Pablo Esparza / CNA Pope Francis at the general audience at the Vatican on August 24, 2022
31 August 2022, 10:45 a.m., Vatican City (CNA).
Pope Francis has asked Catholics around the world to pray for the abolition of the death penalty in September.
He made the request in his September prayer intention, which he released along with a video on August 31.
The prayer intention supported by the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network reads, “We hope that the death penalty, which undermines the dignity of the human person, will be legitimately abolished in all countries.”
In the video describing his prayer intention, Pope Francis stated, “The death sentence is morally unacceptable because it kills the most precious gift we have been given: life.”
“Let us not forget that a person can convert and change until the very last moment,” the pope said.
“Moreover, in view of the Gospel, the death penalty is inadmissible. The ‘Thou must not kill’ rule applies to both the innocent and the wicked.
According to Amnesty International, more persons were executed under the death sentence in 2021 than in the previous year, with 579 executions documented in 18 countries.
China executed the most individuals, followed by Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.
In the United States, eleven individuals were killed by lethal injection in Texas, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma in 2013.
This year, Catholic bishops in the United States, including Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City and Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, have lobbied for death row inmates.
Although the Church teaches that the death penalty is not inherently wicked, both Pope Francis and his immediate predecessors have denounced the use in the West.
In 2018, Pope Francis amended the Catechism of the Catholic Church to declare the death sentence “unacceptable.”
Fr. Thomas Petri, O.P., a moral theologian at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., told CNA at the time that he believes this modification “further absolutes John Paul II’s pastoral conclusion.”
“Nothing in the revised language of paragraph 2267 suggests that the death sentence is inherently bad. In fact, nothing could imply this because it would violate the Church’s unwavering doctrine, Fr. Petri said.
In his video message, the pope asked “all persons of goodwill to mobilize for the global elimination of the death sentence.”
“Society can effectively suppress crime without permanently denying convicts the opportunity for redemption,” remarked Pope Francis.
In any legal sentence, there must always be a glimmer of optimism.