Bombing tests death penalty theory

National Catholic Reporter, May 12, 1995 by David E. Anderson

WASHINGTON -- A month ago, in a highly nuanced, somewhat abstract passage of his latest encyclical, Pope John Paul II said cases warranting capital punishment "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent."

With the April 19 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, John Paul's teaching met a blunt and harsh reality: the killing of at least 100 people, including a dozen or more children.

The Oklahoma blast poses a tough and practical question to bishops, theologians, ethicists and lay Catholics: Does the crime fit John Paul's 'rare' circumstance meriting death?

As the search for the perpetrators of the bombing intensifies, it is a question -- both in the United States and Rome -- that elicits conflicting answers.

"That is a judgment call," said Fr. Richard McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. "Some theologians will come down on each side."

What is at issue is not the horror or magnitude of the Oklahoma crime, say McBrien and many other theologians and ethicists, but whether society would be threatened by not executing the perpetrators -- the only situation when capital punishment should be allowed, according to the pope's encyclical.

McBrien said some could compare the bombing to the poisoning of a city's water reservoir, therefore making the death penalty permissible under the pope's thinking.

"If Oklahoma doesn't merit capital punishment, then the pope's exception is meaningless," he said.

Fr. John Navone, a New Testament scholar at the papal Gregorian University in Rome, also said the encyclical does not rule out capital punishment in the Oklahoma case.

"I don't think a Catholic could come out and say that those individuals who committed this act should escape capital punishment on the basis of what the pope has written," he said.

But Fr. Richard McCormick, an ethicist and colleague of McBrien's at Notre Dame, has a different opinion. There is a way of defending society without killing the perpetrators of the bombing, he said.

"We have the means to put these people away, we have the adequate means to prevent these people from doing it again. That's what the pope would say, and I share that view."

Fr. Sergio Bastinel, a moral theologian also at the Gregorian University in Rome, agreed.

In theory, capital punishment is allowable under Catholic doctrine, he said. "But the conditions would have to be extreme, when there's no other possibility to defend society. My personal opinion is that there is rare justification."

Even so, McCormick said some could ask whether there are adequate means, including the prison system, to prevent a recurrence of an incident like the Oklahoma bombing.

Robert Boston, a Catholic layman and ethicist at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington think tank, raised just that question.

"What does the availability of prisons mean?" he asked, citing the pope's contention that improvements in penal systems around the world made capital punishment all but unnecessary.

While admitting to "some personal squeamishness about the state coldly putting a person to death," Boston said: "The death penalty does deter. I don't think there is any moral tradition that would countenance that kind of killing" in Oklahoma City.