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Article_Speaking as one, Catholic publications call for end to death penalty

Press Release | Thursday, March 05, 2015

Speaking as one, Catholic publications call for end to death penalty

Four Catholic publications have published online a joint editorial calling for an end to the death penalty in the United States.  

"We, the editors of four Catholic journals - America, National Catholic Register, National Catholic Reporter and Our Sunday Visitor Newsweekly - urge the readers of our diverse publications and the whole U.S. Catholic community and all people of faith to stand with us and say, 'Capital punishment must end,'" says the editorial, which was posted to the publications' websites March 5. 

The editorial will appear in these publications' print issues in coming weeks. The editorial is in response to a death penalty case out of Oklahoma that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear next month. The case, Glossip v. Gross, involves the use of a lethal injection protocol widely used in the United States, which resulted in a series of botched executions last year. 

The editorial quotes Archbishop Thomas Wenski's comments on the Supreme Court's decision to take that case, comments he made in his capacity as chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, -

The editorial also notes that thinking on capital punishment has evolved over time. Since Pope St. John Paul II's 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, the Gospel of Life, the Church has taught that the need for capital punishment is "very rare, if not practically non-existent."

The Catechism of the Catholic Church was updated in 1997 to reflect this. Writing at that time, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI, noted that "where other means for the self-defense of society are possible and adequate, the death penalty may be permitted to disappear." 

The editorial notes that "Last year, Pope Francis called on all Catholics 'to fight ... for the abolition of the death penalty.'" 

Gretchen R. Crowe, editor of Our Sunday Visitor Newsweekly, said the editorial "stands as a strong, united and pro-life statement against the U.S. death penalty." 

"Such a combined effort is not unprecedented, but it is rare, and as such, we hope that it contributes to the national debate," she wrote in the newspaper's upcoming print edition, dated March 15. 

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