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Pope Francis’ Absolute Ban on the Death Penalty Aimed at U.S.

Pope Francis’ Absolute Ban on the Death Penalty Aimed at U.S.

Last updated on: August 6, 2018 at 12:20 pm by Andrew Chesnut

Pope Francis’ Absolute Ban on the Death Penalty Aimed at U.S. 2018-08-06T12:20:15-04:00 Andrew Chesnut

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Lethal Injection Room at San Quentin State Prison

In a major shift on Church teaching, Pope Francis has declared capital punishment unacceptable in all cases. Prior to the pontiff’s recent pronouncement, Church doctrine allowed for the death penalty if it were deemed the only practical way of defending lives. Practically speaking, the Church’s new policy of total opposition to capital punishment is aimed at the United States. Of the 52 nations that still execute convicted criminals the U.S. stands alone as both the only major Western country and the only one with a significant Catholic population, the 4th largest in the world.

As the first Latin American pope, Francis has put mercy and social justice at the top of his pastoral agenda, so the new ecclesial position on capital punishment comes as no surprise. One of the fixtures of his foreign tours, including the one to the US, are visits to prisons, which in his native Latin America are hellholes often controlled by criminal elements.

While American prisons are not as hellish as those in the pope’s native region, serious flaws in the criminal justice system in many of the states that still carry out executions, including Virginia where I live, result in lethal injections of men, the great majority are male, who are disproportionately African-American, Latinx, high-school drop-outs, many of whom received subpar legal representation in a system in which access to high-priced attorneys often makes the difference between ending up on death row and serving an abbreviated sentence.

A new Pew poll shows a significant majority (57%) of White American Catholics are in favor of the death penalty despite the Church being one of the major opponents to it for some time now. Overall, American Catholics of all ethnicities are a bit less in favor of executing convicted murderers because Latinx and African-Americans oppose the death penalty at much higher rates than Euro-Americans. 49% of Latinx oppose it, while 52% of African Americans do. In contrast, only 34% of White Americans oppose executions of convicted murderers.

In short, the new Church doctrine will give greater ammunition to Catholics fighting to abolish it in the U.S., but will probably not sway those parishioners who support it, many of whom view the Argentine pontiff as too liberal on issues of social policy.

criminal justice system

About Andrew Chesnut

Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut earned his Ph.D degree in Latin American History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995 and joined the History Department faculty at the University of Houston in 1997. He quickly became an internationally recognized expert on Latin American religious history Professor Chesnut was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Bishop Walter Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at VCU in 2008. The chair was established as the Most Rev. Walter F. Sullivan was nearing retirement as the 11th bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond to honor his nearly thirty years of service. For Professor Chesnut the chair became a unique opportunity to develop Catholic studies in a global context and at a large public university. Professor Chesnut’s early work, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (Rutgers University Press, 1997), traces the meteroric rise of Pentecostalism among the popular classes in Brazil following the disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church. His second book, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (Oxford University Press, 2003) focuses on the three groups that have prospered most in the region’s pluralist landscape, Protestant Pentecostalism, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and African disasporic religions (e.g., Brazilian Candomble and Haitian Vodou). Professor Chesnut's most recent book is Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (Oxford University Press, 2025). It is the first in-depth study of the Mexican folk saint in English and has received widespread media coverage. You can read more about the author here.

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