What does it mean to be pro-life in the 21st century? Pope Francis has reiterated the basic Catholic understanding that the dignity of life must be respected from conception until natural death. This understanding has been echoed by the US bishops and every other Bishop’s conference around the world for many years. It is nothing new.
I mention this because the US Attorney General, William Barr, recently announced that the Justice Department will begin executions at the Federal level soon. Executions for federal crimes have been fairly rare. Over the past 16 years there has been no such executions at the Federal level. Concerns over the violation of the rights of the condemned put Federal executions on hold and they have remained in that state until now. Barr noted that several states have been conducting executions of criminals without problems, so the Federal government will use the procedures developed by these states. He further argued that the execution of convicted criminals who have committed egregious murders is a matter of justice due to the families of the victims.
Ever since abortion politicized being pro-life, most people have tended to think of being pro-life only in terms of opposition to abortion on demand. Thus, they have strong feelings about opposition to abortion but have few qualms about the government putting men and women to death or separating infant immigrant children from their parents, both of which are contrary to respect for life. This fragmented understanding of what it means to be pro-life may serve the strategic purposes of a political party but it has little to do with an authentic pro-life stance as taken by the Church.
Is justice being done when the government executes an offender when his crime is particularly egregious? For example, one of the men scheduled to be put to death kidnapped, raped and murdered a woman.
Justice is a term that admits many meanings. For example, restorative justice seeks to repair the damage done by the crime. Its emphasis is on accountability for one’s actions. Distributive justice is seeing that everyone gets what is due to him in the fairest manner. Retributive justice sees the necessity of punishing the offender in a manner that is proportionate to the crime committed. The idea here is to deter the occurrence of similar crimes in the future by showing that there will be serious consequences for our actions. It also deters the families of victims or other citizens from taking justice into their own hands by providing a formal means of punishment that has adequate due process safeguards, as compared to a midnight lynching of a supposed offender. This is the operating understanding of justice that is the foundation of much of the US criminal justice system. Attorney General Barr is operating from the perspective of retributive justice in his decision to once implement executions at the Federal level.
While a widely used justification for capital punishment, it is a theory of justice that is controversial. Numerous studies have shown that capital punishment is not an effective deterrent to similar crimes, either in the States or in other countries. The criminal justice system is not foolproof and an innocent person is condemned to death often enough that there is cause for concern. If it is a moral evil to kill someone, then how does it become acceptable when the murderer is someone employed by the government to kill the prisoner? Just because a punishment is proportionate to the offense ( a death for a death), does that make the particular punishment just? Putting someone to death leaves no room for their reform. It must also be observed that the majority of persons on death row are ethnic and racial minorities. Does this reflect a proportionate commission of capital crimes or does it reflect ethnic and racial discrimination that has resulted in a disproportionate number of minority persons condenmed to death? Is that justice?
Back in the days following the rise to power by Constantine and the subsequent conversion of much of the Roman Empire to Christianity, Catholic bishops and theologians struggled with the issue of needing to defend the Empire from invading barbarians. Augustine helped to popularize Just War doctrine, which argued that the Christian has a duty to defend himself or an innocent third party from an unjust aggressor. There were certain conditions placed on the situation to ensure that was was a last resort and that the aggressor was truly unjust, even then the actual conduct of the war had constraints on it to protect the innocent. A few centuries later Thomas Aquinas applied just war theory to capital punishment, arguing that the criminal was similar to the unjust aggressor in his attacks upon society through his criminal actions. This argument was used by many European governments to justify their use of capital punishment. Recent decades have seen this argument being rejected by Church leadership. They argue that the conditions necessary for just war no longer apply to contemporary society and this is the same for capital punishment. Both Pope Saint John Paul II and Pope Francis have argued that there is almost no justification for capital punishment nowadays. There are other means to deter crime and to punish the offender without needing to kill the offender, even if his crimes are reprehensible.
It is interesting to note that most countries in the world have rejected the use of capital punishment. The United States is among a handful of nations—including China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, and Iraq that continue its use. We think of these other countries as among the most repressive on Earth. What does that say about the United States?
Being against abortion is not necessarily being pro-life. Being pro-life is respecting the dignity of life from conception to natural death. It requires consistency and integrity in our pro-life advocacy. We can’t be pro-life on certain issues and against life on other issues.
