Scottish Catholic Observer

THE Vatican’s spokesman has called on the world to make the death penalty a punishment of the past. Rejecting the practice in all of its forms, Fr Federico Lombardi said that mankind has moved beyond any necessity to kill.

During his weekly appearance on Vatican television, Fr Lombardi voiced his abhorrence of all forms of the death penalty and declared himself roundly opposed to both the principle and the practice.

Stating his position against capital punishment, he said ‘I don’t want it’ in any country, in any of its forms, for any person or in any circumstance, ‘whether painful or painless in public or in secret.’ This, he explained, is because he ‘seeks a greater justice.’

For the benefit of all people, Fr Lombardi observed: ‘It is good to walk this street to affirm ever more the dignity of the person and of human life, of which it is not up to us to dispose.’

The Church, according to the Catholic Catechism, ‘does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.’

Citing the Pope John Paul II-based words from the same article of the Catechism, Fr Lombardi said that such examples today ‘are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.’

The spokesman added his own encouragement to take it a step further, urging: “Let’s make them nonexistent. It’s better.”

Bishops in the US have made a similar statement on the eve of the scheduled execution in California of Albert Greenwood Brown for the rape and murder of 15-year-old Susan Jordan, Bishop Gerald Wilkerson, Auxiliary Bishop for the San Fernando Pastoral Region of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and President of the California Catholic Conference, issued a statement calling for an end to the use of the death penalty in that state.

Speaking for all the Bishops of California, he said it was impossible for him to support capital punishment.

“In light of the fact that California has scheduled the execution of Albert Greenwood Brown, we implore all Californians to ask themselves what good comes of state-sanctioned killing,” he said. “We recognise the profound pain of those who lost a loved one to violence and offer them our prayers and our consolation. However, nothing can undo what was done, even taking the life of the convicted killer. The infliction of the death penalty does not make for a more just society.”

Later on that same day, US District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose granted a stay of Mr Brown’s execution, saying he needed time to decide whether new policies had repaired the defects he found in the death penalty protocols detailed in his 2006 ruling.

The state appealed that ruling but time ran out when it was revealed that the drug needed to anesthetise Mr Brown before stopping his heart would reach its expiration date on September 29.

According to statistics from Amnesty International, executions were known to have taken place in 18 nations in 2009. Fifty-two people were executed in the US alone. The organisation reported that at least 714 people, not including the ‘likely’ thousands in China, were killed worldwide by hanging, shooting, beheading, stoning, electrocution and lethal injection