{"id":178856,"date":"2018-08-02T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-03T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/08\/02\/frank-impresses-me-again\/"},"modified":"2018-08-02T19:00:00","modified_gmt":"2018-08-03T00:00:00","slug":"frank-impresses-me-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/08\/02\/frank-impresses-me-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Frank Impresses Me Again"},"content":{"rendered":"
In a nother change to Catholic doctrine, Pope Francis has made the Church’s opposition to the death penalty absolute<\/a>:<\/div>\n

Pope Francis has changed Catholic Church teaching to fully reject the death penalty, the Vatican announced Thursday, saying it would work to abolish capital punishment worldwide. <\/p>\n

The revision<\/a> to several sentences of the catechism, the compendium of Catholic beliefs, has the potential to recast debates around the world on how to handle those accused of the most heinous crimes. It adds a new wrinkle to the question of what it means to be pro-life \u2014 particularly in the United States, where Catholics who support the death penalty sit on the Supreme Court and govern states that permit executions. At the same time, it will test the church\u2019s ability to influence with a moral authority weakened by decades of sex abuse scandals.<\/p>\n

The church\u2019s updated teaching describes capital punishment as \u201cinadmissible\u201d and an attack on the \u201cdignity of the person.\u201d Previously, the church allowed for the death penalty in very rare cases, only as a means of \u201cdefending human lives against the unjust aggressor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Francis has for years been a vocal critic of the death penalty, calling it an \u201cinhuman measure.\u201d The Argentine pontiff has pointed to the church\u2019s stance on the death penalty as evidence of how the Vatican can evolve: The church for centuries permitted executions, but in 1997, John Paul II dramatically narrowed the standards for when the punishment was permissible. <\/p>\n

Francis\u2019s latest move places the issue toward the forefront of his own efforts to overhaul and modernize the Roman Catholic Church\u2019s approach to social justice.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no doubt the pope wants politicians to pay attention to this,\u201d said John Gehring, the Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, an advocacy group in Washington. \u201cHe is not just speaking internally. The pope wants to elevate this as a definitive pro-life issue.\u201d<\/p>\n

The full political significance of the new teaching stands to emerge slowly, as priests and bishops speak more clearly about the death penalty to planet\u2019s 1.2 billion Catholics. But in part because the practice has already been abolished in most countries with large Catholic populations \u2014 including throughout the European Union and across nearly all of South America \u2014 the United States is among the places where the shift could have the greatest consequence.<\/p>\n

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Catholic, presides over the state that carries out the highest number of executions. Several states have recently opened new discussions about abolishing the punishment. And in New Hampshire, one of the most heavily Catholic states, Gov. Chris Sununu in June vetoed a legislature-backed repeal of the death penalty, saying he didn\u2019t want to send a message that the worst criminals might be \u201cguaranteed leniency.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The fact that Abbott or Sunnunu get jammed up over the politics of this is just icing on the cake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a nother change to Catholic doctrine, Pope Francis has made the Church’s opposition to the death penalty absolute: Pope Francis has changed Catholic Church teaching to fully reject the death penalty, the Vatican announced Thursday, saying it would work to abolish capital punishment worldwide. The revision to several sentences of the catechism, the compendium …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[712,374,380],"class_list":["post-178856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-death-penalty","tag-politics","tag-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178856"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178856\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}