Citing Evangelium Vitae, Pope St. John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical letter on the value and inviolability of human life, the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops asked Governor Ron DeSantis to stay two executions scheduled for July 28.
“The crimes of which these men were convicted are gravely evil,” the conference’s executive director, Michael Sheedy, wrote in his July 21 letter.
“To punish with lifelong imprisonment is not to minimize the heinousness of these men’s crimes,” Sheedy added. “It is rather to recognize with awe that God is the author of life, and to reserve to him the taking of human life except where it is otherwise impossible to maintain the common good.”