Changing Lanes: An Execution to Be Televised Prompts a Papal Statement

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.

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1, “Christa Pike Is Discharged from a Hospital after Surviving Execution Attempt, Her Attorney Says,” APNews.com, October 10, 2026.
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.

A Bishop's Partisanship Overshadows Her Christianity

On the first full day of U.S. President Trump’s second term, the president and vice president attended a multi-faith prayer service at the National Cathedral. Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde delivered the sermon on what is necessary for imperfect political unity in a country such as the United States. I contend that in trying to influence the president on immigration policy in a partisan way, she undercut the credibility of her message that there is strength in loving rather than retaliating against one’s detractors and even political enemies. The sacrifice of which she spoke concerning being kind in reaching out in humanity to people we dislike could be applied to herself in resisting the temptation to be partisan. That she lapsed at the expense of Jesus’ most important message is particularly striking.

Rev. Budde claimed that recognizing the dignity of even one’s enemies as being worthy of respect is one of three elements in achieving an admittedly imperfect (for we are imperfect beings) political unity, which in turn can be understood as “a way of being with one another.” To hold different perspectives or opinions as “valid and worthy of respect” does not require agreeing with them, and it is indeed permissible to proffer corrections on faulty reasoning. Such differences can exist within a deeper political unity if there is also compassion with another person’s humanity, as in the context of natural disasters.

Helping another person even though dislike exists in either or both directions involves sacrificial love as we give of ourselves for the sake of others, regardless of whom they voted for in the last election. In his Sermon on the Mount, the priest said, Jesus advocates loving not just our neighbors, but to love our enemies. Such love can seem vague, and the term “enemies” can easily be dismissed as too extreme to apply as the term does not include people who simply don’t like us or whom we don’t like. Being willing to be compassionate and kind in not just sympathizing, but also helping even people whom we regard as assholes is none other than the content of the kingdom of God, according to Samuel Hopkins, an American theologian who followed his relative, Jonathan Edwards, in the First Great Awakening. God is incarnate in our world in the interpersonal dynamic that only exists when a person disregards dislike in choosing to respond in kindness to another person’s needs when doing so is inconvenient interpersonally.   Valuing this divine presence in the world and enabling it to manifest by helping out in humaneness is something that anyone can value without necessarily believing in a god-man. Indeed, the litmus test in Christianity could be changed in line with this focus on the kingdom of God, whose mysteries Jesus says in the Gospels he came to discuss. Put another way, were actual acts of kindness to people who have been rude or even mean the focus for Christian intention, interpersonal peace might just break out as from a mustard seed. The world would change dramatically, and a president could lead the way by example.

Had the priest left her message at that, the impact would have been greater than it was, but she went on to bring up Jesus’ position on societal outcastes in order to beg President Trump to have mercy on people in the United States who have entered illegally. Reminding the president of Jesus welcoming outcastes in the Gospels, she pleaded for mercy on the hard-working people in the U.S. who don’t “have the proper documentation” to be in the country but “are not criminals.” I submit that not having the proper documents is a function of having broken U.S. law, and thus being criminals by entering the U.S. illegally. The problem lies not with documents, but with the willful decision to enter another country without permission, which, I submit is rather presumptuous. To label this as not criminal is not only incorrect factually, but glosses over the sheer presumption in sneaking into another country. I submit that the attitude of “laws don’t apply to me” is indeed presumptuous, and in fact is inconsistent with being in a society at all. For it is only in a Hobbesian state of nature that laws do not apply.

So, I submit that by “getting political” in a misleading or artful way, the priest undercut the immense credibility that lies in the strength of forgiveness by helping out people who have been most unkind—a kind of strength that is often dismissed in the political world, as it is by the Romans in the Gospels. In his writings, Nietzsche argues that this sort of strength is actually weakness. He even points out how it is preached as a means of gaining power over the politically strong. This is exactly what the priest was doing in trying to make the president feel guilty for objecting to people whose first act in the U.S. was to break its laws by entering illegally. That they have no right to be in the U.S. does not undercut their dignity, for they have done that themselves in audaciously sneaking into a country (or staying beyond a court date). The priest herself said that honesty is a major element of political unity.  

Unfortunately, the focus was not on whether serving the humanity of even political adversaries in acts of kindness rather than seeking retribution constitutes strength or weakness. Christianity stands for the former, whereas Nietzsche provides a counter-argument wherein the religion is useful for the weak who are not strong enough to be politically powerful. It could be that valuing not only turning the other cheek, but responding to the humanity of detractors in acts of kindness is the or ought to be the definitive litmus test by which a person can decide in the privacy of one’s own heart whether one is a Christian. Were this the focus of the religion, then the earthly city might really change. Being opportunistic in seeking political influence, on the other hand, is unfortunately already well-ensconced, and is thus easily recognizable.