A clarification for Steve Bainbridge and others concerning the Magisterium's position on capital punishment

In his post today (here), Steve writes:  "[I]'s not clear that involvement with the death penalty is cooperation with evil, given that the Church has not definitively ruled it out."

Steve's statement is, at best, misleading and, at worst, mistaken.

True, the Magisterium has not ruled out the death penalty in any and all imaginable circumstances.  But it has ruled it out--"definitively" so--in some circumstances, namely, where it is possible for government to "render[] one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself" (section 2267 of the 1997 edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church).

The Catechism goes on to say that "the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity 'are ... practically nonexistent.'"  (Id., quoting John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae.)

Now, it would be preposterous to argue that the State of North Carolina lacks the ability to "render[] one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself ..."  There is no room for a reasonable difference in prudential judgments about that.  (If there were, the Catechism and JPII would be mistaken in insisting that "the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity 'are ... practically nonexistent.'")

So, Steve's misleading statement should be replaced with this:  It is clear that the Church has definitively ruled out the death penalty in the circumstances that obtain in North Carolina--and in every other state in the United States.
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mp