. One of them was the lady who deposed Alvrez, current House Speaker Gloria Arroyo.
Pope Francis said that no matter the method for judicial killing, it is always in itself “contrary to the Gospel, because a decision is voluntarily made to suppress a human life, which is always sacred in the eyes of the Creator and of whom in the last analysis, only God can be the true judge and guarantor.”
Instead of participating in more carnage paid for by public money on top of State-abetted extra-judicial killings, lawmakers should reallocate their efforts and the country’s resources to healing our people.
As the papal statement went, in a challenge that would test the authenticity of public, high-profile Christians especially in politics, “more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens, but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.”
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