By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment

Description

The Catholic Church has in recent decades been associated with political efforts to eliminate the death penalty. It was not always so. This timely work reviews and explains the Catholic Tradition regarding the death penalty, demonstrating that it is not inherently evil and that it can be reserved as a just form of punishment in certain cases.

Drawing upon a wealth of philosophical, scriptural, theological, and social scientific arguments, the authors explain the perennial teaching of the Church that capital punishment can in principle be legitimate—not only to protect society from immediate physical danger, but also to administer retributive justice and to deter capital crimes. The authors also show how some recent statements of Church leaders in opposition to the death penalty are prudential judgments rather than dogma. They reaffirm that Catholics may, in good conscience, disagree about the application of the death penalty.

Some arguments against the death penalty falsely suggest that there has been a rupture in the Church's traditional teaching and thereby inadvertently cast doubt on the reliability of the Magisterium. Yet, as the authors demonstrate, the Church's traditional teaching is a safeguard to society, because the just use of the death penalty can be used to protect the lives of the innocent, inculcate a horror of murder, and affirm the dignity of human beings as free and rational creatures who must be held responsible for their actions.

By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed challenges contemporary Catholics to engage with Scripture, Tradition, natural law, and the actual social scientific evidence in order to undertake a thoughtful analysis of the current debate about the death penalty.

Is the death penalty for sodomy a proportionate punishment? Cf. ref:9.21:

There are also in the Mosaic Law many crimes other than murder for which the death penalty might be inflicted, including false witness (Deut 19:18-21), idolatry (Deut 13:6-10), adultery (Deut 22:22; Lev 20:10), homosexual acts (Lev 20:13), bestiality (Ex 22:19; Lev 20:15-16), incest (Lev 20:11-12), kidnapping (Ex 21:16), and striking one’s parents (Ex 21:15). Unlike the sanction in Genesis 9:6 of the death penalty for murder, which is presented as having application to the human race in general and predates the Mosaic Law, capital punishment for these other offenses reflects the special circumstances of ancient Israel and is no longer in force after the Mosaic Law was abrogated. But that it was in force even temporarily reinforces the point that Scripture regards the death penalty as in principle legitimate.

II-II q. 154 a. 3 ad 3: "murder is a more grievous sin than fornication and every kind of lust" (of which the unnatural vice (sodomy) is the worst).

The principle of proportionality also justifies capital punishment for treason, espionage, tyranny, and heresy, as these are very serious crimes against the common good.

18 U.S. Code § 242 says that those who commit "kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill" "may be sentenced to death".