Death penalty dilemmas. (News).

At a recent major conference on religion and the death penalty, a considerable amount of grumbling could be heard from audience members who had expected a more representative and contentious debate between religious proponents of the abolition and retention of capital punishment. Weighted heavily toward the retentionist position, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life's January conference did, however, provide an intriguing window on the struggles of conservative Catholic public officials with their church's anti-death-penalty teachings (for transcripts see pewforum.org).

Speaking at the University of Chicago conference, both United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating took issue with the Catholic Church's current official teaching on the death penalty. In recent documents the church has said that because other means of protecting society are now available, there is practically no longer any justification for the use of capital punishment.

Although his state last year surpassed even Texas to lead the nation in the number of executions, Keating argued that, considering the far greater number of homicides, executions in the United States are already "rare if not nonexistent," as the pope has urged. As a Catholic governor in an overwhelmingly non-Catholic state, Keating said "it's no fun" to frequently find himself in public battles with Oklahoma's Catholic bishops over the death penalty. "I kind of hide under the bed when they start firing the big guns." Pointing to the church's long-standing previous support for capital punishment, Keating added that he thinks "the church's position on abortion is far more mature than its position on capital punishment."

That sentiment was echoed by Scalia, who said, "I have given this new position [on capital punishment] thoughtful and respectful consideration, and I have rejected it.... Unlike such other hard Catholic doctrines as the prohibition of [artificial] birth control and of abortion, this doctrine is not a moral position that Christianity has always maintained." He pointed out that the church's position against capital punishment "does not represent ex cathedra teaching" (i.e., a formal, infallible pronouncement from the pope), although he was wrong in asserting that its teachings on abortion and birth control were ex cathedra. Scalia said he did not find the death penalty immoral and added that he was "happy to have reached that conclusion because I like my job and would rather not resign. And I am happy because I do not think it would be a good thing if American Catholics running for legislative office had to oppose the death penalty. Most of them would not be elected." As for the anti-death-penalty revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church--a rare and thus significant act--Scalia dismissed it as "just the phenomenon of the clerical bureaucracy saying, `Yes, boss.'"