Row flares over Rome stand on death penalty

by Viviane Hewitt in Rome and Angus Macdonald RENEWED theological controversy has flared in Rome over the "failure" of the recently-published "Universal Catechism" to condemn the death penalty outright.
In two simultaneous initiatives, one of the Church's leading Italian theologians and an association of prison chaplains have declared the catechism "commits an error of logic and doctrine".
Both criticisms appear in two major official Catholic publications Avvenire, the conservative daily journal of the Italian episcopal conference, and the Church review Vita Pastorale.
The 500-page Catechism of the Catholic Church was compiled by a commission of 40 experts under the supervision of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and was presented to the faithful by the Pope in December.
It is the first comprehensive compendium of Catholic doctrine in 400 years and is intended to give definitive rulings on all matters of doctrine for teachers of the faith.
But a paragraph explicitly refusing to rule out the use of the death penalty "in cases of extreme gravity" has outraged some sections of the Church.
Theologian Mgr Enrico Chiavacci, writing in Vita Pastorale this week, said that the new catechism's refusal to exclude capital punishment was unthinkable.
The Second Vatican Council. he said, stressed the notion that the Christian "does not kill the guilty or unjust but is concerned for them in a positive way".
In a parallel attack, the Association of Military Prison Chaplains of Lombardy challenged bishops to offer theological explanations for the catechism's ruling on capital punishment.
In an open letter published in Avvenire, the chaplains from prisons throughout the Milanese region in the north wrote: "How can the very principle of the death penalty be acceptable to a Christian vision of life?"
Mgr Philip Carroll, general secretary of the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, said the catechism's endorsement of the death penalty had to be seen "within the overall context of the common good of society".
"It would be wrong to present its teaching outside the context in which it was intended," he said.
Anthony Clark. secretary of the Bishops' Conference Education Committee, defended the controversial paragraph in the catechism. "It doesn't say 'hang 'em all'. It says for the sake of the lives of others and only in very extreme cases the death penalty may be justified. I would defend that position.
"It is one of the classic dilemmas: when other innocent lives are in danger, is the taking of life justified?"