In my last article, I described how the Church’s opposition to the death penalty, formalized in Pope Francis’s 2018 revision of the Catechism, reflects more than just a momentary shift; it is the culmination of a long, deliberate development in doctrine. For over a century, successive popes — from Benedict XV to Francis — demonstrated a consistent commitment to the principles of mercy and human dignity, which led to Francis’s development. This trajectory was not subtle or obscure. Countless papal appeals for clemency beginning in the early 20^th century or earlier witness to the fact that the Church’s leaders have upheld the belief that the sanctity of life — even the life of a condemned criminal — is a fundamental expression of the Gospel. The overwhelming consensus of the world’s bishops against the death penalty further reinforces that this development is neither arbitrary nor isolated, but an organic deepening of the Church’s teaching.

This development also reflects the sensus fidelium — the sense of the faithful — which the Church recognizes as an essential guide in discerning authentic doctrine. The call to sentire cum ecclesia, to think with the Church, demands attentiveness to how the Holy Spirit guides the Body of Christ through its living Magisterium. To reject the Church’s teaching that the death penalty is inadmissible is to reject not only the papal Magisterium but also the witness of a Church united in cherishing and proclaiming human dignity. The doctrine’s development is not a break from tradition; it is a faithful continuation of the Gospel’s call to uphold life and reject vengeance.

Yet despite these clear signs, some Catholics — many of whom are very influential — still resist this teaching, claiming fidelity to an older, supposedly immutable understanding. This resistance is more than a doctrinal disagreement — it reveals a lack of trust in Christ’s promises to the Church.

The resistance

One prominent Catholic who has expressed disagreement with the Church’s teaching is the popular Catholic author, speaker, and theologian Scott Hahn. In a 2022 conversation with Fr. Gerald Murray of the Archdiocese of New York, Hahn criticized the Church’s opposition to the death penalty, saying, “St. Thomas Aquinas uses the Latin term vindication — it’s the vindication of the objective moral order. And in Genesis 9:6, you actually have this. It doesn’t in any way demean the dignity of man. Man was made in the image and likeness of God, so if you take the life of a man who bears that image and likeness, you forfeit that right to life. Likewise, it can be enforced because the authorities are not simply exerting their own private power, but they are exercising authority in the name of God, whose image and likeness they bear.”

Remarkably, with his assertion that murderers “forfeit” their right to life, Hahn contradicts Pope John Paul II’s teaching in Evangelium Vitae. Reflecting on God’s protection of Cain after he murdered Abel (Gen 4:15), the pope wrote, “Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this. And it is precisely here that the paradoxical mystery of the merciful justice of God is shown forth” (EV 9). Yes, there are some pre-Vatican II popes who made statements similar to Hahn’s position, including the one time Pope Pius XII explicitly endorsed the legitimacy of the death penalty in principle, in an Address to the First International Congress of Histopathology of the Nervous System, on September 14, 1952. Yet somehow Scott Hahn, who became Catholic during the papacy of John Paul II and regularly expresses his love and fidelity to him, fails to acknowledge the former pope’s desperate pleas (and formal teachings) to ban the practice.

Another example of a prominent figure who rejects Church teaching on the death penalty is Cardinal Raymond Burke, who said to a group of catechists in 2019, “Is the change now official teaching? No.” He added, “This is an opinion of Pope Francis as a man,” indicating that he rejected the idea that the revision was not an official act of the pope in the exercise of his office.

More recently, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, in his error-riddled “catechism,” Credo, defends the death penalty in several passages, claiming, “The lawfully constituted public authority may put proven criminals to death for the most serious crimes when this is necessary to maintain social order in repairing injustice, protecting the innocent, deterring further crime, and summoning the criminal to true repentance and atonement” (p. 355).

Dr. Edward Feser’s Crusade

Perhaps the most ardent Catholic scholar who opposes the Church’s teaching on the death penalty is philosophy professor and author Edward Feser. His most prominent work on the death penalty is By Man Shall his Blood be Shed, a 424-page apologia for the death penalty that he co-authored with Joseph Bessette, which claims to make its case from a “Catholic” perspective. Since its 2017 publication, Feser has continued to insist relentlessly through his blog, articles, and podcast appearances that the Catholic faith cannot allow for the position that recourse to the death penalty is inadmissible. His views reveal a rigidity that seems more about maintaining a sense of doctrinal certainty than engaging with the Church’s living Magisterium. And he insists that the bigger issue is not about the death penalty per se, but that a doctrine banning it would create a rupture in tradition that the Catholic Church cannot withstand.

In 2017, he wrote in anticipation of the 2018 development:

“The Fathers and Doctors of the Church and all previous popes have uniformly interpreted scripture as affirming the legitimacy in principle of capital punishment. If Pope Francis were suddenly to declare that they had all gotten scripture wrong for 2000 years, this would entirely undermine rather than reinforce the Magisterium’s claim to be a reliable interpreter of scripture.”

This, of course, is a bit of self-centered framing. Catholics who have been campaigning against the death penalty for decades do not see its prohibition as an admission that all previous popes were wrong, but that the Church, as the Body of Christ, has increased its awareness and understanding of the sanctity of life. The death penalty is not the main principle at stake — it is, rather, the dignity of the person. Ruling out the death penalty as a legitimate means of punishing criminals is a natural consequence of greater awareness of human dignity.

Dr. Robert Fastiggi, in a response to Feser, pointed out that Feser is in no position to insist that his dogmatic and metaphysical claims must be accepted as the objective truth. He writes, “Many people, including Pope Francis, do not seem bound by Prof. Feser’s understanding of Scripture. What Prof. Feser doesn’t seem to realize is that his claim that Pope Francis is ‘flirting with doctrinal error’ also can serve to undermine people’s confidence in the papal Magisterium.” As strongly as Feser believes he is right, he is but one voice in a 1.4-billion member Church. And unlike the pope and bishops, his is not a voice of authority.

Following the release of the Declaration Dignitas Infinita, Feser insisted, “To defend Pope Francis is to reject the teaching of the previous popes; to defend those previous popes is to reject the teaching of Pope Francis. There is no way to defend all of them at once.”

This sort of simplistic assertion about “all popes” ignores the fact that the number of popes who made statements (ones that have survived, anyway) about the death penalty is fairly small. It also ignores the number of centuries that it took for the Church to develop its teachings on other moral issues. It took more than 18 centuries before a pope finally made an unqualified condemnation of slavery and called for its abolition. It wasn’t until 1965 that the Church declared that “the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself.”

Surely these teachings seemed both jarring and irrational to many Catholics at the time, and some have been excommunicated or gone into schism for their dissent against these teachings — justifying their point of view on the same grounds that Feser does: they argued that it was a rupture with the tradition of the Church. But hasn’t this concern been with us since the beginning? As Newman wrote of St. Peter and the early Church:

“We cannot determine whether a professed development is truly such or not, without some further knowledge than an experience of the mere fact of this variation. Nor will our instinctive feelings serve as a criterion. It must have been an extreme shock to St. Peter to be told he must slay and eat beasts, unclean as well as clean, though such a command was implied already in that faith which he held and taught; a shock, which a single effort, or a short period, or the force of reason would not suffice to overcome. Nay, it may happen that a representation which varies from its original may be felt as more true and faithful than one which has more pretensions to be exact.”

Many early Christians were surely distressed by Peter’s declaration on Jewish dietary laws, which seemed to be an incredible rupture with their tradition. Unlike the death penalty — which for most of us is a largely theoretical topic involving prisons, courts, and government officials — the early Christians were faced with dramatic changes to their daily rituals and eating habits.

If Edward Feser had been a member of this early Christian community, would he have argued that this was an impossible rupture with the Mosaic Law? Would he have insisted that to defend the new teaching was to reject the teachings of the scriptures, prophets, and kings of Israel who came before? Might he protest that this would mean the deaths of the Maccabean martyrs would have been in vain? Hadn’t Jesus himself said, “Until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place” (Mt 5:18)?

The stakes, for Feser, are incredibly high. In a recent appearance on Matt Fradd’s Pints with Aquinas YouTube channel (in a video seen by nearly 100,000 people), Feser made an astounding assertion (emphasis added):

“In my opinion, if it were to become settled Catholic teaching — unambiguously taught that the death penalty is always and inherently of its very nature immoral — that it’s tantamount to murder, that it’s no different from abortion, that it’s no different from just shooting an innocent guy when you’re robbing a bank or something, and that became settled, there was no controversy about it anymore a hundred years from now, my book on capital punishment, it’s disintegrated into dust, everybody’s forgotten it and so on, and all the other controversy over it is gone, right? And everybody’s just like, ‘We all teach that,’ right, and, ‘We all know that,’ and all disagreement is gone — I would say that would falsify Catholicism, because that just conflicts with scriptural teaching.”

Feser is wrong of course. It wouldn’t falsify Catholicism — it would only falsify Catholicism for him. If the teaching becomes “settled” — I believe it already is — he might walk away, but the Church isn’t going anywhere. After all, the Church has taught with authority that it was a legitimate development in continuity with tradition, and the logic seems to appear sound to most Catholics.

Feser clearly adheres to what I once called the Imagisterium (imaginary Magisterium), which is a tendency of many conservative Catholics to reject or ignore the teachings of the actual living Magisterium and to deceive themselves to believe that their personal views are really the “perennial” Magisterium and self-evident objective truth. Their confidence in their opinions gives the impression they think they have become one with the Logos and can hear the music of the spheres.

Embracing the Living Tradition

The fierce opposition to Pope Francis’s teaching on the death penalty reveals a troubling reality: for some, orthodoxy has become a litmus test based on personal interpretations rather than faithful assent to the Magisterium. This is not merely a disagreement over doctrine; it is a refusal to engage with the Church’s living tradition.

Catholicism is not a faith of rigidity; it is a faith of fidelity — fidelity to the Gospel, to the Church, and to the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. This is what Pope Francis means when he speaks about the “God of Surprises” — this is what his critics reject when they mock and scorn the idea. The death penalty debate is a reminder that fidelity sometimes requires the faith to let go of secure certainties to embrace deeper truths.

The change to the Catechism in 2018 is not a rupture; it is a fulfillment of the Church’s call to uphold human dignity. The resistance to this teaching is not about defending orthodoxy; it is about defending a narrow vision of faith that cannot accommodate growth.

For millions of Catholics, Pope Francis’s declaration is a clear affirmation of the Gospel message. For us, to reject the teaching is to reject or undermine the sanctity and dignity of human life. Granting assent to the development in the Church’s teaching on the death penalty is an affirmation of faith in the Church’s ability to discern truth, in the dignity of every person, and in a God who calls us to mercy and justice.

As the Church continues to grapple with this issue, may we remember that true orthodoxy is not found in resistance to change, but in openness to the ever-deepening call of the Gospel.

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Image: The martyrdom of the Maccabees by Giustino Menescardi. By Didier Descouens – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67559272