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AIDE: I DON'T WANT THE DEATH PENALTY FOR ANYONE
Spokesman Reflects on Church's Stance on Punishment
ROME, OCT. 4, 2010 (Zenit.org).- The director of the Vatican press office says he is against recourse to the death penalty, and wants capital punishment for no one anywhere in the world.
This was the affirmation made by Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, as he offered his personal reflection on the Church's opposition to current recourse to capital punishment.
"I don't want it in China, or in Iran, or in the United States, or in India, or in Indonesia or in Saudi Arabia -- nowhere in the world," he asserted during the most recent episode of Vatican Television's "Octava Dies."
"I don't want it by stoning, or by shooting, or by decapitation, or by hanging, or by the electric chair, or by lethal injection," he continued. "I don't want it painful or painless. I don't want it in public or in secret.
"I don't want it for women, or for men; for the handicapped or for the healthy. I don't want it for civilians or military men, I don't want it in peace or in war. I don't want it for someone who might be innocent, but I don't want it for confessed criminals either. I don't want it for homosexuals. I don't want it for adulterers. I don't want it for anyone."
"I don't even want it for murderers, for the Mafiosi, for traitors or for tyrants," Father Lombardi added. "I don't want it out of vengeance, or to free ourselves from troublesome and expensive prisoners, not even for alleged mercy."
"Because," he said, "I seek a greater justice. And it is good to walk on this path to increasingly affirm, in favor of everyone, the dignity of the person and of human life, of which we are not the ones to dispose."
The Vatican spokesman referenced the Catechism of the Catholic Church, saying that cases in which the death penalty is the only means to protect human lives and public order are practically non-existent.
"Let us make [the cases] non-existent," he said. "It's better."
1 comment:
we are watching a papal and magisterial regression on this topic. A regression is the opposite of a development. When Pope Sixtus V brought the castrati into the papal choirs in 1585 so that women could be silent in church as Paul seemed to say, that was a regression that lasted til 1878 when Pope Leo XIII issued a bull against the practice. But 28 Popes during that 300 years cooperated with the view of Sixtus. When Pope Innocent IV made burning heretics mandatory on secular rulers in 1253 and entered it in the decretals or old canon law, it sat there til 1917 as a papal regression. Those were harsh regressions...this one being started on the death penalty is a soft regression...but Father Lombardi and the magisterium in general need to read Plato's republic, Book III...where it notes that too much music makes males..."soft". Our present leaders are soft on law breakers in general (read Cardinal Law) because they have no ancillary ideas about criminals being punished eg with 8 hours of work with money produced going to victim families. That's how you can tell this whole thing is a catering to Euro intellectuals who cry barbaric on this issue. If the last two Popes were really concerned, they would address more than this one part of the prison process. They did not because to study it is to realize that
the Avignon papacy had a perpetual prison sentence so that it too had bloodless means and walls 17 feet thick.
Now a lifer murders Fr. Geoghan and another lifer murders Jeffrey Dahmer and a Pope and a catechism state that modern penology easily protects.
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