In the year since his pontificate began, Pope Leo XIV has come out strongly against the death penalty, repeatedly affirming the Catholic Churchʼs relatively recent declaration that capital punishment is immoral and should be abolished.
In April, the Holy Father spoke out against executions several times, including to pro-life advocates in his hometown of Chicago, whom he urged to continue seeking the abolishment of the death penalty in the United States.
Earlier, speaking aboard the papal plane while returning from his apostolic trip to Africa, Leo also called for an end to the death penalty.
“I condemn the taking of people’s lives,“ he said. ”I condemn capital punishment. I believe that human life is to be respected and that all people — from conception to natural [death] — their lives should be respected and protected.”
In September 2025, meanwhile, he argued that supporting the death penalty is antithetical to the pro-life position.
Can executions ever be permitted?
Leoʼs repeated entreaties against the death penalty articulate a relatively new but forceful magisterial teaching in the Catholic Church, one promulgated in 2018 by Pope Francis.
The revision to the Catechism of the Catholic Church acknowledges that while the death penalty was “long considered an appropriate response” to serious crimes, in the modern world there is “an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes.”
“In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state,” the catechism says, while also pointing to “more effective systems of detention” that “ensure the due protection of citizens” but “do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.”
The Catechism bluntly refers to the death penalty as “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”
The 2018 revision of the Catechism came after several decades of shifting views within the Catholic Church on the death penalty. In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II wrote that punishments for crimes “ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity,” specifically “when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society.”
“Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically nonexistent,” the pope wrote.
The most recent revision of the Catechism at that time stated that authorities must adhere to “bloodless means” of punishment if they are “sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor.”
Pope Benedict XVI, meanwhile, continued advocating against capital punishment, urging in 2011, for instance, that societyʼs leaders should “make every effort to eliminate the death penalty and to reform the penal system in a way that ensures respect for the prisoners’ human dignity.”
Though the teaching appears uncomplicated, it would ostensibly seem that the Church does leave at least some room for dispute over whether the death penalty can ever be morally applied — such as in cases where an “effective system of detention” does not exist and there is no other way of properly detaining a dangerous criminal.
Moral theologians told EWTN News that the issue is still somewhat in flux, though the teaching of the Church leaves little wiggle room at least in countries such as the United States.
Father Phillip Brown, the president and rector of St. Maryʼs Seminary in Baltimore, noted that “natural law … acknowledges the right of self-defense,” including “violence and killing to defend oneself.”
But such extreme measures can only be used “as a last resort when other means to stop unjust aggression would not be capable of doing so.”
Brown suggested that societies may “evolve” to the extent that “it is never necessary to kill a person to protect society from further harm, because modern societies have the means to protect themselves from such dangers in less egregious ways than killing the offender.”
He noted, however, that such an understanding gives rise to “a concomitant duty on the part of society to deal with offenders in a humane way, and certainly ways that are not less humane than killing them.”
Monsignor Stuart Swetland, the president of Donnelly College in Kansas City, Kansas, said theologians are “still working to figure out” what “inadmissible” means in this context.
“We’re in that transition stage where we have a true development of doctrine,” he said.
Still, he argued, the moral implications of capital punishment itself leave little room for uncertainty.
“For the death penalty to be carried out, someone must have a will to directly kill another person,” he said. “And I think it’s always wrong to directly kill somebody — to intend death.”
He distinguished between deliberately causing someoneʼs death and inadvertently bringing about death when using violence to defend oneself or others.
“In war, and in police actions, the intent is to stop a perpetrator in carrying out unjust aggression,” he pointed out. “If we capture [a soldier or a prisoner], we treat them humanely.”
“We’d much rather deter than wound, wound than maim, and maim than kill,” he continued. “With the death penalty we have to intend the death penalty. I think that intent is immoral.”
He further drew a line between what he described as “prudential judgments” that reflect Church teaching on the one hand and the unambiguous teaching of the Church on the other.
He pointed out, for instance, that the U.S. bishops advocate “certain policies about immigration.” The national bishops’ conference has regularly petitioned the government to carry out “just immigration policies.”
“Can you disagree with those? I think so,” Swetland said. Yet the Churchʼs recent promulgation on the death penalty is less ambiguous, he said.
“It says the Church ‘teaches’ this about the death penalty,” he said. “I think the way itʼs presented, itʼs more than a policy.”
Burden of proof for death penalty ‘extraordinarily high’
Father Thomas Petri, OP, STD, a Dominican friar and theologian who served as the president of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies, told EWTN News that the 2018 revision of the Catechism generated “a lot of confusion about the status of a state’s authority to impose on the death penalty on a criminals who commit extremely grave crimes.”
Petri pointed out that the Catechism does not state that the death penalty is “intrinsically evil.” However, such actions, he said, “are never moral, regardless of the times, circumstances, or intention of those who do them.”
“The Church teaches that every person is created in the image of God and called to eternal communion with him,” he said. “This is our fundamental human dignity that cannot be taken away. Our dignity can grow with good and holy actions but can also diminish with sinful actions, though it can never be destroyed. Our fundamental dignity always remains.”
The priest argued that the “best way to understand the revision is that the Church is exercising a prophetic judgment about the moral direction of civil society.”
“It is not simply saying that the state never had authority to impose capital punishment,” he said. “It is saying that the conditions of punishment should now be ordered so that even the worst offender’s fundamental dignity remains publicly recognized, society is protected, and the guilty are not definitively deprived of the possibility of repentance and redemption.”
Under that teaching, he said, “one should not speak casually of circumstances in which the death penalty remains permissible.”
“The burden of proof would be extraordinarily high,” he argued. “At most, one could imagine a case in which no nonlethal means exist to protect innocent life. But that would be an exceptional breakdown of ordinary penal order, not a normal application of Catholic teaching today.”
The U.S. is among the few developed countries in the world that still regularly carries out executions. The countryʼs Catholic bishops, particularly state bishops’ conferences, regularly appeal the government to halt executions, especially in states like Texas and Florida where capital punishment is frequent.
Still, a majority of U.S. Catholics are supportive of the death penalty, though polling indicates that Catholics who attend Mass regularly are much more likely to oppose the death penalty than Catholics whose attendance is less frequent.
In December 2025, meanwhile, a group of Catholics and other advocates formed the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty. Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, the executive director of the anti-death penalty group Catholic Mobilizing Network, which is taking part in the campaign, told EWTN News that the initiative represents “an exciting expression of the growing momentum and interest in ending capital punishment in the United States.”
“The impressive range of organizations involved in [the campaign] represents the incredibly effective efforts happening across the country for this critical mission,” she said.
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