Pleading for the lives of child-killers

What would you do with two men convicted of raping and murdering a four-year-old girl? Pope John Paul II's answer last week was to plead for their lives. In so doing, he gave a striking example of how he would apply Church teaching on capital punishment in a very concrete and difficult circumstance.

In "Evangelium Vitae" ("The Gospel of Life"), his 1995 encyclical, the Pope stated that the death penalty is acceptable only under certain extreme conditions; he added that such conditions are very rare, maybe even nonexistent, in the modern world.

A scenario in Guatemala tested those conditions last week when Castillo Mendoza and Roberto Giron were executed by a firing squad. The pair had been charged with the rape and murder of a four-year-old girl. Although samples of hair and fluids from her body matched their own, they claimed innocence. Local Catholic authorities were joined by the Pope in pleading for reversal of their sentence of death.

Guatemalan officials claimed that restoring capital punishment, not practiced there since the mid-1980s, "would contribute to reducing the current levels of crime" in the country. "There are times when things get too much," said Public Security Minister Hugo Barrera, who supported the execution. But to the Pope, that was not enough reason to carry out the death penalty.

As the executions of the two men were being debated in Guatemala, prison chaplains from around the world, meeting in Warsaw, Poland, were asking for clarification from the Vatican on Church teaching about capital punishment. The Ninth World Congress of Catholic Prison Chaplains, attended by chaplains from 46 countries, stated that inmates around the world have been denied basic human rights and asked that the Vatican show its "special concern" for prisoners.

As they spoke out, so did Archbishop Fernando Saenz Lacalle of San Salvador, who reiterated the Church's position that "it could be right and legal for the state to use [the death penalty] in extraordinarily necessary cases when it is the last possibility available."

Just what is "extraordinarily necessary" and when does a "last possibility" occur? Does the rape and murder of a four-year-old girl warrant the death penalty? The Pope's plea for pardon for her murderers says no.

Many Catholics, in that light, might wonder just what would justify the death penalty; but the Vatican should not take to issuing statements describing specific conditions under which it would be permissible. The Pope has already affirmed the Church's stand: in favor of life. That is enough. A Vatican statement trying to outline specific cases would only detract from that teaching by placing the Church on a slippery slope toward a "culture of death," a slope greased with exceptions and hard cases.

If such a statement were issued, authorities and citizens would immediately begin trying to make cases fit the Vatican's conditions for use of the death penalty. If a convicted criminal could be seen as appropriate to be killed even in the eyes of the Church, it would become easier to press the button, make the lethal injection, or, in the cases of Mendoza and Giron, fire the bullets into their bodies.

The Pope's voice last week on behalf of two child-killers speaks as loudly as possible to those in New York who eagerly anticipate an execution. And his voice said, "Don't do it."