Pope Francis called for all nations to eliminate the death penalty on Thursday in his message for the 2025 Message for the World Day of Peace, saying it “not only compromises the inviolability of life but eliminates every human hope of forgiveness and rehabilitation.”
On Sunday, during his Angelus, the pope made a specific appeal to America:
“Today, it comes to my heart to ask you all to pray for the prisoners who are on death row in the United States. I believe there are thirteen or fifteen of them. Let us pray that their sentence be commuted, changed. Let us think of these brothers and sisters of ours and ask the Lord for the grace to save them from death.”
It is unusual for a pontiff to make such a specific request on the issue, with such appeals usually made in more general terms.
One person I know who works at the Vatican made this sarcastic remark to me: “Now do China… Iran… Saudi Arabia… Japan, referring to other countries that also still employ capital punishment. (The person asked not to be named, for fear of being reprimanded by the person’s superiors.)
As it turns out, the pope’s math was a bit off about America’s death row population. At the state level, over 2,400 people currently are awaiting execution. The number in the federal government’s system is just 40, but that’s still more than double what the pope thought.
President Joe Biden is leaving office next month and has the power to commute the sentences of those people on the federal death row.
During his 2020 campaign for office, Biden pledged to “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.”
This never happened, but his administration did issue a moratorium on death penalties, and no federal prisoner on death row was executed during his administration.
However, his successor Donald Trump has pledged to have all 40 federal prisoners on the federal death row executed during his four years in office, and to increase the number of people subject to the death penalty.
Trump resumed federal executions in the last year of his first term, following a 17-year hiatus. His administration put 13 prisoners to death – more than in the previous 50 years combined.
On Thursday, several people at first hoped Biden has followed Francis’s call when it was announced he was commuting 1,500 prison sentences and pardoning 39 other people.
However, none of these were on death row.
(Last week, the president drew criticism for pardoning his son, Hunter.)
Francis is perhaps hopeful that the second Catholic president of the United States might be willing to use the pope as an excuse for pushing through a policy they both support – it is a difficult stance for U.S. politicians, since the majority of Americans support the death penalty.
Of course, the first Catholic president was living in a different era – when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, capital punishment was still technically legal in Vatican City, since it wasn’t abolished until 1969.
(As an aside, capital punishment was never carried out for the Vatican City State established in 1929, but was very common in the Papal States, where criminals were executed under Papal authority until the year Rome was conquered by the Italian state in 1870.)
Francis has said “today capital punishment is unacceptable, however serious the condemned [person]’s crime may have been.”
This builds on Pope St. John Paul’s declaration that the death penalty “is both cruel and unnecessary.”
In 1995’s Evangelium Vitae, John Paul said capital punishment can be justified if it is “the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor,” even if in reality “cases of absolute necessity for suppression of the offender today are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”
Among Western democracies, the United States is the only Christian-majority nation to still regularly carry out executions.
Although opposed by the U.S. Catholic Church, many Catholic politicians in America have endorsed the practice.
The next most likely Catholic candidate for president, is Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, who takes office during a Trump presidency that can last only one term.
In the run-up to the 2024 election, Vance pledged support for increasing the use of death penalty at the federal level.
Pope Francis may still be hoping Biden takes the opportunity to commute the sentences of the 20 federal death row inmates before Trump takes office on Jan. 20, 2025.
Follow Charles Collins on X: @CharlesinRome
