October 31 | 
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Pope Francis issues call for abolition of the death penalty
POPE Francis called for the abolition of capital punishment during a speech last Thursday, as well as all forms of penal punishment that violate human dignity.
In an audience with delegates from the International Association of Penal Law, the Pope decried the ‘growing conviction’ in recent decades ‘that through public punishment it is possible to solve different and disparate social problems, as if for different diseases one could prescribe the same medicine.’
“It is impossible to imagine that today (there are) states which cannot make use of means other than capital punishment to defend the life of other persons from unjust aggressors,” the Holy Father said.
During his speech, the Pope called on ‘all Christians and people of goodwill… to fight not only for the abolition of the death penalty, be it legal or illegal, in all of its forms.’ He also called on the Faithful to work toward ‘the improvement of prison conditions in the respect of the human dignity of those who have been deprived of freedom,’ adding: “I link this to the death sentence.”
The Holy Father also compared the death penalty to life imprisonment, recalling that the Vatican Penal Code no longer employs life sentences. “A life sentence is a death sentence which is concealed,” he said.
The Pope also noted that the penal system goes beyond its own sanctions, infringing on the freedom and rights of persons—‘above all the most vulnerable’—in the name of prevention.
“There is the risk of losing sight of the proportionality of penalties that historically reflect the scale of values upheld by the state,” he said. “The very conception of criminal law and the enforcement of sanctions as an ‘ultima ratio’ in the cases of serious offences against individual and collective interests have weakened. As has the debate regarding the use of alternative penal sanctions to be used instead of imprisonment.”
The Holy Father also decried the ‘deplorable conditions’ of some detention centres throughout the world, which he describes as ‘an authentic inhuman and degrading trait, often caused by deficiencies of criminal law, or by a lack of infrastructures and good planning.’ He added that such conditions are, in many cases, ‘the result of an arbitrary and merciless exercise of power over persons who have been deprived of freedom.’
—Read the full version of this story in October 17 edition of the SCO in parishes from Friday.
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