VATICAN CITY — Throughout his papacy, Pope John Paul II has persistently spoken out against the death penalty.

And on Nov. 30, the Holy Father did so again, lending his voice in support of a Catholic movement's campaign against capital punishment while addressing pilgrims in St. Peter's Square after his Sunday Angelus prayers.

The World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, initiated by the Rome-based lay Catholic Community of Sant’Egidio and joined by other nongovernmental organizations, aims to achieve a universal moratorium on executions and raise public awareness that capital punishment “devalues life.”

“We believe that, like torture and slavery, capital punishment will disappear,” said Mario Marazziti, coordinator of the campaign. “In the last five years we have seen an acceleration in support for its abolition.”

Indeed, Sant’Egidio, which has been committed to human rights and service to the poor since its founding in the 1960s, has garnered 5 million signatures that will be presented to the U.N. secretary-general as part of a proposal for a worldwide moratorium. So far, 112 countries are without capital punishment; 82 retain some form of it.

The Sant’Egidio campaign began five years ago when a community member wrote to Dominic Green, a prisoner on death row in Texas since August 1993. An exchange of letters followed and sympathy grew for Green, an black man who was convicted of murder at age 18 — with no eyewitnesses — in a case that was surrounded by racial issues and allegations that Green was deprived of a proper legal defense.

Humanizing Prisoners

Today, the Sant’Egidio Community corresponds with 700 death-row prisoners.

“We’re trying to humanize the situation,” Marazziti said. “We’re trying to make sure the prisoners have legal rights — to break their isolation.”

Marazziti said Green “was a symbol of a society that sometimes oversimplifies such cases and brings violent answers to social problems.”

This opinion of society is shared by Mark Cambiano, a former defense attorney in Arkansas with extensive experience of representing people on death row. He believes people who are for the death penalty “usually are [in favor] until you explain individual cases.”

Cambiano said the “vast majority of those on death row are guilty of the crimes they are accused of,” but, he added, they often received “shoddy representation.”

Cambiano, who intervened on behalf of a Catholic priest who unsuccessfully sought to stay the 1990 execution of Arkansas murderer Ronald Gene Simmons, explained that most convicted killers “have been abused and had terrible backgrounds.”

“I remember a case where the defendant's mother had him thrown off a 20-foot-high embankment and whose father had beaten him so badly he had a serious concussion,” Cambiano recalled. “These are the kinds of people who end up on death row.”

Jeff Rosenzweig, another Arkansas defense lawyer with extensive experience in such cases, agreed.

“In most cases, they’ve had a background in mental illness, retardation, abuse and poverty,” Rosenzweig said.

Which is one reason why Marazziti likes to emphasize the importance of rehabilitation when dealing as a Catholic with the issue of capital punishment.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that while capital punishment is not intrinsically immoral when there is no other way to protect society, “as a consequence of the possibilities that the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm — without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself — the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity ‘are very rare, if not practically nonexistent’” (No. 2267).

“We now have a deeper understanding of what justice is — that there is no justice without rehabilitation,” Marazziti said. “The death penalty is not justice because there is no rehabilitation.”

And for Catholic anti-death penalty campaigners such as Marazitti, the removal of the circumstances for forgiveness and reconciliation is fundamentally inconsistent with the Gospel.

“Families are denied any passage toward healing,” he said. “It freezes them in hatred — for years.”

Marazziti also rejected the argument that capital punishment guarantees greater security. He said in jurisdictions where it is allowed, homicide rates are “much, much higher,” citing the southern United States as an example.

Death-Penalty Catholics

Not all Catholics share Sant’Egidio's position, however.

Michael Dunnigan, a specialist in canon law and religious liberty at St. Joseph's Foundation in San Antonio, believes by framing the question primarily as a right-to-life issue the community “implicitly places the rights of convicted terrorists and mafiosi on the same level as those of innocent citizens and unborn children.”

Citing the teaching of John Paul in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), Dunnigan noted, “Only innocent persons possess a right to life that is absolute.”

Dunnigan is also opposed to the Sant’Egidio Community's position that the death penalty puts “vengeance and reprisal first.”

Citing the Catechism's teachings on the issue, he noted that traditional Catholic teaching has never excluded recourse to capital punishment. And, Dunnigan said, a distinction must be made between vengeance and retribution, the latter of which he said “is defined in the Catechism as a legitimate reparation of the disorder caused by a crime.”

He would like the Sant’Egidio Community to confront the issue of Catholic teaching and tradition more directly.

“[The community] is a group of serious Catholics,” he said. “It should give considerable attention to what it means for a Catholic movement to take such an absolute position against the death penalty.”

But Sant’Egidio spokesman Marazziti says the teachings of John Paul and of the Catechism make it clear Sant’Egidio's international campaign against capital punishment accurately reflects the modern development of Church doctrine regarding the immorality of capital punishment.

“There is an evolution going on,” Marazziti said. “We are moving toward a New-Testament respect for human life.”

Edward Pentin writes from Rome.