Content area
Full Text
Capital Punishment and Roman Catholic Moral Tradition By E. Christian Brugger Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. 281 pp. $50.00.
Has the Roman Catholic Church changed its mind on the death penalty? Brugger, assistant professor of ethics at Loyola University of New Orleans, contends that it has. He begins by analyzing pertinent sections of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997) and of Pope John Paul II's encyclical letters, Evangelium Vitae (1995) and Veritatis Splendor (1993). From these documents, he infers that the 1997 Catechism, in sharp contrast to the 1566 Roman Catechism, teaches that capital punishment is not an exception to the fifth commandment, "You shall not kill." Whereas the sixteenth-century Catechism taught that the death penalty could be inflicted in order to redress wrongdoing (retributive justice), the new Catechism, supported by the two encyclical letters, eliminates retribution as a justification for the death penalty and limits state execution to instances where it is absolutely necessary to protect the community's safety. Such instances, the Catechism asserts, "are very rare, if not practically non-existent" (§2267). Brugger argues that the dignity of the human person provides the...