I Believe in John Paul II’s Teaching on the Death Penalty. That’s the Problem.

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 22, 2026

We are now about two weeks out from the federal government’s announcement that the execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan would be public and livestreamed and one week out from the reversal of that decision. The controversy unleashed the usual torrent of Catholic commentary about Church teaching, argued along the usual lines. In all that time I’ve not seen anyone articulate my own view on the topic, which is apparently unique to me. So here it is.

I assent to Pope St. John Paul II’s teaching against the death penalty as articulated in his 1995 pro-life encyclical Evangelium Vitae (EV) and the 1997 revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church that resulted from that encyclical. I disagree with every critic of John Paul II who claims his opposition to the death penalty contradicted traditional Catholic teaching in favor of the death penalty. It didn’t. It was because of John Paul II’s 1990s development of Catholic doctrine that I have opposed the death penalty for most of my adult life.

And it is because I believe in John Paul II’s teaching against the death penalty that I am now more in favor of the death penalty than I once was.

In paragraph 56 of EV, John Paul II wrote that the death penalty should not be used

except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.

The Church has always taught that the state has the right to execute criminals and John Paul II did not say otherwise. Rather, John Paul II said that it was a right better left unexercised. That, in the modern era, there was no need for it. In other words, his was a teaching that was historically contingent. John Paul II’s opposition to the death penalty made perfect sense to me, given the world we were living in back in the 1990s. Maybe it was still needed in, say, Rwanda’s genocidal civil war. But in the West of the 1990s? Certainly not.

If this were still the 1990s, that would still be my position. Times have changed. We’re still not Rwanda, of course, and I pray to God we never will be. But relative to where we were in the 1990s, the West has gone to hell in a handbasket. If Catholic teaching against the death penalty is historically contingent, and history has taken a wrong turn, then the teaching doesn’t hold up quite as well as it once did.

John Paul II’s point was that the death penalty wasn’t needed to protect society anymore. That may have been true at the time he was writing. What about now? Does anyone feel safer today than they did thirty years ago?

Isn’t it, rather, the opposite? Between Soros prosecutors who don’t want to prosecute crimes, and liberal judges who give light sentences to repeat offenders, and ideological juries like the harpies on the Lindsay Clancy trial, and the previous administration letting at least ten million illegals over the border, and mass shootings, and the murders of Laken Riley and Iryna Zarutska, and state governments abolishing their laws against marijuana and psychotropic drugs and gambling, because they would rather feed you your vices so as to feast off the tax revenue instead of their traditional role of protecting your health, safety and welfare?

Who, today, trusts the government to have the good faith and competence to lock away those who pose mortal dangers to our safety and to throw away the key? If it serves some other interest of those in power to let them back out on the street, even if it makes it more likely that you or your loved ones could be killed, they may do it. I would not have thought so thirty years ago. I do think so now.

Catholic teaching since John Paul II has, of course, evolved in the exact opposite direction of what I have sketched out above. In 2017 Pope Francis declared the death penalty to be “inadmissible” and in 2018 he had the Catechism changed to reflect his teaching. But that’s the fun of Pope Francis. “Fun” is a word not normally employed by conservatives when considering the Francis papacy, but I mean fun as in “funny,” and I mean funny as in “strange.”

As with so much else in the Francis pontificate, we don’t really know what Francis meant when he declared the death penalty “inadmissible.” It sounds like he ratcheted up John Paul II’s opposition to the death penalty, closed what loopholes remain, and went where John Paul was careful not to go: declaring previous Church teaching to be in error. But why not just say so? Because he can’t say so without violating the Church’s own self-understanding. So, he did the usual ambiguous thing, and those who want to read it one way can, and those who want to read it the opposite way also can. He did that sort of thing often.

And yet, in spite of everything I have written above, were Pope Leo to unambiguously declare that Pope Francis’ apparent development of doctrine on the death penalty is exactly what it looks like, and that a Catholic cannot hold the opposite view and remain a faithful Catholic, that teaching would have my assent. I’m working out the logic of all this as best as I can. But at the end of the day there is a Pope and I’m not him, a Magisterium of the Church and I’m not it. And we scribblers on the Catholic internet are quite capable of being wrong. Particularly when we set our pixelated face against the Pontiff himself.