On many issues the Catholic Church has backed itself into a indefensible position and such is the case with capital punishment. The Church teaches that all life is from God and that only God has the right to end it. Reconcile that position with the practical daily occurrences of self-defense and the obvious need to end lives during time of war. You get the idea that God doesn’t want good people to die because they aren’t allowed to defend themselves or their country. So there are exceptions to the universal Church rule about not EVER taking life. Let’s talk capital punishment…a recent reading at Sunday Mass addresses this issue quite clearly. It says: if your foot, hand or eye is causing you to sin, cut it out because it is better to enter Heaven with only one foot, hand or eye that to burn in Hell with 2 feet, hands or eyes. The message of the Bible here is clear: whenever a part of the body can do irreparable harm to that body it must be discarded immediately. Now, if we apply that concept to society, the Bible is saying “if a member of society is a danger to that society, that member must be removed from the society”. A removed foot dies. A removed individual would seem expendable. Yes, we can hear the comment “what if the person was wrongly convicted?” But with today’s constitutional court process and DNA testing this is less and less likely to happen. This is not a perfect world and mistakes will still be made. But the opposite of carrying out an execution is to imprison an individual for life in a cage. Is that what the Church favors? The Church needs to re-assess its position on capital punishment because the preservation of some lives is a dangerous detriment to all life. Imagine avoiding the death penalty for a terrorist only to have him escape and engineer another 9/11 type attack. Is that something the Church could explain and defend?
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