Vatican Official: Death Penalty ‘Never Justified’ as Legitimate Defense

Breitbart ^ | 11/29/18 | Thomas D. Williams

[marshmallow]

The Vatican’s foreign minister said that capital punishment may never be considered a form of legitimate defense Wednesday, adding that it constitutes “cruel and degrading treatment.”

Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Vatican Secretary for Relations with States, said that the death penalty “is never justified as a hypothesis of legitimate defense,” in his address at a conference at the Italian parliament on “A World Without the Death Penalty.”

The meeting, which was attended by Ministers of Justice from 25 countries, was organized by the Community of Sant’Egidio.

Saint John Paul II had taught that the only way that capital punishment could be justified was under the principle of legitimate defense. In his 1995 encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae, John Paul wrote that legitimate defense “can be not only a right but a grave duty for someone responsible for another’s life, the common good of the family or of the State.”

“This is the context in which to place the problem of the death penalty,” he wrote, while recognizing that “there is a growing tendency, both in the Church and in civil society, to demand that it be applied in a very limited way or even that it be abolished completely.”

[sparklite2]

Oh, I am quite in favor of the death penalty. Further, I think executions should be televised, not done behind closed doors. If the DP is to have any preventive effect, it needs to be as it used to be ... public. And if public executions are too shocking for the citizenry, maybe the state shouldn’t be acting in their pearl-clutching stead.

[skr]

Does this person mean as in preventing further murders by the convicted? Otherwise I don’t understand capital punishment as a defense. Perhaps something lost in translation?

[boatbums]

It depends on if it is something that is declared "ex cathedra", or "from the chair". If Pope Francis, or any pope, declares that it is a matter of faith that ALL must receive and hold to, then it would be a mortal sin to dissent. That seems to be the deciding factor though we can, and have, pointed out other ex cathedra declarations that were subsequently overruled or "reformulated positively" (i.e., extra Ecclesiam nulla salus).

[metmom]

So now the Vatican is presuming to sit in judgment on God.

How arrogant of them.

[metmom]

Is this one of those doctrines that Catholics are not allowed to dissent against, or are they allowed to believe different?

Who knows?

I suppose it depends on who you talk to.

[GingisK]

The death penalty is a surgical procedure to remove a tumor.

[G Larry]

First, I believe Romans clearly support the death penalty (It is good to fear the sword of the state).

The Vatican is concerned more about the rest of the world's use of the death penalty, without justice.

While here in America, we have seen way too much evidence of ambitious D.A.s framing innocent people and placing them on death row, only to be proven innocent by DNA evidence years later.

[onedoug]

Nuts