Although Pope Francis amended Catholic social ethics to exclude the death
penalty rather than continue to accept the punishment in cases in which no
other punishment is practical or available, Pope Leo decided in October, 2026
to make a public statement of his Church’s opposition to the death penalty in
reaction to the decision of the Trump administration to televise an upcoming execution
live on television. That a woman had recently survived execution attempts by two
lethal injections may have primed the pope’s pump, as it were. The danger
is that the foray into applied ethics by leaders of a religious organization
could conflate ethics and theology. That the latter transcends, and may even
violate ethical principles, can easily be forgotten when a religious leader
speaks out a lot on ethical issues. In the case of Pope Leo’s statement on
capital punishment, a distinctly theological rationale can be found, and, I submit,
should have received more emphasis, lest the religious leader be reduced
to an ethical critic, or conscience. To be sure, in 2026, the world was very
much in need of a public conscience, especially because Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine was still underway, as was Israel’s genocide in Gaza and wanton
violence in the West Bank—all of this aggression was being done with obvious
impunity.
Tennessee, a member of the
U.S., attempted to execute Debra Johnson with two doses of pentobarbital on
September 30, 2026. “At one point she was on a ventilator and her attorney did
not expect her to survive. However, they said Pike woke up and began walking
with assistance.”[1] This
quoted passage from the media makes her recovery seem like a miracle. If it
was, perhaps the distinctly Christian deity, which is selfless love (agape), saved
Pike’s life out of opposition to the death penalty. Vengeance is mine, sayeth
the Lord comes from the Old Testament. In the New Testament, the deity is
epitomized by compassion especially for one’s detractors and even enemies. Pray
for those who persecute you, and respond to their human needs with acts of
compassion. Neither prayer alone nor being compassion friends suffices. Forgiveness
is implicit in being compassionate to someone like Pike, who in 1995 had
beaten and stabbed one of her classmates. It is not as if she had gone a murder
spree, mowing down many people with gunfire. If the botched execution could be
considered to be cruel and unusual punishment, mercy in the form of a reprieve would
be justified. After all, she had already spent 30 years in prison knowing that
she would be executed—inflicting that expectation for three decades could also be
considered as cruel.
On October 8, 2026, the U.S. announced
“that the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at a
military base at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, would be livestreamed on 3
December.”[2]
Hasan was an army psychiatrist when he “open fire with a handgun at a medical
facility at Fort Hood on 5 November 2009 as soldiers waited for medical checks
before deployment. He was shot by a police officer during his arrest and left
partly paralyzed, and now uses a wheelchair.”[3]
It would be interesting to determine whether he was resisting arrest when he
was shot. If he was not, then the police employee should have been arrested and
charged with attempted murder. As for Hasan, the United Nations’ office of the
high commissioner for human rights warned after the Pentagon’s announcement of
the public execution that broadcasting it would “breach the absolute
prohibition of torture.”[4]
Hillary Clinton, a former U.S. Secretary of State, characterized the televising
of the disabled man’s execution as a “barbaric idea.”[5]
Unlike Pike, Hasan murdered many people. Also unlike Pike, Hasan himself was
shot and partially paralyzed, perhaps unjustly. Even so, airing the execution
for the world to see could be considered cruel and unusual punishment. This
question is political and jurisprudential, as well as ethical in nature; it is
not in itself a religious question unless explicit reference to Hasan’s redemption
is added.
In writing Fear and Trembling,
Kierkegaard makes the point that Abraham is both guilty of attempted murder and
is faithful to the divine command to sacrifice his son. The negative
jurisprudential and ethical claim is consistent with the positive attribution
of faithfulness to the Yahweh—both are correct because they refer to different
domains. The charge of attempted murder is valid legally and ethically, and the
praise of Abraham obeying a divine command even to sacrifice Isaac is valid
theologically. The validity of the theological claim is not invalidated by the unethical
act of attempted murder. Theology transcends ethics. Were the Ten Commandments
in Torah prior to Abraham, then attempted murder would have theological currency
and the question would be: Does the commandment not to kill supersede the
divine command to Abraham to murder Isaac? Moreover, how are we to navigate
between two conflicting divine commands?
Not being Abraham, and with
the Ten Commandments in scripture, both Tennessee and the U.S. faced both the
ethical quandary of capital punishment and the divine, theological, decree not
to kill. In responding to the debate on whether the U.S. should televise Hasan’s
execution, Pope Leo reiterated on October 10, 2026, the World Day Against the
Death Penalty, that capital punishment is “inadmissible.”[6]
The American Midwestern pope claimed that the punishment is contrary to the
inherent dignity of a human being. Human dignity is an ethical rather
than a theological term, and thus is not useful from a distinctly theological
standpoint. In other words, were the pope driving a car on a road, it could
be said that he swerved into another lane; even though the two lanes are
related, they not the same lane. Unfortunately, the pope did not use the car’s
turning signal to indicate to other drivers that he was going from one lane to
another. This analogy falls short, however, because the pope did not entirely
leave his lane.
Although the pope wandered from
his theological education in claiming in his written statement, “Effective
systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens,” he stayed within
his ken, and thus in the theological or religious domain, in adding that
capital punishment deprives “those who are guilty of the possibility of
redemption.”[7] This
raises the question of whether a murderer on death row who has sought redemption
could then, on religious grounds, be executed. The pope could have added that
in the Ten Commandments, the commandment against killing other human beings prohibits
capital punishment—that a murder carried out by a criminal does not justify yet
another killing, even by a government. Two wrongs do not make a right is
an ethical rather than a distinctly theological saying, and thus should
not be used in a religious rationale against capital punishment. Rather
than appealing to the dignity of a human being, the pope should have stuck with
the theme of redemption and added the commandment against killing human beings.
Rather than venture into the field of criminal justice as if he had been
educated in that field of knowledge, he should have elaborated on redemption
itself. It is admittedly very tempting to go beyond one’s ken to pontificate in
other domains of knowledge and human experience. I will not hold this against
the Pope, as he too is a native Midwesterner from northern Illinois (even
though he serially sins by favoring the White Sox over the Chicago Cubs—or is his
lapse merely unethical?).
In conclusion, unless an
unethical act (or intent) is proscribed by a divine command or decree, or
interferes with soteriology or another distinctly theological value, ethical analysis
should be left to ethicists. Put another way, studying theology does not also
earn a student the right to a diploma in ethics, which is a subfield of philosophy.
To be sure, the two fields can be related, but this is not to say that knowledge
in one constitutes knowledge in the other. Unlike theology, criminal justice
and the ethics of conduct do not contain the element of religious transcendence,
which, as Pseudo-Dionysius wrote, inherently extends beyond the limits of human
cognition, perception, and sensibility (emotions). Contrarily, to say that
science still has unknowns is not to say that the empirical unknown lies inherently
beyond our reach. Religious functionaries and leaders, to the extent that they are oriented existentially to the inherently beyond, and thus to interpreting other human domains of experience in terms of the theological, radiate holiness by driving without swerving into other lanes in order to have more influence.
2, David Smith and Ariana Baio, “’Medieval’ and ‘Disturbing’: US Plan to Livestream Execution Elicits Global Condemnation,” The Guardian, October 2026.
3. Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5, Ibid.
6, Fortunato Pinto, “Pope Leo Condemns Death Penalty, Vance Vows Not to Watch Hasan’s Execution Live,” Euronews.com, 10 October, 2026.
7. Ibid.
