“Go to hell,” our President-elect, Donald Trump, wrote on Truth Social to the death row prisoners whose sentences President Biden recently commuted. Trump wrote this on Christmas Day. Christians, who have been arguing about Trump since his campaign of 2016, have received a new expression of his theology.
Pope St. John Paul II became the first pope to call for the abolition of the death penalty in his encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, or The Gospel of Life, published on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1995. The practice was not compatible with human dignity, which not even a murderer loses, he taught. When I went to see John Paul II speak on his trip to St. Louis in 1999, I recall, he publicly called for the Governor of Missouri to grant clemency to a prisoner about to be executed. The governor complied. Pope Francis has repeated the Church’s opposition to the death penalty and prayed publicly on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, that Biden commute the sentences of federal death row prisoners. Biden commuted 37 sentences on December 23.
John Paul II’s response to capital crime extended further after he became the victim of such a crime. After he recovered from being shot by Turkish assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, John Paul II visited Agca in prison and forgave him. This took place on December 27, 1983, just after Christmas. In 2014, Agca laid white roses on John Paul II’s tomb.
The central and founding event of Christianity is Jesus Christ’s forgiveness of humanity’s sins on the Cross and his meriting grace for humanity’s renewal in his Resurrection. Under the terms of the New Covenant, any person who accepts God’s forgiveness through repentance, baptism, and keeping the commandments may live in friendship with Christ eternally. Jesus’ love for the sinner does not exempt murderers but is rather especially intense for them. He has posted the message on his World Wide Web, “go to heaven.”
Jesus extends his love on the Cross equally in solidarity to families of murder victims. The brilliance of the 1995 film, Dead Man Walking, is that it challenges every viewer’s stance on the death penalty, deftly tugging our emotions towards everyone involved, not to leave us confused but rather to cultivate our hearts’ solidarity with victims, prisoner, and everyone involved. The lead role is that of Sister Helen Prejean, an activist against the death penalty who undertakes to accompany the prisoner, Matthew Poncelot, as he unsuccessfully appeals his sentence and then faces execution in a Louisiana prison. Her arduous task becomes ever more difficult when she encounters the parents of the victims, two high school students whom Poncelot murdered on their prom night, who angrily demand of Sister Helen, What about us? At the end of the film, following Poncelot’s execution, one of the victim’s fathers, Earl Delacroix, whose name means “of the Cross,” unexpectedly shows up at Poncelot’s funeral and tells Sr. Helen, “I don’t know why I am here. I got a lot of hate.” In the closing scene, he is shown praying in a chapel with Sr. Helen, which I think we are to interpret as his prayer for the strength to forgive.
About the Church’s teaching on the justice of the death penalty, much more must be said. If one accepts the New Covenant, though, ought not one to participate in this covenant and at least pray for the redemption of prisoners on death row? Our President-elect appears to think not.