Patrish Jackson / Shutterstock (left), White House Flickr (right)
CV NEWS FEED // A Catholic group that advocates for the abolition of the death penalty in the U.S. has called on President Joe Biden to commute the sentences of 40 men currently on death row.
Vatican News reported that Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, the executive director of Catholic Mobilizing Network, said that the roughly nine weeks before Donald Trump takes office are a crucial opportunity to honor Catholic teaching on human dignity.
“We’re in a time-sensitive and urgent moment because the president has constitutional authority and power to take action to commute the federal death row,” she told Vatican News.
She later added, “We know concretely that the president taking office at the end of January has a history of executions and is committed to expanding and expediting them once again, making this a rather urgent moment.”
According to USA Today, Trump has displayed more willingness to use capital punishment than Biden.
“The Trump administration was the first to carry out the federal death penalty in 17 years, overseeing 13 executions, in an unprecedented run that continued despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the outlet reported.
Biden has publicly opposed the death penalty and his administration imposed a moratorium on capital punishment in 2021, but he has failed to follow through on campaign promises to push for legislation abolishing the death penalty.
Pope Francis updated the Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC]’s teaching on the death penalty in 2018.
Prior to the change, the CCC stated that “Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of 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.” The old text also noted that these instances are “very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”
The updated text says that “[T]he 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.”
In the Bull of Indiction of the 2025 Jubilee, known as the Jubilee of Hope, Pope Francis also called for “the abolition of the death penalty, a provision at odds with Christian faith and one that eliminates all hope of forgiveness and rehabilitation.”
Speaking on the Jubilee of Hope, Vaillancourt Murphy noted it has biblical roots “tied to liberating the captives, setting the oppressed free, and bringing about a balancing of society.” She also hoped that Biden’s self-professed Catholic faith would move him to celebrate the beginning of the Jubilee year in a merciful way.
She added, “If President Biden were to take this step, it would have reverberations not only in the United States but around the globe.”
