(2nd of 2 parts)

Boston Globe
by Jeff Jacoby
12/11/05

Last month, by a vote of 237-4, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a pastoral statement calling for an end to the death penalty. ... The bishops acknowledge in passing that Catholic teaching has never banned the death penalty outright or declared it 'intrinsically evil.' Nevertheless, they insist, since the modern state 'has other nonlethal means to protect its citizens, the state should not use the death penalty.' ... But the new document is shockingly blunt in brushing aside the suffering of the victims, or the viciousness of the murder, as irrelevant to the question of capital punishment. 'No matter how heinous the crime,' it says, 'if society can protect itself without ending a human life, it should do so.' Executing killers, in other words, has nothing to do with justice. No act of murder, however calculated or cruel or catastrophic, requires as a matter of sheer decency that the murderer forfeit his life...

http://tinyurl.com/bvqqf


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp