The Pope shakes things up again: is Francis saying anything “new” on the death penalty?

By Christopher Zehnder

So, Pope Francis has struck again! For a time, he was rather quiescent, seeming to settle down into a more traditional papal routine. But, he has leaped into the news again. He has, so we are told, changed the Church’s teaching on the death penalty.

A 17th-century depiction of St. Bernard liberating a thief from the gallows: the subscript reads: Liberat latronem a suspendio et deducit ad monasterium: “he frees a thief from the gallows and leads him to the monastery.”

This alleged change in teaching has come about through a revision of section 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, dealing with the morality of the death penalty. Francis’ revision is the second revision of this section, for John Paul II had it rewritten after his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, questioned the legitimacy of the death penalty in our day. In light of the firestorm that erupted over John Paul’s statements on the death penalty, I wondered what Francis’ revision said, if it could work up what seems an even more vehement reaction. Yet, when I read the new, revised section 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, I was struck by how little there seemed to be struck by. The language was far more emphatic than the previous language; opposition to the death penalty is expressed without the much nuance. Still, I did not think Francis’ revision fundamentally different from Pope John Paul’s revision. I wondered what the outrage over it was all about.