The Pope And The Executioners

How tragic that, on the day the Holy Father arrived in the United States, the Supreme Court there should lift its moratorium on the death penalty, a penalty which John Paul II campaigned so vigorously to eradicate.

Far fewer countries have the death penalty than is generally supposed, and far more American States never use it, or do not even have it these days. It hardly happens in the US outside Texas. I defy those of you who support it to explain why they agree with a practice now most prevalent in China, Vietnam and Cuba. Are those states of which you approve?

But the real point is this: the State has no more right to take a morally innocent human life (i.e., that of a wrongly convicted person) on the basis of mere judicial guilt than on the basis of, say, disability, or old age, or terminal illness, or still being in the womb.

So, when can we expect liberal America (New Jersey recently abolished the death penalty, even if only symbolically), and the UN (which recently called for a moratorium on the death penalty by a margin far too large to be put down to mere Western cultural imperialism) to act against those evils, too?

Nor is it coherent for a country to have nuclear weapons (which likewise have absolutely no deterrent value, but that is not quite the present point) but not capital punishment. The solution to that incoherence is not the restoration or retention of capital punishment.