The Death Penalty in Light of the Ontology of the Person: The Significance of Evangelium Vitae

Thomas R. Rourke

…In Evangelium Vitae, the pope clearly ties the application of the death penalty uniquely to cases where “it would not be possible otherwise to defend society.” In other words, the position taken by John Paul II is no longer to justify the death penalty intrinsically as just retribution, but to justify it only as an extraordinary means of defending society in the rare cases where it is the sole recourse available to obtain that end. [Cardinal] Ratzinger was therefore on the mark when he claimed that the pope's reservations about the death penalty go beyond those present in the Catechism and constitute a real development.

In what follows, then, I want to argue in favor of what I take to be the implication of the development in Catholic teaching on the death penalty initiated by John Paul II in EV, namely, that retribution is not by itself a sufficient or commensurate warrant for the use of the death penalty. The presupposition of my argument is that this development implies a nuancing of the notion of retribution, indeed, of the relationship between justice and mercy, in the light of theological anthropology, which we will explore presently. Before doing so, however, it is worth noting that John Paul II is not claiming in EV any straightforward moral equivalence between capital punishment and, say, abortion or euthanasia. The point is simply that the Christocentric anthropology underlying his teaching on these latter issues is also intrinsically relevant, albeit under different circumstances, to understanding what justice implies for the treatment of criminals.

The burden of this implication is, in my reading, that retribution apart from the strict correlation of person and community entailed by the pope's Christocentric anthropology threatens to become an exclusion in principle of certain persons from the network of relations that define the community as such. That is, the practice of putting to death criminals who are no longer a threat to society weakens the intrinsic link between person and community and thereby helps to diminish the respect that we must have for the life of all human beings, even that of sinners, with whom we are bound both in time and in eternity. Ultimately, Pope John Paul II seems to be telling us, the broad use of the death penalty as an instrument of social policy in, say, contemporary America, unwittingly favors our society's increasing tendency to dispose of persons whose existence is deemed inconvenient or useless, which is to say, the tendency toward a “culture of death.”

Here, then, we see the relevance of the theological anthropology developed in the first three sections of this essay. Genesis teaches us that man is created in the image and likeness of God, while the New Testament adds that our constitution as persons is a reflection of the divine persons. This suggests that, while through sin we can tarnish the image and likeness of the triune God, we never lose our dignity as persons made in that image and likeness. But this imaging is not a strictly individual affair. The Fathers, as we have seen, stress that we are all one body, brought together into an even more radical oneness by the Incarnation; in Christ we most truly become a “we.” This unity is underscored even more vigorously by the ontological presence of Christ in all persons. To be sure, there remains a basic distinction between right and wrong; the ontological presence of Christ in all does not mean that society may no longer distinguish between objectively good and bad men and women. Nonetheless, what Jesus teaches in Matthew 25 holds true, mutatis mutandis, even of the worst sinner. Only such an awareness of the ontological presence of Christ in all people can sustain the respect that we owe to every human life, even to the life of those whose moral status might otherwise tempt us to regard them as having forfeited their humanity altogether…

…Keeping in mind the definition of person developed in this paper, we must be wary of any argument that would separate the person from his or her essential relatedness to others in order to reconstitute him or her as an atomized rights-bearer who, when he or she takes the life of another such atom, automatically forfeits the “right to life” by virtue of a kind of mechanical exchange. Needless to say, mercy has no place in such a mechanical conception of justice. But again, as Portier reminds us, in a sound and integral theology of nature and grace, charity is the perfection of justice and not an optional supplement.5 This is why, far from securing real justice, retribution abstracted from the universal, eschatological solidarity revealed in Christ ends up reducing justice to a mechanistic caricature of itself.

The question of the death penalty, even as a matter of social policy, is thus intrinsically bound up with the question of final judgment. Here we need to take seriously the fact that God desires the salvation of all. Clearly, then, those guilty of the most serious sins would have to be the object of our deepest solicitude. As St. Catherine of Siena expresses it, “How could l ever reconcile myself, Lord, to the prospect that a single one of those whom, like me, you have created in your image and likeness should become lost and slip from your hands?” Balthasar shows that when we reconcile ourselves with the idea of hell for others we fail to love as Jesus calls us to love. We reject his mission at its very root. Balthasar writes, “Whoever reckons himself with the possibility of even only one person's being lost . . . is hardly able to love unreservedly.. . . Just the slightest nagging thought of a final hell for others tempts us, in moments in which human togetherness becomes especially difficult, to leave the other to himself.” To be sure, in stressing God's universal desire to save, I am not advocating a facile universalism. My point is rather that the eschatological execution of divine justice is inseparable from the ultimate act of divine mercy. This is not to say, of course, that we simply bypass the workings of inner-worldly justice in the name of the gospel. It is rather to affirm that, given the intrinsic unity of nature and grace, the inseparability of justice and mercy revealed on the Cross must determine our basic attitude towards the nature and administration of justice already at the level of earthly society and social policy. Most advocates of the death penalty probably do not desire the damnation of the condemned, and they may even pray for them. Yet a retributive act that abstracts from the order of redemption, which reveals the ultimate meaning of justice in its integration with mercy, objectively contributes to diluting the solidarity that binds the community together.

It is not surprising, then, that, as Archbishop Chaput laments, there is a “circus-like indignity” that increasingly surrounds executions in America today. He makes specific reference to a radio station in Denver that invited people to come to the federal court house and “literally, honk if you wanted to execute (or “fry”) the killer” [in this case Timothy McVeigh. While this may be particularly grotesque, I would argue the very nature of executing already incarcerated criminals as a general instrument of public policy invites the community to participate in such celebrations of hatred. The death penalty, as currently practiced in the United States, encourages and fosters the evil passion to take delight in vengeance.

In light of the foregoing, we are now able to see more clearly what Pope John Paul II is doing with respect to the death penalty in Evangelium Vitae. Rooted in the deepest and richest sense of Christian personalism and an integral relationship between nature and grace, John Paul II is bringing a radical Christocentrism to bear against the use of the death penalty as a general instrument of public policy. He does clearly stop short of defining capital punishment as an intrinsic evil; capital punishment cannot be morally equated with abortion. Nevertheless, the pope also states clearly that the use of the death penalty should be “very rare, if not practically non-existent.” …tightly restricted to cases where the community has no other way to defend itself against an aggressor.

…[T]he pope's timely development of the Church's teaching on this important and controversial subject is an excellent example of “razing the bastions” separating the Church from the world. The pope's teaching, rooted in revelation, is a genuine service to the entire human community.

Thomas R. Rourke is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Clarion University.

Originally published in Communio: International Catholic Review 25 (Fall, 1998), 397-413. Reprinted with permission.