Peccatorial elitism feeds the intransigent, periodically resurgent support for restoring capital punishment in predominantly Christian Philippines.
We stratify sinners, conveniently counting ourselves among the better offenders who may repeatedly excuse ourselves. The gallows for everyone else!
Never mind that Scripture generally holds no one impeccable. “If you, O Lord, should mark our guilt, Lord, who would survive?” the Psalmist asks.
“But with you is found forgiveness. For this, we revere you.” Irrelevant, say those who misunderstand Church-State separation, who cannot accept that politics is not morality’s wellspring.
Should the death penalty return as incoming President Rodrigo Duterte desires, the State would have to reappropriate a lexicon that sifts offenders who deserve execution from those who may be spared.
Saint John the Evangelist seems to agree. Some sins, he wrote, lead to death. Others do not. So Catholics differentiate between venial and mortal sin.
The latter is grave offense committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent. It kills the spirit.
But the remedy for both includes the culpable one’s contrition for and confession of sins to a priest, who, on God’s behalf absolves and prescribes acts of penance for him. The fruit is reconciliation with self, neighbor and God.
Will peccatorial elitists learn? In answer to our sins, which, big or small, distance us from God, He gave us the grace of time to reform and learn love.
We continue to breathe only on account of God’s mercy. We ought to pay it forward, not morbidly anticipate public hangings, Duterte’s preferred means of dealing death on convicts. Let the sinless cast the first stone, Jesus said. Even the immaculate one, the Virgin Mary, chose to cast her lot with and pray for us.
Listen to Pope Saint John Paul the Great’s “Evangelium Vitae” and the Catholic Catechism, breathless in encouraging clemency: “As a consequence of the possibilities which the [S]tate has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm—without definitively 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 non-existent.’”
To deter criminals, remove crime’s precursors. Maximize spending on education. Prevent truancy. Studies from various regions around the world have consistently recognized that with more learning, a person is less likely to be delinquent.
Raise police visibility. Create public spaces for beauty. Subsidize lifelong values education for all. Legislate a living wage for breadwinners. Revitalize and enhance the infrastructure for loving parenthood. Teach children the art of building virtuous friendships.
For further change, Duterte’s slogan, how about jailing drug lords, proper social reintegration for former inmates, denying special treatment for rich convicts?
Order is reached through multiple paths. Yet many among us would rather take the mob’s shortcuts—the hangman State and its twin, vigilantism.
Are we but barbarians, enamored of iron fists, the ferrous smell of blood?
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