In his week­ly col­umn, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia voiced the Catholic Church’s ongo­ing oppo­si­tion to the death penal­ty in the U.S. and called for clemen­cy for Pennsylvania death row inmate Terrance Williams. ​“We don’t need to kill peo­ple to pro­tect soci­ety or pun­ish the guilty. And we should nev­er be eager to take anyone’s life,” the Archbishop said. He addressed the needs of mur­der vic­tims’ fam­i­lies, say­ing ​“Turning away from cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment does not dimin­ish our sup­port for the fam­i­lies of mur­der vic­tims. They bear a ter­ri­ble bur­den of grief, and they right­ly demand jus­tice.” He con­clud­ed, ​“When we take a murderer’s life we only add to the vio­lence in an already vio­lent cul­ture, and we demean our own dig­ni­ty in the process.” He par­tic­u­lar­ly urged clemen­cy for Williams, who is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed in October. Chaput not­ed that Williams’ attor­neys have said he ​“was repeat­ed­ly sex­u­al­ly abused as a youth, includ­ing five years of abuse at the hands of the man he mur­dered, and this helped moti­vate his violence.…Terrance Williams deserves pun­ish­ment. No one dis­putes that. But he doesn’t need to die to sat­is­fy jus­tice. We should think very care­ful­ly in the com­ing days about the kind of jus­tice we want to wit­ness to our young people.”

(C. Chaput, ​“Justice, Terrance Williams, and the death penal­ty,” CatholicPhilly​.com, September 7, 2012). See Religion and New Voices. For more infor­ma­tion on Terrance Williams, see www​.ter​ry​williamscle​men​cy​.com/.

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