Colorado Bishops Support Pending Repeal of Death Penalty

In mid-January, SB20-100, a bill which would repeal the death penalty in Colorado, was introduced to the Colorado State Senate. This bill marks the legislature’s sixth attempt in recent years to repeal the death penalty. So far, it has passed the Senate, and is also expected to pass the Democratic-majority House of Representatives and to be signed into law by Democrat Governor Jared Polis, at which point Colorado will become the 21st state, along with Washington, D.C., to repeal the death penalty.

SB20-100 has gained the support of the Colorado Catholic Conference of bishops, a discourse among the Colorado bishops which issues statements on matters of public policy. Testifying at a hearing of the Colorado Senate Legislative Committee, Auxiliary Bishop Jorge Rodriguez of the Diocese of Denver, a member of the Conference, remarked that “the Catholic Church has long taught that every person, whether they are unborn, sick, or sinful, has a God-given dignity that cannot be erased or taken away.”

“Besides the fact that it cannot offer healing to victims and their loved ones,” Rodriguez elaborated, “the use of the death penalty only adds to the cycle of violence. What are we teaching our children? If we as a society accept the idea that it’s possible for someone to lose their human dignity and be executed, then it is only a short step to say that certain classes or types of people belong to this less-than-human group. History has shown that this is not outside the realm of possibility.”

The choice of the Colorado bishops to support this bill is in line with recent movements in the Church against capital punishment. As early as 1974 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) voted with an overwhelming majority to communicate its opposition to the death penalty.

More recently, in 2015, Pope Francis addressed a joint session of U.S. Congress, saying that his conviction to defend human life at every stage has led him “to advocate at different levels for the global abolition of the death penalty” and that “a just and necessary punishment must never exclude the dimension of hope and the goal of rehabilitation.”

Several years later, in 2018, Francis ordered a change to section 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC). Previously, section 2267 had noted that the Church “does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.” Even before Pope Francis’ change, the Catechism permitted capital punishment in very limited circumstances, especially considering the resources of modern states to contain dangerous criminals. Quoting St. John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae, the pre-2018 wording of the Catechism explained that “Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm—without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself—the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity ‘are very rare, if not practically non-existent.’”

Acknowledging the pre-2018 Catechism’s concerns about the death penalty, the updated version explains that the death penalty is neither necessary nor justifiable given the dignity of every person: “Consequently, the church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,’ and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”

Though many figures in the Church today oppose the death penalty, the issue has been fraught with controversy throughout history. In a December 1996 statement, the USCCB notes that early Christian thinkers including Justin Martyr and Clement of Rome permitted that the state could resort to capital punishment, “but Christians were not to be a part of this punishment.” Furthermore, both Augustine and Thomas Aquinas supported capital punishment in certain cases, and Augustine wrote that the death penalty could be valuable because it could deter crimes, and also because it could protect the innocent from future harm. Whatever one’s stance on capital punishment, it is uncontroversial that it is an issue of great importance that warrants reflection. For, as the USCCB notes, “in the public debate over capital punishment we are dealing with values of the highest importance: respect for the sanctity of human life, the protection of human life, the preservation of order in society, and the achievement of justice through law.”