By Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, a Catholic, is expected to issue a statement on the death penalty after the May 5 primary election.
More than 300 faith leaders from at least 17 faith traditions, including Catholics, sent a letter to members of the Ohio General Assembly urging lawmakers to bring an end to the death penalty in their state.
“As people of faith, we are committed to policies rooted in justice and grounded in the promise of redemption,” the May 4 letter said.
“While we come from varied backgrounds and political stances, we stand together against state-sanctioned murder,” it said. “Instead, we are motivated by the restorative power of empathy and investments in transformation.”
The letter, led by the single-issue organization Ohioans to Stop Executions (OTSE), comes as Ohioans await a statement on the death penalty by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. Last month, the governor said he would issue a statement in the week after the primary election, which is May 5.
DeWine, a Catholic, has delayed several executions as Ohio has had difficulty in obtaining the drugs needed to administer lethal injection.
In the letter, the faith leaders state that “now is the time for Ohio to rid itself of its outdated and immoral death penalty.”
“As people who are motivated by faith and sparked by profound love for the common good, we are calling on you to endorse the bipartisan, multi-faith effort to abolish the death penalty in Ohio,” they said.
The faith leaders affirmed they “hold deep care and respect for victims and co-victims of crime, and we most certainly are not opposed to accountability for rightfully convicted persons,” however: “We believe that the death penalty serves no moral purpose.”
“Instead, it is a hollow instrument of death that offers no redemption, no closure, and no transformation for anyone involved,” the letter said. “The death penalty monopolizes human and financial resources that would be better spent if applied to the co-victims whose glaring list of needs often goes unmet.“
The signatories included parish priests, Protestant pastors, and Catholic religious sisters. It also includes non-Christians, such as rabbis, Muslims, Zoroastrian, and unitarian universalists.
Marsha Forson, associate director of Social Concerns at the Catholic Conference of Ohio, spoke during a news conference to announce the letter, noting the continued celebration of the Easter season.
“What does this mystery grant us but the hope of life — life eternal,” she said. “Hope that one day all things will be placed in proper order by justice and peaceful reign and every tear will be wiped from our eyes.”
Forson said “each person’s fundamental identity and value is renewed not in the good or evil [that the person] has done but in the invaluable self-sacrificing love of one.” She said “there is no longer any value that can be placed on a human life other than the inestimable price of Christ’s sacrifice.”
The bishops did not sign onto the OTSE letter but instead sent their own separate letter in late March, which also urged Ohio lawmakers to abolish the death penalty.
Brian Hickey, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Ohio, said in a statement to EWTN News that lawmakers have “the unique opportunity” with House Bill 72, under consideration in a House committee.
That bill, he explained, would “end state-sanctioned death in Ohio by abolishing the death penalty while also ensuring state funds will not pay for abortion or assisted suicide.”
“We are actively meeting with Ohio legislators and urging them to stand against the culture of death and defend the sanctity of life in all stages and circumstances, as Pope Leo XIV continues to urge Catholics and all people of goodwill to do,” he said.
On April 24, Leo provided a message to activists at DePaul University celebrating the 15th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois, in which the Holy Father offered his “support to those who advocate for the abolition of the death penalty in the United States of America and around the world.”
“I pray that your efforts will lead to a greater acknowledgement of the dignity of every person and will inspire others to work for the same just cause,” Leo said.
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“The death penalty serves no moral purpose.” Really????
Well, here in NY the legislature is poised to enact legislation that would allow “senior” criminals out of their jail terms. On the basis one guesses that they are too old to re-offend. A very stupid assumption. One of those criminals is the “Son of Sam” murderer David Burkowitz, a well known serial killer from decades ago who shot to death a number of strangers. . I dont think we need to see people like this on the street. But as long as the criminals are still alive, there will always be bleeding heart liberals and crazed Dems who want them sprung from jail, no matter what crimes they committed. This is the same bunch fighting ICE when they try to arrest a pedophile. Evidently they have no feeling about the victims or the victim’s families. I believe this is again another issue where the church should butt out.
Two observations from the back bleachers…
FIRST, about the actual messaging in “The Gospel of Life,” so rercently in 1995:
Regarding application of the death penalty–the application of, not the (im)morality–we find from St. John Paul II that “such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (Gospel of Life, 1995, n. 56); AND that this teaching segues into and prefaces the very next paragraph: “If such great care must be taken to respect every life, even that of criminals and unjust aggressors, [THEN] the commandment “You shall not kill” has absolute [!] value when it refers to the innocent person [italics]. And all the more so in the case of weak and defenseless human beings….” (n. 57).
And yet, abortion is legal and more-or-less routine across all of the secularist European Union where a condition of membership is the abolition of the death penalty. The European audience yawned…
SECOND, history records the past “Age of Faith,” but will future history brand us as the “Age of Oblique Evangelization?”
Features might be: (a) now “inadmissible” capital punishment, partly to harmonize secularist contradictions (the above nn. 56 vs 57), (b) the Abu Dhabi Declaration’s “pluralism of religions,” euphemizing “fraternity” with Islam as now ecumenical rather than interreligious, (c) the “binding synodal path” of centripetal Germania to euphemize its anti-apostolic “tyranny of relativism,” (d) the “provisional” China Accord so as to learn nothing from the 12th-century Investiture Crisis in Europe, (e) most recent incoherent “dialog” with Biden’s cafeteria-Catholic posturing vs the Eucharistic Church, and (f) in curial reform, leveling of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) as simply one castrated dicastery (DDF) among the pastoral and sorta synodalish many.
Writing as somebody who grew up with a murderer as a classmate and teammate (tortured his victim before killing him and dumping his body) and who is/was confined to single unit housing because his psychological assessment was too violent to be trusted with a cellmate-and hearing the horrific account of Marise Chivarella, the school girl and aspiring nun who was kidnapped, raped and dumped in 1964 (cousin in her class) and whose murderer escaped earthly justice by dying unexpectedly at the age of 38 in 1980. Before he died, he assaulted an adult woman in a car in 1974-she may have escaped only because of the presence of another vehicle. Creepily, he had an apartment overlooking the cemetery where she was laid to rest not far from some of my family members.
His identity was only found in 2022 because of the efforts of a then teenager Eric Schubert-who developed an interest in forensic genealogy-and the preservation of DNA, despite the “victory lap” taken by the Pennsylvania State Police.
In addition, I spent some time in the fiscal end of the “corrections” system, to have been apprised of things that would make the average person sick to their stomach. Mops, for example are restricted items, not because the handles could be fashioned into “shivs” but because the heads make serviceable wigs on “date night”. Some of these things are so disordered and depraved that they could only be diabolically inspired.
While modern facilities are built as a Benthamite panopticon and modularized to limit disorder from becoming institutional riots and that reduces the risk to society, it’s worth remembering incarceration presents risks to the staff and other inmates. Consider the ordinary person who commits the colossal wrong of DUI and is incarcerated for vehicular homicide-they are there to serve a sentence- their sentence doesn’t include the abuse, beatings and rape they might receive.
There is a romanticization and fetishization of death row inmates that far from being enlightened mercy is myopic moral infantilism. Some of these “leaders” need some time behind the concertina wire.
Catholic morality has always recognized the need for the death penalty. This account reports all the others that joined in this-as if argumentum ad populum was a definitive barometer of moral certitude rather than a fallacy.
As for Marsha Forson, she’s a failed nurse-spending fifteen months in one assignment and and a former immigration advocate who as a graduate of the University of Scranton adds to my lament for having attended that institution to obtain an MBA-mostly out of convenience. She’s not a “leader”, she’s a paid “spokesmouth”.