Mother Jones mag­a­zine recent­ly fea­tured an arti­cle about the grow­ing oppo­si­tion to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment among U.S. Catholics, and it high­light­ed con­ser­v­a­tive Catholics who have changed their posi­tion in response to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ call for an end to the death penal­ty. The arti­cle not­ed that Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, for­mer­ly a staunch sup­port­er of the death­penal­ty, is now call­ing for lim­its on its use. And Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, anoth­er con­ser­v­a­tive Catholic, is quot­ed as say­ing, ​“if we’re try­ing to estab­lish a cul­ture of life, it’s dif­fi­cult to have the state spon­sor­ing exe­cu­tions.“

The arti­cle point­ed to a 14,000-member Catholic parish in Raleigh, North Carolina, as an exam­ple of actions being tak­en on a local lev­el. The parish of St. Francis of Assisi has made oppo­si­tion to the death penal­ty a cor­ner­stone of its social out­reach. The pas­tor remarked, ​“One of our imper­a­tives is to embrace soci­ety’s out­casts. Those who are on death row are being judged by one act in their lives. They are seen as dis­pos­able, and there­fore we exe­cute them. They need our com­pas­sion.“

There are an esti­mat­ed 67 mil­lion Roman Catholics in the United States, mak­ing the Church the nation’s largest reli­gious denom­i­na­tion. (S. Catania, ​“Death Row Conversion,” Mother Jones, December 2005). See New Voices.

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