WASHINGTON — The Church's teaching on the death penalty is tough for many Catholics to accept.

In this issue of the Register, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Cardinal Avery Dulles, Father George Rutler and University of Notre Dame Law School's Charles Rice explain why.

This death penalty symposium began when Scalia didn't take lightly what he read in a Register editorial about himself.

In his letter to the editor, he said that the editorial “Scalia's Dissenting Opinion,” which criticized remarks he made at Georgetown Universtiy about the death penalty, “is full of mistakes.”

He concludes by writing, “I protest your portrayal of me as ‘supporting the death penalty.’ I do no such thing. I support the proposition that it is not sinful for a Catholic to support it, and indeed to participate in its imposition.”

The editorial had taken exception to Scalia's remarks at a Georgetown Jesuit Heritage Day function, at which a student asked him about capital punishment.

Scalia answered by suggesting that Catholics need only assent to papal teachings when a pope speaks ex cathedra (from the chair) on a matter of faith or morals, a method of papal teaching last used by Pope Pius XII in 1950 when he declared that Mary was assumed bodily into heaven at the end of her life on earth.

“If I agreed with that encyclical I'd have to resign,” he continued, explaining that he did not agree with it.

Commented the editorial: “One can hardly fault Scalia for voicing his dissent [at the University of Chicago Divinity School], in an academic forum that was set up specifically for scholars to debate such things. But Justice Scalia must realize that the kind of public dissent he voiced at Georgetown … wasn't an example of appropriate dissent.”

The editorial also accused Scalia of using the same modus operandi as other dissenters, like the cloning scientist who said he can reject anything that isn't taught ex cathedra.

“In various ways the Register editorial gave Justice Scalia a bum rap,” says University of Notre Dame Law's Charles Rice, in this issue of the Register.

Nonetheless Rice takes exception to Scalia's arguments overall, just as Cardinal Dulles does. On Scalia's side, Father Rutler sees nothing significantly wrong with the justice's arguments.