I have spent much of the last two days deeply engrossed in the latest book about Pope Francis, Life: My Story Through History, in which the pope recounts his life through his memories of major world events, such as the outbreak of World War II, the Holocaust, the moon landing, and Argentina’s 1986 World Cup victory. The presentation of each event begins with an overview by author Fabio Marchese Ragona, followed by comments by Pope Francis in his own words. I have been switching between the Kindle version and the Audiobook, depending on what I am doing. Ragona’s narration is read by the well-known US television personality (and practicing Catholic) Stephen Colbert, who does a fine job with the role.
I am approaching the end (I have reached the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center) and I will have much more to say about this remarkable book, but one passage jumped out at me about a historical fact that I hadn’t heard before. I thought it was worth looking into more deeply.
When discussing postwar communism, Francis mentioned that Pope Pius XII asked the US government for clemency on behalf of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the American couple executed in 1953 for spying for the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs were members of the Communist Party and were convicted of passing secret information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union in 1945. They were condemned to death.
Pope Francis recalled:
“I remember that the pope—it was Pius XII at the time—asked in a message that the couple be spared the death penalty. For the Church, no matter how long it has gone on, and no matter how much it persists to this day in so many countries of the world, the death penalty is inadmissible. Even for a person who is convicted of a crime, there must be a window of hope, whereas capital punishment represents the defeat of justice. People can redeem themselves to the last, they can change. This practice doesn’t allow for that possibility; it destroys the most important gift we have received from the Lord: life. And I ask myself: Who are these people to decide to deprive others of life? Maybe they wish to take the place of God! I want to reaffirm that, today more than ever, we need a collective spiritual mobilization of all Christians to give concrete support to organizations that are fighting for the abolition of the death penalty. In this we must be united!”
Pope Francis. Life: My Story Through History. HarperCollins Publishers, Spring 2024, p. 52.
I had never heard this little bit of history. I was well-aware that Pope Paul VI abolished the death penalty from the legal code of Vatican City in 1969, and that Pope John Paul II had made many pleas for clemency in US death penalty cases, but most discussions of papal opposition to the death penalty stop there, and then shift their focus on how Pope Pius XII and his predecessors affirmed the legitimacy of the death penalty in principle. Catholic death penalty supporters tend not to spend much time discussing the fact that papal opposition to the death penalty goes back much further in practice.
This fact lends support to the assertion of former CDF prefect Cardinal Luis Ladaria that “The new revision of number 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, approved by Pope Francis, situates itself in continuity with the preceding Magisterium while bringing forth a coherent development of Catholic doctrine.” Many opponents of the 2018 revision to the official Catholic teaching, which declares that the death penalty is inadmissible, argue that this teaching (and often the previous revision promulgated by John Paul II in 1997 as well) represents a rupture with Catholic tradition, rather than a true development.
I found an article on the front page of the New York Times from February 14, 1953, that corroborates Pope Francis’s recollection. The headline reads, “POPE MADE APPEAL TO AID ROSENBERGS; PLEA ONE OF MERCY.” The subheadings add some intrigue to the story, however: “But Neither White House Nor Justice Department Has a Record of Its Receipt,” “REDS FORCE REVELATION,” “Kaufman Indicates Rejection of Another Long Delay in Fixing Spies’ Death Date.”
The article reports that the official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, had published a statement on behalf of Pope Pius XII, saying that he sent a message to the US government asking that the Rosenbergs be spared from the death penalty. The article explains the pope’s position that, “when it was a matter of saving human lives, the Pope never refused to intervene, ‘though without being able to enter into the merits of the case.’” In other words, regardless of the crimes that the Rosenbergs may have committed, Pope Pius attempted to save their lives from execution.
The story says that the public announcement of the pope’s attempted intervention “was prompted by the Communist press in Italy, which for some time has been accusing the Pope of callousness in allowing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to approach the electric chair without raising his voice on their behalf.” The pope’s intervention itself, “however, was made as a result of appeals to the Pope from Catholics in several countries.” In other words, the pope intervened after Catholics from around the world appealed to him to plea for clemency for the Rosenbergs.
Unfortunately, according to the US State department, the pope’s message never came through. The article says that the Apostolic Delegation in Washington said it transmitted the pope’s appeal to the Justice Department the previous December. But the president’s press secretary, James C. Hagerty, “said that no notification on the subject had been received by the White House, the State Department or the Justice Department. Former President Truman likewise was said to have no knowledge of the plea.”
This was an interesting time in US-Vatican relations. Prior to 1984, in fact, the US government did not have official diplomatic relations with the Holy See at all. The story notes, “L’Osservatore, in giving news of the Pope’s action in the Rosenberg case, hinted strongly that perhaps it might have been more effective if diplomatic relations existed between the Vatican and the United States. It thus appears that the Pope’s plea did not go through any of the recognized diplomatic channels.”[1]
Regarding where the message originated, the author added, “the best guess in Rome is that the Pope’s views were forwarded to a prominent churchman or layman whom the Pope had received sometime in the last few months, possibly through [New York’s] Cardinal Spellman, who was received in private audience in the early part of January.”
Sadly, the pope’s plea had no effect and the Rosenbergs were executed at Sing Sing Prison on June 19, 1953.
I found the final section of the article fascinating, because it demonstrates clearly that the Rosenberg case was neither unprecedented nor unusual:
Papal interventions to save the lives of persons condemned to death are recalled as far back as World War I. when Benedict XV appealed unsuccessfully for clemency in the case of nurse Edith Cavell, condemned by the Germans for helping war prisoners to escape.
The present Pope intervened in favor of the Italian general, Nicola Bellomo, who was shot by British military authorities in Italy in 1945; Pietro Caruso, Chief of Police in Rome, who was shot by Italian military authorities in 1945; Arthur Greiser, condemned in Poland in 1946, and Albert Forster, condemned in Poland in 1948.
In 1948 General Lucius Clay, on the appeal of the Roman Catholics in Germany, stayed the execution of 45 condemned Germans. In this last case, the Pope’s intervention was not direct, but it was thought that the German clergy acted on instructions from the Vatican.
These historical appeals for clemency are not often discussed by pro-execution apologists. They do not, for example, appear in By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, an absolute nightmare of bloodthirsty anti-life propaganda written by Edward Feser and Joseph Bessette published by Ignatius press in 2017. The authors certainly cite Pius XII frequently (although selectively and almost always out of context, as John Finnis has pointed out), but they make no mention of the appeals for clemency made by him or his predecessors.
It is only fair to note that the article does state that there was one situation where Pius XII seemed not to have involved himself in a death penalty trial:
There is one notable exception in papal appeals for clemency. The Pope did not intervene in favor of men condemned to death at the Nuremberg war crimes trial, and the Vatican made a special point of announcing that the Pope had taken no action in that case.
When publishing that claim, the editors of the New York Times must have forgotten their October 6, 1946 article about Pope Pius XII’s plea for clemency for Hans Frank, the former Nazi governor of Poland, who had been sentenced to death at Nuremberg. I think it is reasonable to say that in opposing the executions of figures as ideologically different as Frank and the Rosenbergs, Pius seems to have completely rejected the use of the death penalty in practice.
Edward Feser, coauthor of the aforementioned pro-execution tome, demonstrates his ignorance of this history in a screed against Pope Francis’s views on the death penalty and on life sentences without the possibility of parole:
Consider the Nuremberg trials, at which many Nazi war criminals were sentenced to death or life imprisonment. Pope Francis’s view would imply that all of these sentences were unjust! Indeed, Pope Francis’s position seems to entail that, had Hitler survived the war, it would have been wrong to sentence him to more than about twenty years in prison! For Hitler was in his fifties when he died, so that if he had been sentenced to more than that, he could not “plan a future in freedom” – as a greengrocer or crossing guard, perhaps. Pope Francis’s views imply that the Nuremberg judges should have been at least open to the possibility of letting Hitler off with such a light sentence and letting him return to a normal life – despite being guilty of the Holocaust and of fomenting World War II! Perhaps Pope Francis would shrink from these implications of his views. One hopes so. But they are the implications of his views.
Inevitably, Catholic dissidents who promote the death penalty resort to hypothetical scenarios and motivated reasoning to justify their views. It can be seen for what it is with a bit of sober historical analysis and critical thinking.
Realizing that papal opposition to the death penalty goes back more than a century (and noting that Catholic countries were abolishing it even earlier than that), we can see that the Church’s present teaching on the inadmissibility of the death penalty is truly a development in continuity with tradition. And this teaching may continue to develop. Only God knows. As Pope Francis says so often, reality is greater than ideas. Neo-Scholastics and traditionalists can continue to argue among themselves in the realm of ideas over whether the death penalty is “intrinsically evil” to their hearts’ content. But in the real world, the Church’s position on the death penalty is that it is inadmissible. This is a matter of saving lives, and we should never refuse to intervene.
Note:
[1] The disagreement between the Hagerty and the Vatican over this message would eventually devolve into a fairly intense back-and-forth in the press, but that’s a whole other story.
Mike Lewis is the founding managing editor of Where Peter Is. He and Jeannie Gaffigan co-host Field Hospital, a U.S. Catholic podcast.
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