With sorrow, I learned Friday that the Boston Bomber, 21 year old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has received the death penalty, slated for lethal injection. It is not the case that he doesn’t deserve the death penalty. He does. Execution is the gravest possible punishment for the gravest possible crime: the remorseless and meaningless killing and maiming of innocent civilians–classic terrorism. Punishment, according to Catholic teaching, is indeed meant to redress the disorder created in society by the crime. But it is also meant to rehabilitate the aggressor. In recent years, particularly in John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium vitae, the Catholic position has called for an end to the death penalty, not because it isn’t legitimate (the Church has supported capital punishment in the past), but because ending the death penalty underscores the immense value of human life, even of grave sinners. Tsarnaev’s apparent cold-faced remorseless is abhorrent, and the lack of repentance, which rightly shocked the jury, is what led them to hand down the deadly sentence.
Unfortunately, the sentence of lethal injection gives Tsarnaev drastically less time to reach the much needed sorrow for his crimes that the jury and defense hoped to find. As tragic as the deaths and injuries from the bombing two years ago were, Tsarnaev’s death will not heal any of those wounded or bring back any of those lost. John Paul II calls for the death penalty to be used only in a defensive framework, society defending itself, and therefore to avoid it where possible. The Boston bombing was obviously an emotional blow to the nation; it was home-grown terrorism. Our fears and passions are rightly inflamed, but it would be even more tragic if we fall down to the level of the perpetrators. With the weighty and trying crimes of the bombing on our hearts, we must still cling to truth that makes terrorism wrong in the first place: the value of life.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
Traditionally, capital punishment has been accepted as part of a wider understanding of punishment. The 1992 Catechism explains that it is “the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime” (CCC 1992). In corresponding with this, the death penalty has long been understood as the gravest punishment for the gravest crime—the severity of the penalty underscores the immense value of life and the irreparability of the loss. However, the Church has come to move away from this formulation and frame capital punishment as a form of societal self-defense, which should greatly decrease its use in society.
John Paul II taught in Evangelium vitae that the death penalty is not to be sought for retributive purposes at all, but only for the protection of society.
“The nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (EV 56).
John Paul II, here, calls for a vast limitation on the use of capital punishment, which has brought some scholars, particularly Dr. Christian Brugger, to ask whether there is a development of doctrine going on here. Without wading too far into that debate, I would like to point out some of the major ways that the current emphasis on a self-defense paradigm for capital punishment is actually very continuous in Church teaching, though without excluding the possibility for a development.
First, even while limiting the death penalty, John Paul II does still emphasize the proper role of punishment. He says:
“The primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is ‘to redress the disorder caused by the offence’. Public authority must redress the violation of personal and social rights by imposing on the offender an adequate punishment for the crime, as a condition for the offender to regain the exercise of his or her freedom. In this way authority also fulfils the purpose of defending public order and ensuring people’s safety, while at the same time offering the offender an incentive and help to change his or her behaviour and be rehabilitated” (EV 56).
He upholds the traditional teaching about the role of punishment, including its retribution for the severity of the crime and “redressing the disorder caused by the offense.” Yet he also emphasizes rehabilitation, as no one is beyond God’s mercy. Punishment is meant to punish, but also to reform the offender in such a way that it helps both society and the criminal. Even in punishment, the life and dignity of the offender is not disregarded. John Paul II continues: “Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this. And it is precisely here that the paradoxical mystery of the merciful justice of God is shown forth” (EV 9).
The recent Virginia Bishops’ statement takes up this notion: “But our faith also challenges us to declare sacred even the least lovable among us, those convicted of committing brutal crimes which have brought them the ultimate penalty, the penalty of death” (Virginia Bishops’ May 5 Press Statement).
These two propositions, one that every life is sacred, even those of grave sinners, and two that punishment is legitimate retribution by a just authority for a wrongful offense, seem in tension in the case of the death penalty. But in fact, they are not. Traditionally, capital punishment was accepted precisely because it recognized the importance of life—that of the one taken, and not because it devalued the life of the criminal. As Dr. Steven Long, a theologian at Ave Maria University, puts it, a reader of Evangelium vitae “will not hesitate to give ‘defense of society’ a rich meaning inclusive of the manifestation of a transcendent order of justice within society” (from “Steven A. Long, “Evangelium Vitae, St. Thomas Aquinas and the Death Penalty. The Thomist, 1999). In other words, the state shares in God’s justice when, by its legitimate authority, it punishes the gravest sin with the gravest punishment.
But in today’s Culture of Death, as John Paul II dubs it, there is a problem with this approach. Dr. Christopher Kaczor describes it well in his book, The Edge of Life, “Although theoretically punishing murderers more severely might underscore a lesson about the value of human life, contemporary society does not as a whole seem to understand that as the lesson.… Rather, there is a moral danger that the use of capital punishment in fact reinforces the belief of many people in contemporary society that some human beings are expendable and may be killed for the good of others” (148).
That is, instead of stressing the positive value of life, society today takes capital punishment as an indicator that some lives truly are expendable, worthless, unimportant, irredeemable or simply not worth living. That is a problem, and this problem seems to me to be the impetus for limiting the death penalty and framing it as primarily a defensive issue.
By minimizing the death penalty and upholding the value of life, John Paul II and the Virginia Bishops trumpet what has become an uncomfortable position: that all life is valuable, from the tiniest, newly-conceived baby to the senile, cancer patient and even the death-row convict. They remind us that no one is dispensable.
They challenge us to not to ignore the deep troubles, grief and loss of those who have lost loved ones. Neither do they ask that we ignore justice or the proper role of punishment. Rather, what John Paul II and the Virginia Bishops ask us to see is that Jesus Christ already bore all the punishment the human race ever incurred. Proper earthly punishment rightly aligns with that, but because of Christ, there is also the real possibility of repentance and forgiveness. That even for the most wretched-seeming, there is still hope.
And while still holding to the value of all life, even Evangelium vitae leaves room for capital punishment in a defensive context, the right of society to defend itself and preserve peace. It is precisely in this that the apparent contradiction evaporates: on double-effect reasoning, even in the case of self-defense, the action itself must not be intrinsically wrong. Capital punishment is permissible as societal self-defense because it is permissible in itself as retribution. There are good reasons to limit its use, primarily to witness to the value of life, but the death penalty remains a permissible action of the state even if it not performed. Because of this, there is no contradiction in affirming the validity of capital punishment as retribution while at the same time seeking to greatly restrict or abolish it where circumstances allow.
Stephanie Pacheco is a writer, blogger, and speaker in Northern Virginia. She earned a M.A. in Theological Studies, summa cum laude, from Christendom College and holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia in Religious Studies with a minor in Government and Political Theory. She has presented at a conference of the American Catholic Historical Association and for Christian Women in Action. She lives with her husband and two young children.
