Death Penalty: Political Sport at Its Most Barbarous

Executions as a matter of political sport are unnerving. When an audience cheered at one debate because Texas Gov. Rick Perry has authorized 234 executions in a little more than 10 years, I got nervous. Such light-hearted reaction to a heavy-hearted reality reflects ill on us as a people. When the audience cheered the death penalty accomplishment I felt like I was at the Colosseum surrounded by Romans giving thumbs down to a beleaguered Christian before the lions. It is barbaric.

There are many reasons to oppose the death penalty. It is applied disproportionately to minorities, and there are more white prosecutors to seek the death penalty than black. The process demeans us as a people. Seldom do John Donne's words, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind ..." ring so true. The death penalty is a statement of hopelessness, perhaps the ultimate sin for Christians since it denies that people can be redeemed.

But my number one reason is simply that we can be wrong.

The number of persons from death row who have been exonerated shows how easy it is for our society to be wrong. One estimate puts the number at 138 exonerations since 1973. We've had so-called eye-witnesses, who are absolutely sure a man committed a crime - until DNA evidence proves them wrong. They weren't liars. They just remembered wrong, something we all do all the time though in less serious matters. Sadly, "Oops, we made a mistake. Sorry," is pretty inadequate in this instance and cannot undo a mistaken execution.

At times, gripping witnesses and zealous prosecutors have convinced people to believe beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime was committed. Some of the witnesses turned out to be wrong. Some prosecutors did not play by the rules. Some judges were swayed by political pressure. All of which is to be expected in our fallible world and all of which ought to put the death penalty off the table because the result of mistakes and weakness of character can result in the taking of God-given life. The fact that we are all fallible human beings should outlaw the death penalty.

There have been 1,268 executions since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Can anyone say the years since them have been made safer? Nor has America's spirit been especially uplifted. Right now there are some 3,200 inmates on death row.

Contemporary Catholic teaching opposes the death penalty. The Catechism of the Catholic Church finds it acceptable only when there is no other way to protect society from a dangerous criminal. With the invention of prisons that moment arrived. Digging a tunnel through a cell wall is the stuff of "Shawshank Redemption," a movie about a prisoner's escape from a corrupt warden, not the stuff of today's supermax prisons.

The death penalty is vengeance and a penalty to be reserved to the One who doesn't make mistakes. Those of us who make mistakes big and small have no right to decide on ultimate penalties.

Some argue that the death penalty is allowed by the Catholic Church. That may be right in theory but not in contemporary practice. Some argue that abortion is verboten because it is the taking of innocent life but the death penalty is acceptable because it is the taking of life deemed non innocent. Yet how can they be absolutely sure?

Some criminals inspire a lock 'em up and throw away the key approach. Some crimes are so horrific as to require it. Some persons are so damaged as to put all of us at risk. Thus the need for prisons.

The death penalty, however, is a step too far. And in the political games it becomes one more foul, error, offside. That's all right for the stadium, but with executions the error is fatal.

A Catholic by any other name…

Bill Keller, soon to be retired managing editor of The New York Times, recently outed himself as a “collapsed Catholic.” Writing readers Keller said that being a “collapsed Catholic” was even further removed from being a “lapsed Catholic” because, he said, “you never really extricate yourself from your upbringing.”

Keller’s note related to his review of “Absolute Monarchy—A History of the Papacy” in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Perhaps it was meant as a disclaimer to say he had no bias for or against the church or to cite his years of Catholic education as qualifications for opining on popes.

Keller’s remark bears on how we define Catholics and Catholicism. For sure the times are a-changin.’ Whereas once we spoke of a “good Catholic” as a “daily communicant,” today a “good Catholic” is a “church-going Catholic.” People who seldom go to Mass at all amount to cultural Catholics, whose spiritual identity is Catholicism but who have given up on sacramental practice. Such a position once bore a stigma in society, now less so, though the Church still requires attendance at weekly Mass for its members.

Many cultural Catholics have a fondness for their roots. A young woman I met on an elevator a few years ago typified such people. When she discovered I am a nun she gushed “I used to be Catholic.” She had no idea of the emotional pain she evoked as I encountered one more member of America’s second largest religious body, the former Catholics.

Her identification with Catholicism suggests something about its sticking power. The Irish playwright Brendan Behan knew it, despite constantly railing against the church. Friends advised him to stop complaining, join another church and be happy. Behan thought the idea absurd and replied (this is the cleaned-up version), “Look, I’m a lapsed Catholic, not a (expletive) eejit,” an eejit being the Irish term for idiot.

Part of this hold stems from how the Church defines those who leave or gradually fall off. The Church doesn’t refer to them by the name of whatever religion they choose subsequently, say Lutheran or Episcopalian. It doesn’t even refer to those who declare non-belief as atheists or agnostics. Instead, the church calls them as “former Catholics,” “lapsed Catholics” or “ex-Catholics.”

The hold may lie in the definition of the adjective “catholic,” which means all-embracing and wide-ranging. The Catholic Church doesn’t totally give up anyone. Even if you’re excommunicated, it expects you to attend Mass each week, though not to participate in the sacraments. James Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake defined the Catholic Church as “here comes everybody,” giving a blunt, yet poetic expression to a Church with room for all.

One also suspects this hold comes from something more. Is it based in the image of Mother Church, emphasis on “mother,” who loves her children and doesn’t give up on them even when they don’t deserve it or don’t merit the affection, except for the accident of birth or in the Church, of baptism?

Is it the lifelong impact of prayers and other rituals, such as guardian angels to protect you, the Blessed Virgin to care for you, the rosary to guide your prayer, the Eucharist to sustain you, the soaring cathedrals to amaze you? Is it rooted in emotion laden events such as First Communion Day celebrations of purity and innocence or the deep comfort in a funeral Mass imbued with the conviction that we’ll meet again in heaven? Is it a wish to connect to a parent’s or grandparent’s Catholicism that provided a moral compass in facing life’s many challenges?

Is it grace? Is it this inexplicable gift of God’s presence, recognized not enough to stop us daily in our tracks, but sensed on occasion to make us pause at God’s creation, the gift of human life, the message in Louie Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”?

Whatever it is, this Catholicism, this grace, is real, and because of it Bill Keller and others, be they lapsed, collapsed, befuddled or bemused, are part of it. They are family, even if they no longer come by for dinner.

John Henry Newman: Heart Speaks to Heart

The beatification of John Henry Cardinal Newman on September 19 in Birmingham, England, may not draw much media attention, but it is still noteworthy.

Newman’s beatification will be the first one Pope Benedict XVI has presided over. One senses that the theologian/scholar/Pope Benedict might feel a kinship with Cardinal Newman, a great intellect of the Victorian Age, and a figure of renown in both Anglican and Catholic traditions.

Newman was born in 1801 and died in 1890. He converted to Catholicism in 1845 after study and struggle to understand God. His efforts with the Oxford Movement to bring Anglicanism back to its Catholic roots led him instead to join the Catholic Church. Conversion brought no end of grief for him. Anglican scholars felt betrayed; Catholic scholars were suspicious. He must have felt quite bleak when he wrote in his journal in 1863. “O how forlorn and dreary has been my course since I have been a Catholic!” he wrote. “Since I have been a Catholic, I seem to myself to have had nothing but failure, personally.”

He was a prodigious writer who promoted the need for the church to engage the world, a position that did not always make him friends. As a Catholic he fiercely defended the faith, to the point where he nearly went to jail for intemperate words while sparring with an anti-Catholic zealot.

He was a man of intellectual rigor, but writings reveal a humanness too. He expressed it in his motto as a cardinal: “heart speaks to heart.” A favorite poem, written in 1833, when he was 32, is “The Pillar of Cloud.” It reveals both the intellectual quest for God for which he was known, and the deep reach of a soul, to which most can relate at some point in their lives.

LEAD, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home –
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene, -- one step enough for me,
I was not ever thus, nor pray’d that Thou
Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path; but now
Lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will; remember not past years.
So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on,
O’er moon and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.