LARRY KUPERMAN WRITES” "Evangelium Vitae" (The Gospel of Life) issued March 25, 1995 after four years of consultations with the world's Roman Catholic bishops, John Paul II wrote that execution is only appropriate "in cases of absolute necessity, in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. "
Clearly, the death is permissible under certain circumstances. While it should be a last resort, the Pope allows that in certain circumstances it is allowed. One such circumstance is in the defense of society.
You can read the entirety at the Vatican's own site at
Link
It is rather long, the portion that I have referenced is in section 56.
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Thank you LK for referring Sean to EV and the link. I remember that during this time the liberal media were all in a twit hoping there was a big new development with the death penalty---that it would be abolished altogether and that is one of the reasons why EV and Pope JPII’s comments go misunderstood.

Re: the Catholic Church and the death penalty-----There has been an unbroken continuity for 2000 years where the Church has always recognized the right of civil authorities to impose the death penalty. The Church has never abolished the death penalty, nor could. Limiting its use though is an entirely separate matter. One of the main argument for capital punishment has rested on the fact of what happened at the Praeporium between Pontius Pilate and Christ. Our Lord had 2 momentous occasions to denounce the death penalty--when Pilate condemned Him to death and as He died on the Cross. Our Lord did not do so. In St. John 19:10-11, Jesus acknowledges that capital punishment is licit. When Pilate asked him, “Don’t you know I have the power to crucify You?” Jesus answered, “You would not have such power against me unless it were given to thee from above.” In other words, Pilate’s power or authority to crucify was from God.
In St. Matthew 22:21, Jesus tells us to follow civil law. “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s.” In no place in the New Testament did Our Lord say the verses of Numbers 35: 16-20 are wrong. Here it says 3 times that murderers will be put to death. Yes, it was God who instituted the death penalty. Genesis 9:6, "whoever sheds blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for the image of God has God made man." Nothing I have ever read in the Old or the New Testaments has suggested He ever repealed it.

As I understand the statement from representatives of the Holy See concerning Iraq’s use of the death penalty against Saddam Hussein----they did not call for the abolishment of capital punishment, they only asked to limit its use.

The 2nd edition of the Catechism of the CC states that “the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty.” 2267. The presumption has always been that the death penalty is not to be used as societal retribution; rather it is an act of societal self defense.

There is a radical moral distinction between the capital punishment of the guilty and the killing of an innocent in the womb.

KFC---we must have been posting at the same time! I see you mentioned Genesis. You gave an excellent description of understanding the death penalty in the context of Genesis. That may be difficult for some to grasp.

There are a lot more verses we could cite too.

The murderer had to suffer for his actions because it was a fundamental denial of the image of God in the one that was killed. So the person, in this case Saddam, who destroyed another being made in God's image in fact did violence to God himself. To God every human is sacred with worth and value that God himself had invested in the slain individual.

very well put - clear and to the point...very easy to understand.

One of the main argument for capital punishment has rested on the fact of what happened at the Praeporium between Pontius Pilate and Christ. Our Lord had 2 momentous occasions to denounce the death penalty--when Pilate condemned Him to death and as He died on the Cross. Our Lord did not do so. In St. John 19:10-11, Jesus acknowledges that capital punishment is licit. When Pilate asked him, “Don’t you know I have the power to crucify You?” Jesus answered, “You would not have such power against me unless it were given to thee from above.” In other words, Pilate’s power or authority to crucify was from God.

excellent point Lula.

I would say just this. TODAYS church, thinks execution is a bad think no matter who it is being executed. I do not believe in execution MOST THE time. sometimes I get a little torn and want to see some particularly nasty monsters put to death. confusing? yup. is to me too. Conflicted? yup. Torn between two diverse beliefs? yup.

I would say just this. TODAYS church, thinks execution is a bad think no matter who it is being executed. I do not believe in execution MOST THE time. sometimes I get a little torn and want to see some particularly nasty monsters put to death. confusing? yup. is to me too. Conflicted? yup. Torn between two diverse beliefs? yup.

On some issues we think alike MM. I don't believe in the death penalty in general but it seems to me if anyone deserves it Sadam Hussein does, Timothy McVeigh did.

The church said in it's statement that hanging Saddam was simply committing another crime against humanity to somehow pay for other crimes and had nothing to do with justice.

They are absolutely right. This has NOTHING to do with justice and "balancing the scales" This has to do with removing a threat. As long as he is alive, there is the possibility that a group woudl seek to reinstate his bloody reign. Justice is for God to met out at the final judgement. We cannot come close to holding this man accountable for the crimes he commited. As for this being another crime against humanity? I can't speak for God, but I think he will take the fact this was not an angry mob, but a decision made by leaders/judges who were seeking the welfare of their people into consideration.

now this is the kind of debate i wanted to see...thanks for the comments all:)

I don't believe in the death penalty in general but it seems to me if anyone deserves it Sadam Hussein does, Timothy McVeigh did.

yes, but can you see how this can be very subjective? That's why we have judges who make these decisions. We may not be in the know for lesser known murderers and tyrants and think they don't deserve it like Saddam does.

How many murders does a murderer make? How many do they have to committ before we say..."Okay this one deserves the death penalty." Two? Three? Twenty? Hundreds?

God set up the judicial system and his system right from the get go was if one commits a murder his life was owed to God in exchange for the one taken. That was the only way the land could be cleansed and atoned for. But he, also to protect the one being charged, said one could not be executed with just one witness. There had to be, at the very least, two witnesses before an execution could take place.

We have no right to take the life of another (outside the judicial system)wheter it be an unborn or fully grown human because God made man in His image. To kill anyone is to shake a fist at the creator and rebell against him.

In the Hebrew version, the Old Testament says "You shall not commit murder" not "Thou shall not kill." These are very different in meaning, of course. A State ordered execution is not a murder.

While this is true, you are confusing church doctrine with biblical facts. Keep in mind that the Catholic Church was conned into following science, which became doctrine that non-believers site as how bad religion is. Remember science at the time said the moon, stars, sun and planets revolve around the earth. This is contrary to the bible but became doctrine because they wanted to up-date the church. Oops.

The Catholic Church hierarchy - especially Eugenio Pacelli, before and after he became Pope Pius XII - aided the Nazis. Indeed, Pacelli and the Church played a central role in making Hitler the dictator of Germany. On 23 March 1933, the Nazi government put forward the Enabling act, which would allow Hitler to create new laws without parliamentary approval. The Zentrum, the Catholic Center Party, supported Hitler in this legislation. Zentrum leader Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, a close friend and adviser to Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, addressed the Reichstag, calling for a "Yes" vote.

Here you are confusing individual leaders with church doctrine. Ambassador Kennedy (admittedly a Catholic) supported Hitler and the Nazis starting that family on an 80 year family tradition of support for terrorists, and despots. By your reckoning since Mr. Kennedy was a Democrat it must mean that all Democrats supported the Nazis. Or all Americans supported the Nazis. Neither is true and the generalization you make is just as incorrect.

But that is old news. What is more current is the conviction of Catholic priest Father Athanase Seromba for crimes against humanity in Rwanda. He has been convicted of deliberately sending 19 Tutsi schoolgirls to their deaths at the hand of Hutu extremists. Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka has also been convicted of committing rape and aiding militiamen in the genocide. Nuns have also been implicated. Sister Julienne Maria Kizito and her Mother Superior, Sister Gertrude Mukangango, were sentenced by a Belgian court to 12 and 15 years in prison, respectively. They were accused of calling in militiamen to drive out Tutsis who had sought refuge in their convent at Sovu.

So much hate and so little context. We have had people torture our enemy in a time of war. Does that mean that the American government supports torture? We had idiots that took pictures of humiliations in a prison. People similar to you screamed that the President supported these actions just because he is the Commander in Chief. Now if the Pope had condoned what they did I would agree with you. The UN people in some countries also raped and abused people; are you saying that the United States, a member of the United Nations, condoned and approved the actions of these wayward people? If so then you as an American are also responsible for their actions. How about the Priests that molested people? People break their vows all the time you can’t hold the organization responsible for what individuals do unless they do nothing to correct the problem once it is known. This would include the UN and the Church in some cases. I keep in mind that they believe in forgiveness which contributes to their problem with the molestation. These people are humans not God.

LARRY KUPERMAN writes:
You said "The Catholic Church sees no justification to kill whatsoever. This has remained consistant since after the Crusades and the middle ages. And at least in the modern era, they have remined uberconsistant on their position." That is not true at all.
To Sean Conners, Larry Kuperman and anyone else interested-------I would advise reading Pg. 2267 of the Catechism of the CC which covers the Church’s philosophy on the death penalty. Numbers 35:16-21 of the OT will help also. Popes can request mitigation of the death sentence, but it has not been abolished, nor could it be. Pius XII asked Ike for clemency for the Rosenburgs but got turned down.
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LARRY KUPERMAN WRITES: “But that is the smallest detail” and goes on to rail against Pope Pius XII falsely charging him with aiding the Nazis.
All I ask Larry Kuperman, is, instead of slinging out hostile, bankrupt charges most likely dredged up in the last few years from anti-Catholic media in its quest to advance the culture war, to please read both sides. Until you do, please stop blaming Catholicism for the wrong doing of secular regimes.
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LARRY KUPERMAN WRITES: Were you aware that the Catholic Church signed an agreement with the Nazis in 1933? At any rate, in 1933 the Reichskonkordat was signed by Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli and Franz von Papen on behalf of Pope Pius XI and President Paul von Hindenburg, respectively. Under this agreement, the Catholic Bishops of Germany took an oath to support the Nazi government ("I swear and vow to honor the constitutional government and to make my clergy honor it") ending Church opposition to the Nazis in exchange for right to freely practice the Roman Catholic religion.
To get the facts on the Vatican-Nazi Concordat of 1933, one must read, THE PERSECUTION OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE THIRD REICH: FACTS AND DOCUMENTS, published in 1941 at the height of Nazi tyranny. The appendix is the full text of the concordat. It proves with authentic and incontrovertible facts that beyond a shadow of doubt the Catholic Church condemned Hitler and his ideology, loudly, repeatedly, and from the very beginning of his rise to power. For this, he tormented, repressed and killed Catholics. Another good book on the CC under Hitler is THE NAZI PERSECUTION OF THE CHURCHES by JD Conway, 1968.
The following is a brief explanation of the signing of the Concordat. In 1920, Hitler laid the foundation for overthrowing the Versailles Treaty by converting the German Workers’ Party into the Nationalist Socialist’s German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). In 1923, while in prison for 8 months, he compiled notes for Mein Kampf. His aim was to supplant faith in Christianity by faith in national socialism. Once this goal was attained, he hoped to annihilate the Catholic Church as an institution. In the elections of 1932 and 33, German bishops warned Catholics against this movement, and urged them to vote for Catholic candidates and forbade them to vote for the Nazis. In Jan. 1933, Hitler became chancellor of the Third Reich and affirmed Germany’s traditional foundations by asserting that his government regarded Catholicism and Protestantism as the most important factors for support of the German ethos and would devote itself to cooperation between church and state.
He seemed to be fulfilling these promises when he concluded a concordat with the Holy See on July 20, 1933 that permitted free, public exercise of religious freedom. He lied. Hitler’s violations of its provisions were so numerous that in 1937 Pius XI issued the encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge, which made clear the fundamental irreconcilability of Catholicism and Nazism. It protested the closing and confiscation of Catholic schools, hospitals and seminaries, the seizure of property and goods belonging to the religious orders, the discrediting of religious by means of rigged trials, and the identifying of loyalty to Christianity with disloyalty to the fatherland. In pastoral letters and sermons, the German hierarchy forcefully opposed racism, totalitarianism, euthanasia laws, compulsory membership in Hitler’s youth organizations, and the desecration of churches.
KUPERMAN WRITES: Hitler was born and raised as a Catholic and there is disagreement whether he was ever excommunicated. (If he was, it was by inclusion in a group, never singling him out personally.)
Hitler was an apostate from Catholicism. Sister M. Marchione, a historian on Pius XII, seems to think he was excommunicated.
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KUPERMAN WRITES: the result of granting Hitler freedom to enact whatever laws he wanted with the tacit approval of the Catholic Church was the Shoah or Holocaust.
The Catholic Church hierarchy - especially Eugenio Pacelli, before and after he became Pope Pius XII - aided the Nazis.

I don’t know whether your obscene and scurrilous attack on Pope Pius and the German hierarchy is of ignorance or outright prejudice or combination of the two. In any case, your comments are completely unfounded, untrue and unjust. Orthodox Rabbi, David Dalin, would disagree with you. William Donohue, president of The Catholic League, writes, These are the words of Rabbi David Dalin, author of the just-published book, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis: ‘Jeno Levai, the great Hungarian Jewish historian, was so angered by accusations of papal ‘silence’ that he wrote Hungarian Jewry and the Papacy: Pius XII Did Not Remain Silent (published in English in 1968), with a powerful introduction and epilogue by Robert M.W. Kempner, the deputy chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremburg.’ Levai demonstrated how Catholic Church officials ‘intervened again and again on the instructions of the pope,’ the result of which was that ‘in the autumn and winter of 1944 there was practically no Catholic Church institution in Budapest where persecuted Jews did not find refuge.’
THE MYTH OF HITLER’S POPE sets the record straight documenting the dishonesty of Pius’ leading attackers and dishonest treatment of the Pope who actually was a friend and protector of Jewish people.
I spoke to a friend who has empirical knowledge of World War II having been an infantry soldier about your idea that the Holy See was buddies with Hitler. He quipped, “How come that none of the thousands of Catholic soldiers who fell fighting from Normandy to the Elbe were told that the Pope was a pal of Hitler?” and “We lost thousands of Catholic infantryman on the way to liberate the Jewish inmates of Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. Funny. Nobody told us at the time that Pius XII or the CC caused these camps.”
He’s a retired librarian and suggested if you believe in fairness to read Ron Rychlak’s book, now in its second printing, “Hitler, the War and the Pope”, Ralph McInerny’s “The Defamation of Pius XII” or John Toland’s Pulitzer prize winning “Adolf Hitler”. Toland argued, “The Church, under the Pope’s guidance...saved the lives of more Jews than all other churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations combined.”
In “Eugenio: True Hero of the Holocaust”, M.L.T. Brown gives a great deal of information on the policies and workings of the Vatican in sheltering Jews in Vatican City itself, in Castel Gandolfo, and in other parts of Italy. She also draws extensively from excellent sources, books written by Jews of the Holocaust, including Israeli Ambassador Pinchas Lapide’s “Three Popes and the Jews” and Jeno Levai’s book that I cited above from Donohue. She also has written an excellent analysis of Hitler, including his psychopathic hatred of Christianity and his demonic persecution of the CC in Germany.
A while ago, I debated someone else on this very subject and we decided to ask a history teacher about the actual number of people killed under Hitler’s order. He said,
It seems that about twelve million were murdered by the Nazis in various ways, beginning in 1939 when they invaded Poland. By 1945, they were all done. Six million Jews, one million Gypsies, about 100,000 homosexuals (the feminine kind - because many of the high-ranking Nazis perpetrating the Holocaust were themselves homosexuals, but the more masculine type), many Russian POWs, probably over a million, but I'm not sure on that category. There were thousands of Catholics killed, but not because they were Catholics, but because they opposed Nazi policies and wouldn't shut up about it. I'll have to look at my books again for more details. The best account is "War Against the Jews" by Lucy Davidowicz. It has the most statistics. I have a copy if you want to borrow it.
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Sister Margherita Marchione, of the Religious Teachers Filippini, is a historian and expert on the life of Pius XII. She wrote the recently published book, “Crusade of Charity: Pius XII and POW’s (Paulist Press). She says there are 20 million wartime letters in the Vatican Archives that express the faith and confidence of families with regard to their loved ones who were prisoners of war or missing in action. She said that he saved hundreds of thousands of Jews from the gas chambers. She also says there are thousands of available documents in the Archives that record the humanitarian work of the Holy See, including his rescue program that with diplomacy rather than confrontation saved hundreds of thousands of Jews and Christians from death in concentration camps. All members of the CC were ordered to protect all refugees and Jews.
Kuperman, do you know that for nearly 20 years after WW II, Pope Pius XII who reigned from 1939-1958, was respected worldwide for saving countless Jewish lives in the face of the Nazi Holocaust. Robert Lockwood of This Rock magazine said, “When he died on Oct. 9, 1958, Golda Meir, future Israeli prime minister and then Israeli representative to the UN, spoke on the floor of the General Assembly: “During the ten years of Nazi terror, when our people went through the horrors of martyrdom, the Pope raised his voice to condemn the persecutors and to commiserate with the victims.” Among the organizations praising the Holy Father at the time of his death were the World Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, the Synagogue Council of America, the American Jewish Congress, the New York Board of Rabbis, the American Jewish Committee, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and the National Council of Jewish Women.”
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KUPERMAN WRITES: The Church also supported the pro-Nazi government in Croatia during World War II. The Church protected Catholic leaders accused of genocide in Croatia.
The Catholic Church does not approve of totalitarian regimes like Pavelic in wartime Croatia. It tries to live under such regimes as today is the case in Pakistan, Red China, and Vietnam. It manages to live under the Bush American presidency where the holocaust of babies are legally slaughtered in their mother’s wombs and moments before they are about to be born in the amount of 4,000 per day and 6,000 on Saturdays in abortion mills across the land.

lula,,,what is your position in he catholic church?

SEAN CONNERS Writes: lula,,,what is your position in he catholic church?

I am a lifelong member of the Catholic laity. Just a lady in the pews.
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SEAN CONNERS WRITES: i should have remembered the nazi exception,,,,you are right, they caved there......... outside of supporting nazi's i can't find much in the modern era where the church has strayed from their life doctrine.

The CC is the only institution in the entire world that has a consistent life doctrine. There was no "nazi exception or "supporting nazi's". Don't take my word for it, check out some of those books from your local library and see for yourself.

The CC is the only institution in the entire world that has a consistent life doctrine.

i believe i credited them with that. let's not go overboard tho...there is clear evidence of the aiding and passively accepting nazi practices before and during WWII.

SEAN CONNERS Writes: lula,,,what is your position in he catholic church? I am a lifelong member of the Catholic laity. Just a lady in the pews.

are you in the pews daily? do you volunteer for the church? how active are you?

SEAN CONNERS WRITES: are you in the pews daily? do you volunteer for the church? how active are you?

I would attend daily Mass, if I could. We have a small mission Church and our priest must travel 20 miles in order to celebrate Sunday Mass and one on Tuesdays that follows the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

I like to help out in the Church as much as I am able while mindful that my family and home comes first.