The Roman Catholic Church’s current opposition to the death penalty is inconsistent with historical church teaching about human dignity and agency, argued Peter Karl Koritansky in a talk hosted by The Lyceum last month.
Koritansky, a Cleveland University professor of philosophy and religion and author, began his talk by joking about the difficulty of convincing his listeners that medieval thinkers such as St. Thomas Aquinas have something meaningful to contribute to modern discussions about justice and cruelty.
This difficulty, Koritansky said, began in 2012 with the publication of his book “Thomas Aquinas and the Philosophy of Punishment,” a look at the Catholic theologian and philosopher’s contribution to the subject.
“The cover art, when the book went to press, turned out to be nothing other than a representation of a criminal convicted of blasphemy being branded on the lips by the order of an approving and onlooking King Louis IX,” Koritansky said.
Nonetheless, Koritansky said, confusing statements from the last two pontificates, such as Pope Francis’ insistence that the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s teaching on the death penalty needed revision and Pope Leo XIV’s accusation that Christians who oppose abortion but support capital punishment are hypocritical, require a careful look at the entirety of church teaching.
“We need to examine the confounding question of whether the church has changed its teaching, added to its teaching, evolved in its teaching, or merely drawn out the implications of what its teaching always was,” Koritansky said.
Modern opposition to capital punishment, Koritansky said, comes from an important emphasis on the inviolable and inherent dignity of all humans. Viewing the current structure of imprisonment as sufficiently humane and efficient, current Catholic teaching advocates for the abolition of capital punishment.
The issue with this, Koritansky said, is that it disagrees with tradition.
“The first thing to observe in discussing the Catholic teaching on capital punishment is that, for nearly 2,000 years, the church has spoken with extremely few and somewhat unremarkable exceptions, with one voice on this matter,” Koritansky said. “Whether we look at scriptural teaching, that of the church fathers, the scholastic doctors, or even the modern magisterial statements, the death penalty has been recognized as a legitimate punishment imposed for serious crimes.”
Modern opposition to the death penalty is founded in a misunderstanding about the nature of punishment. Aquinas argues that criminals ought to be punished, Koritansky said, so that their dignity as free human beings is vindicated.
“The primary purpose of punishment, Aquinas says, is not rehabilitation, deterrence, or even the physical protection of society from the wrongdoer, but the vindication of justice,” Koritansky said.
By giving criminals what they deserve, society actually acknowledges their human dignity and agency in a way that mere rehabilitation does not, according to Koritansky.
“When we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether,” Koritansky said, quoting C. S. Lewis’s 1949 essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.”
Junior Audrey Powell said that she enjoyed hearing someone go through the entire argument piece by piece.
“This definitely left me with a lot of thoughts to sort out,” Powell said.
Freshman and Catholic Jonah Meduna agreed, saying that he found the talk informative.
“I’ve always thought that the death penalty was fine and biblical, but I never had the most robust arguments for it,” Meduna said. “It’s good to be able to give a gracious answer when these questions come up.”
