A state­ment approved dur­ing this week’s meet­ing of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) calls for an end to the death penal­ty in the United States and notes that the death penal­ty ​“con­tributes to a cycle of vio­lence in our soci­ety that must be bro­ken.” The state­ment, draft­ed by the USCCB Domestic Policy Committee, is the first com­pre­hen­sive state­ment focused on the death penal­ty by the Catholic bish­ops of the United States in 25 years. It is part of the wider ​“Catholic Campaign to End the Use of the Death Penalty.” This pro­gram aims to improve vic­tims’ ser­vices, to edu­cate Catholics and oth­er cit­i­zens about the Church’s teach­ings regard­ing the death penal­ty, and to advo­cate for an end to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the U.S. The cam­paign and the pro­posed USCCB state­ment echo the posi­tion of the late Pope John Paul II on the death penal­ty. The statement notes:

It is time for our nation to aban­don the illu­sion that we can pro­tect life by tak­ing life. When the state, in our names and with our tax­es, ends a human life despite hav­ing non-lethal alter­na­tives, it sug­gests that soci­ety can over­come vio­lence with vio­lence. The use of the death penal­ty ought to be aban­doned not only for what it does to those who are exe­cut­ed, but what it does to all soci­ety.
…
[Victims of vio­lence] deserve our com­pas­sion, sol­i­dar­i­ty and sup­port — spir­i­tu­al, pas­toral and per­son­al. … No act, even an exe­cu­tion, can bring back a loved one or heal ter­ri­ble wounds. The pain and loss of one death can­not be wiped away by anoth­er death.
…
[This issue] is more than pub­lic pol­i­cy; it involves our faith…[it] is about more than how to respond to vio­lent crimel it is about jus­tice and what kind of soci­ety we want to be…this ini­tia­tive is not about ide­ol­o­gy, but life and death.”

A November 2004 and March 2005 Zogby International sur­vey found that sup­port for the death penal­ty among Catholics had dropped from 70% in the 1970’s to under 50% in 2005.

(U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Press Release, November 14, 2005). Read the press release. Read the Bishops’ Statement. See New Voices.

Citation Guide