Last Rites

On September 24 at 6:01 PM—still business hours for many Americans—Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, fifty-five, having been led in chains to a room and strapped to a table, was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital, a barbiturate that, at lower levels, induces sleep, treats seizures, and calms anxious patients before surgery. It is also used to euthanize pets. Williams was accompanied by his imam, while his son and attorneys watched from an adjoining room. He was declared dead nine minutes later. 

The execution took place at Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri, the state where Williams, a Black man, had been incarcerated for twenty-one years for the 1998 killing of Felicia Gayle, a former journalist who was stabbed to death in her home. He had always maintained his innocence, and his trial had been obviously deficient. A racist jury selection process that reduced the number of Black jurors from seven to one (the prosecutor Keith Larner said that one prospective juror and Williams “looked like they were brothers”), unreliable and incentivized witnesses, nonexistent forensic evidence: Williams had, to all appearances, been railroaded, first into a cell and now into the death chamber.

Public outcry mounted as the execution date drew near. It had been stayed twice before, in 2015 and 2017, and many hoped that a third reprieve was forthcoming. Gayle’s family had publicly advocated for Williams’s sentence to be commuted to life in prison: “the family defines closure as Marcellus being allowed to live,” their petition read. But successive courts struck down their appeals, repeatedly ruling that the defense had not produced any new evidence supporting Williams’s claim to innocence. In one instance, the Missouri Supreme Court made a point of arguing that it was not bound by a prosecutor’s confession of error, because the determination of error was the Court’s responsibility.

In August Williams and the St. Louis County prosecutors reached an agreement to enter a so-called Alford plea, which would grant that the state had enough evidence to charge him with murder in exchange for commuting his sentence to life in prison. The plea was opposed by the state attorney general, however, and blocked by the Missouri Supreme Court. When the appeals finally reached the United States Supreme Court, it decided along political lines to decline to hear the case, effectively denying another stay. After the execution, Governor Mike Parson, directly contradicting the Gayle family’s account, claimed that they had been “revictimized” by Williams’s repeated attempts to prove his innocence. “We hope this gives finality to a case that has languished for decades,” he said, as if the value of such finality were self-evident. The sentiment was so representative of official consensus that the director of the Missouri Department of Corrections issued an identical statement.

The Court’s failure to intervene and spare Williams’s life was appalling by any measure. A bitter irony is the fact that six of the nine justices are practicing Catholics. (A seventh, Neil Gorsuch, was raised Catholic, though he now attends Episcopalian services; in a brief dissenting statement, one of the six Catholics on the bench, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined her liberal colleagues Elena Kagan, who is Jewish, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Protestant, to say that she would have stayed the execution.) The Church as a political entity in the US has for the past half-century been tightly associated with the notion of the “sanctity of life,” which guides its hard-line stance against abortion. A growing number of American Catholics have, since at least the 1990s, been pushing to apply this principle more broadly, advocating with increasing visibility for the abolition of the death penalty as well.

It has been a difficult fight, both within the Church and beyond it. Early Christians commonly condemned capital punishment, but as the Church’s proximity to worldly power grew, it came to make allowances for this most extreme sentence. For much of its history, its authorities and theologians believed, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, that “if any individual becomes a danger to society and if his sin is contagious to others, it is laudable and beneficial to put him to death on behalf of the common good.” The 1566 Roman Catechism—the first Church-wide set of Catholic doctrine, itself a response to the Reformation—invested the “civil authorities” with the “power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent.” Later changes narrowed the scope of its applicability, down to the 1992 Catechism, which limited its use to cases “of extreme gravity.” In every instance, however, the Church deferred to the state as the deciding actor, even during the Spanish Inquisition, when the condemned were simply handed over to civil magistrates, or, as the phrase went at the time, “relaxed to the secular arm.”

Progress toward abolition began in earnest in the twentieth century, with the arrival of the broad movement known as Catholic social teaching—a series of post–Industrial Revolution doctrinal innovations intended to defend the dignity of the poor and the working class against capitalist rapacity and state repression. What followed was a venerable history of American Catholic dissidents who denounced the death penalty, among them Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, the Berrigan brothers and the Plowshares Movement, and, most notably, Sister Helen Prejean, perhaps the foremost American campaigner in the fight against capital punishment. In her classic 1993 book about her time as a spiritual adviser to two death row inmates, Dead Man Walking, she describes her activism in explicitly religious terms: “Kings and Popes and military generals and heads of state have killed, claiming God’s authority and God’s blessing. I do not believe in such a God.” The Catholic Mobilizing Network, meanwhile, advocates tirelessly for the abolition of the death penalty and the transformation of the US justice system “from punitive to restorative,” on the basis of the “Gospel value that every human is created in the image and likeness of God.” 

Informal condemnations have since emerged from the Vatican, such as Pope (now Saint) John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, which pointed to the increasing rejection of capital punishment both within the Church and in civil society as evidence of civilization’s progress toward universal recognition of intrinsic human dignity. Citing this encyclical, the 1997 Catechism’s language on capital punishment was further clarified to limit its use to cases that were “very rare, if not practically non-existent.” On a 1999 visit to the United States he told 100,000 people gathered for mass in St. Louis that it was time to “end the death penalty.” Finally, in 2018 Pope Francis officially amended the Catechism to declare the death penalty “inadmissible” in the modern world and call on Christians everywhere to work toward its eradication. Following on John Paul II’s language of progress, the Catechism now reads: “Today…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,” which renders the death penalty strictly forbidden.

Francis’s amendment represents a seismic shift not only on the discrete issue of executions but also on the Church’s attitude toward the authority of governments to uphold the common good. In effect, he closed a loophole that the Catechism had previously left open—the possibility that lawful authority may take a life. In the process he did more than firmly limit the powers of the state. He also suggested that the faithful ought to actively resist the state on the issue of the death penalty to remain in good standing with the Church, which now officially teaches that capital punishment is in every instance a violation of human dignity, an abdication of our obligation to the least of us, and an act of tyrannical hubris. By sanctioning the taking of a life, we prevent any possibility that the condemned might someday reconcile with the world and with God—it is as violent and unjustified an act as any crime that could tempt us to employ it. 

A significant number of Catholic politicians in the US have failed to follow Pope Francis’s lead. The refusal of five Catholic justices to intervene even in a case as patently unjust as Williams’s was especially outrageous, but it was hardly unique. Six of the twenty one states in which the death penalty is practiced are presided over by Catholic governors, including Greg Abbott, who described the frequency of executions in his state as “Texas justice.” 

To be sure, some inroads have been made in the fight against capital punishment, even among the powerful. In 2020 Ohio’s Catholic Republican governor, Mike DeWine, who has cast doubts on the death penalty’s deterrent effect and issued more than forty reprieves during his tenure, instituted an “unofficial moratorium” on the practice—although initially he cited only the lack of an alternative method for lethal injections, the only legal technique in the state. (Following Alabama’s execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith by nitrogen hypoxia—in other words, by gassing—Ohio Republicans have begun pushing to legalize this novel method.) Nancy Pelosi, also a Catholic, decried the hypocrisy of church officials who punish politicians for their pro-choice voting records—as she herself was, when the archbishop of her home diocese denied her communion—but not for their support of state executions. Joe Biden, for his part, began his administration as the only sitting president to ever oppose the death penalty without exception. In July 2021 Attorney General Merrick Garland imposed a moratorium on capital punishment at federal prisons after Donald Trump oversaw thirteen executions in the final months of his presidency, ending a seventeen-year hiatus. 

But Biden’s own time in office is nonetheless ending with what the political scientist Austin Sarat has called the “worst execution spree in three decades”: Williams’s killing was one of five sentences carried out across five states in a single week. Garland, meanwhile, is allowing the Justice Department to seek the death penalty in two cases involving racially motivated mass murders, and the Democratic Party has quietly dropped the abolition of the death penalty from its platform. 

It’s a grim reminder, however sotto voce, of the party’s recent record on the issue: after the 1988 presidential debates, when Michael Dukakis’s answer to a grotesque question about whether he would seek the death penalty for his wife’s hypothetical rapist and murderer was deemed insufficiently passionate, the Democrats lurched rightward. In the 1992 campaign Governor Bill Clinton interrupted a visit to New Hampshire to return to Arkansas to personally oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a Black man who had been so severely brain damaged that he saved the dessert from his last meal “for later.” (Once president, Clinton signed into law the 1994 Crime Bill, which expanded federal statues so that the death penalty could be imposed as punishment for sixty different crimes, including some—espionage, treason, and certain drug offenses—that don’t involve murder.)

Prior to the official amendment of the Catechism, some Catholic governors and prosecutors made liberal use of the Church’s exception for ostensibly extreme cases, as former Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts explained in 2015: “The Catholic Church does not preclude the use of the death penalty under certain circumstances: That guilt is determined and the crime is heinous. Also, protecting society.” Since 2018, however, Catholic officials who are now in outright violation of the Catechism have largely been silent on the matter of how they reconcile their religious convictions with their political work. (Ricketts, for his part, said that the death penalty would remain the law of the land in his state, though he “respect[s] the pope’s perspective.”)  

Some Catholics have attempted to relieve politicians of this burden by attacking the Pope’s total condemnation of the death penalty as another example of his dictatorial and revisionist tendencies. In 2018 the formerly urbane right-wing Catholic magazine First Things—now a hotbed of anti-Francis reaction—issued an open letter signed by several dozen priests and theologians, mostly American, requesting that the college of cardinals undo Francis’s amendment on the grounds that it was contrary to Scripture, in particular Genesis 9:6, which reads: “Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed; for in his own image God made humankind.” 

It’s a strange argument for Catholics to make. For one thing, the Genesis passage stands in some tension with the Gospel’s teachings on sin and casting stones. For another, Roman Catholicism typically emphasizes allegorical, rational, and, above all, ecclesial interpretations of the Bible; direct appeals to the literal inerrancy of Biblical texts are rather a hallmark of Protestant theology in general and Reformation polemics against the Roman Magisterium in particular. Then there is the obvious inconsistency between approving of, or indeed advocating for, slaying a human being in the case of capital punishment on the one hand and insisting that abortion constitutes such a slaying—precisely in order to condemn it—on the other. 

The First Things letter also gives the lie to the notion that Catholics swear obedience to the Pope over and above temporal political allegiances. The authors take some license from canon law, which grants the faithful the right to engage in protest when they feel the clergy is leading them astray. But this protest is made in such evident bad faith that it is difficult to read it as a genuine act of conscience. It ignores not only the letter and spirit of decades of papal precedents but also the lessons to be drawn from no less an example than that of Jesus and the Apostles, all of whom were imprisoned and killed by the governing authority. (Even the Emperor Constantine, though hardly against capital punishment in general, banned crucifixion out of deference to his newfound savior.) Considering the literalist, legalistic approach these authors take, it’s hard to see their letter as much more than a screed against a pontiff who so grates against their political preferences (which, in turn, have utterly saturated their religious commitments) that they can only think of him as yet another liberal.

To these American conservatives, the amendment to the Catechism and the advocates who pushed for it epitomize the Church’s failure to maintain its historical identity and stand athwart soft-hearted cultural degeneracy. But those activists—and their teachings—are more rooted in the legacy of Catholic thinking than the signatories of the First Things letter would like to believe, and their gradual rise in influence stems not from external pressures but rather from trends within Catholicism itself, which were finally absorbed and synthesized by the Church in the Second Vatican Council. 

From the late nineteenth century—especially with Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, generally regarded as the starting point for Catholic social teaching—the Church was increasingly in favor of strengthening craft guilds, labor unions, and mutual aid networks. The aim was to develop a social order beyond both capitalist acquisitiveness and what many in the Vatican saw as the dangerous statism of mainstream socialism. And though the Vatican fell to Mussolini with appalling ease, while condemning but doing little to combat the Nazi regime, antifascist resistance flourished in religious and lay communities both in Europe during World War II and under later, US-supported autocracies in Latin America and around the world. 

By the middle of the century, a consonant revolution in the Church’s theology was unfolding. New generations of writers, artists, scholars, and theologians—particularly in France, Germany, and Switzerland—challenged the reigning school of Neo-Scholasticism, which pitted the resources of medieval Christian thought, especially that of St. Thomas Aquinas, against modern philosophy from Descartes onward. Hoping to catalyze a more capacious and dynamic intellectual movement within the Church, people like Henri de Lubac and Yves Congar developed what came to be called ressourcement theology (“a return to the sources,” at first pejoratively referred to as the nouvelle theologie). The ressourcement thinkers believed that the Church ought to be more responsive both to history as it unfolded and to the needs of the laity; they drew on a wider range of early Church sources to wrest Catholic thinking from the ecclesial abstractions of Neo-Scholasticism.^*

Conservatives like the Thomist theologian Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (a friend of the antisemitic Action Française movement and a supporter of the Vichy collaborationist regime) attacked the ressourcement movement and for a time hounded it out of respectable theological discourse on the charge of “modernism”—a formal heresy that involved replacing “traditional” interpretative and political models with modern innovations, especially historical biblical criticism and liberal democracy. But following the death of Pope Pius XII—widely understood as an enemy of ressourcement for his 1950 encyclical Humani generis, in which, under the influence of Garrigou-Lagrange, he warned against the “relativism” of “new opinions” in theology—the movement gained new favor under John XIII in time for it to exert, from 1962 to 1965, a profound influence on the proceedings of the Second Vatican Council. Among other things, its imprint can be seen in the Council’s decision to recover the older tradition of the vernacular Mass, which in the following decades gradually supplanted (though never eradicated) the Latin Tridentine rite—a sixteenth-century innovation that, like the original Catechism, was supposed to have bolstered the Church against the ravages of the Reformation. 

It was under this banner of ecclesial and theological renewal that the Vatican started condemning the death penalty outright, beginning with Pope Paul VI, who in 1969 abolished capital punishment within Vatican City itself, where it had been on the books since the 1929 Lateran Pact with Mussolini, as punishment for the assassination of a Pope.  

Since 1965, however, American Catholicism has returned in some corners to a kind of Neo-Scholastic thinking and, more to the point, to a medieval reverence for “civil” authority. During these last decades a number of powerful right-wing Catholic movements and organizations have flourished in mainstream American society, all of them with intensely traditionalist preferences and long histories of friendship with the powerful and the reactionary. Though not all of them homegrown, these groups—from Opus Dei to the Legionaries of Christ to the Napa Institute—have gained traction here by making strategic alliances on the issue of abortion, notably with the evangelical voter bloc spearheaded by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and benefited from a more general rightward turn in both the clergy and the laity (not to say the country). Where in the past priests had been caricatured as liberal idealists ministering and rabble-rousing on behalf of the poor and the beleaguered—think Father Barry in On the Waterfront—now more than 80 percent of young American clerics self-identify as conservative or very conservative.

On the issue of the death penalty, the American church hierarchy has been moved to act, frequently imploring state governors to grant stays, sometimes successfully, as when the Texas Conference of Catholic Bishops called on Abbott to halt the execution of Rodney Reed in 2019. Since 1974, two years before Gregg v. Georgia, the 1976 Supreme Court ruling reaffirming the death penalty’s Constitutional validity, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has consistently argued against its use, even undertaking in 2005 the Catholic Campaign to End the Use of the Death Penalty, which they reaffirmed in 2015.

But anyone looking for the kind of tenacious united front one sees on abortion will be disappointed. Indeed, American bishops’ consistent opposition to the death penalty has often been undermined by the rhetoric and actions of powerful American Catholic congregants and their academic adjuncts. Theological debate provides some cover: hard-liners like Edward Feser, a Catholic philosopher whose brand of analytic scholasticism harkens back to pre-ressourcement abstraction, defend capital punishment largely on the grounds of the continuity of church teaching. To theologians like Feser, the precedent of Catholicism’s earlier endorsement of the death penalty effectively ends the discussion. Revoking the endorsement in favor of a more coherent position would entail abandoning the sacred tradition altogether. Feser’s arguments, though refuted by more capable theologians like David Bentley Hart and Paul J. Griffiths, are nevertheless mirrored in the actions of Catholic politicians and officials like Ricketts, the former attorney general William Barr (who promulgated Trump’s execution spree), Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and others.

The present situation can appear, in some respects, even more radical than the historical deference to civil authority. In seeming fulfillment of another call by Pope Leo XIII, who in 1895 encouraged American Catholics to seek out the favor of civil institutions, many among the faithful have abandoned ethnic and to an extent religious difference—one is now likelier to hear about Notre Dame football than the Virgin Mary—and become to all appearances devotees of American civil religion, as well. As if the kingdom of heaven were a gated community, the hard-won assimilation of Catholics into the white Christian mainstream seems, for some believers, to have imbued the administrative state with the glow of divine right, transforming secular authority into a worldly tool for heavenly purposes, and, indeed, blurring the distinction between the two.  

This coziness with power is also at the root of the apparent hypocrisy between the dominant American Catholic positions on abortion and the death penalty. For decades now, the Church has been notoriously uncompromising on abortion, advocating total bans the world over and, in certain circumstances, prescribing instant excommunication for Latin Catholics who undergo the procedure. However immovable this conviction may seem to be now, it is a departure from centuries of more nuanced theology in the Church, which while it has always condemned abortion had long countenanced debate over what was meant by the word, up to and including discussions over whether it was sinful to terminate a pregnancy before “quickening” or the point at which a fetus is “ensouled” and becomes human. 

The Catholic position has since crystallized into the steadfast belief that abortion amounts to taking an innocent life; that is, to murder. Ambiguities have thus been neutralized and forgotten, and it is only as an aside—or, more often, a mournful ex post facto reflection on the tragedy of unintended consequences—that conservatives discuss the reality of pregnancies wanted and unwanted, as when, during the vice-presidential debate, J.D. Vance agreed that Amber Thurman, who died while traveling six hundred miles from Georgia to North Carolina in order to obtain reproductive care outlawed in her home state, should still be alive today.

If American Catholics were to consider some of the lessons of Vatican II, they might find that applying a dictum indiscriminately to any situation, whatever the real-world implications, is less an act of moral clarity than an attempt to seize power and assume its righteousness. If the same Catholics who rallied in their hundreds of thousands for forty years to criminalize abortion were to ask not whether a life is being taken but rather whether abortion might be better prevented by social measures; or whether the manifold physical, psychological, and social complications that can occur during a pregnancy are properly adjudicated by politicians and prosecutors; or whether it is at all possible for women, accused of slaying an innocent, to receive a fair hearing before being thrown into the maw of the state, the same state that executes, and executes not for justice but simply for a sense of finality, then they would have to ask themselves whether it is truly life that they sanctify.

Four years prior to his amendment to the Catechism, in an address to the International Association of Penal Law, Pope Francis remarked that “there are many well-known arguments against the death penalty.” That Catholics continue to defend the practice is troubling; that in order to do so they must return not only to arguments but to whole modes of thought that the Church has rightly left behind suggests that their attachment is to a political system and the power it offers, rather than to a living communion that bends toward ever greater reflection of divine love. But the gravest condemnation must be reserved for the likes of the Supreme Court justices who allowed Marcellus Williams, and many like him, to be killed by the state, who lacked the courage to endorse the murder as some kind of justice and simply passed over the matter in silence, like the elders of the city in Deuteronomy, washing their hands in the stream, saying, “Our hands have not shed this blood, neither have our eyes seen it.”

The main insight that motivated Pope Francis’s change to the Catechism is that it should reflect the essential inviolability of human life, even when that life cannot be said to be innocent. The case of Marcellus Williams is particularly egregious because to all appearances he was innocent of the crime for which he had been sentenced, but this is, in a sense, beside the point. What makes the Gospels radical texts, and the Church a potential site of social transformation (to the extent that it reflects the Gospels), is that they introduce into our consciousness a plane of human experience that not only stands apart from law and the organization of political life but also necessarily disrupts the ordinary run of things, interjecting at the most inopportune moments, such as when I or someone I love has been harmed, or when I am flooded with righteous anger, to ask whether my conduct is worthy of my intrinsic dignity, of which even I cannot divest myself. When we hold it above a human life, the “common good” becomes just another idol, and “preventive justice” just another sacrifice offered for its propitiation. No amount of argumentative subtlety will heal the desecration of both victim and perpetrator when a human being, no matter what they have done, is rendered defenseless and killed. And no depth of silence can conceal those responsible, should they ever be held to account.