Catholics can honor Francis’s legacy by advocating for the abolition of the death penalty by Chris Byrd

Nothing shaped Pope Francis’s legacy more significantly than his 2018 decision to change the catechism on the death penalty. For the first time in over two millennia, the church declared: “In the light of the gospel, the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”

To grasp how momentous this change was, we should remember the church historically regarded capital punishment as an “acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good.”

John Paul II was the first pope to question the justification for state killing. In 1993, he amended the catechism to state: “Today, in fact, given the means at the State’s disposal to effectively repress crime by rendering inoffensive the one who has committed it, without depriving him definitively of the possibility of redeeming himself, cases of absolute necessity for suppression of the offender today are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”

In 1995, however, Cardinal Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, undercut this modest progress when he declared a person could be a good Catholic and support capital punishment. 

In an October 2014 address to the International Association on Penal Law, Francis signaled he was prepared to counter the well-established internal recalcitrance on this issue. He said: “It is impossible to imagine that states today cannot make use of another means than capital punishment to defend peoples’ lives from an unjust aggressor.”

A meeting with the nation’s most notable death penalty opponent, Sister Helen Prejean, in August 2018, just prior to the announced revision, is believed to have persuaded Francis to change the catechism. This revision likely influenced former President Joe Biden’s transformation on this issue.

Biden, a devout Catholic, was the chief architect of 1994’s crime bill, which expanded the number of crimes eligible for the federal death penalty by 60. Yet during his campaign for the presidency in 2020, Biden promised to end the federal penalty and incentivize states with capital punishment to abolish it.

He didn’t fulfill the latter pledge, but in January 2025 then President Biden commuted 37 federal death row prisoners’ sentences. Applying in part the more traditional Catholic viewpoint on state killing, however, he regrettably excepted some from his mercy. He didn’t spare the four people on military death row and three people on federal death row: Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue killer Robert Bowers, and Charleston Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal shooter Dylann Roof. These three were excepted from presidential clemency because the justice department is pursuing the death penalty for them, deeming them the worst of the worse. 

But Patrick Crusius’ case tells a different story.

Sentenced by a federal court in 2023 and a Texas district court in April 2025, Crusius received multiple consecutive life-without-parole sentences for a racially animated mass shooting that killed 23 and injured 22 at an El Paso Walmart in August 2019.

Crusius’s sentences exposed the falsehood that capital punishment is reserved for the worst of the worse. Its arbitrary application is one reason among many for Catholics to work to abolish state killing, and the Jubilee Year should motivate them to act.

Declared by our late shepherd on December 24, 2024, the Jubilee encourages believers to live the biblical injunction to “proclaim liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and let the oppressed go free.”

Redoubling their efforts to abolish state killing would be the most fitting way this Jubilee Year for believers to honor Francis’s memory and perpetuate his legacy. But to be most effective, they must embrace his “no exceptions” approach.

Working to abolish the death penalty and promoting restorative justice, the Catholic Mobilizing Network model demonstrates how believers should work toward abolition: through education, advocacy and prayer.

Exploring this issue, Catholics will learn that for every eight death row inmates executed, one is exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Catholics will also discover more than one-third of executions in 2022 were botched, thus manifesting state killing’s violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.” 

The more Catholics discover about capital punishment’s unfairness and barbarism, the more they’ll want to work to end it. They should lobby their state legislators to limit or abolish state killing and engage with the Catholic Mobilizing Network and the nation’s most prominent abolitionist group, Death Penalty Action.

Our faith must inform this work. Facing so much death can become dispiriting. To sustain ourselves over the long haul, we’ll need to pray for God’s grace, help, and mercy and find a community of believers who will reinforce our commitment to the cause.

Buoyed by this solidarity, we’ll advocate for more justice and mercy for offenders, healing for victims’ families, and forgiveness and reconciliation between victims and offenders. Fostering this kind of society, we’ll convince others that we can be safe and hold murderers accountable without stooping to the perpetrator’s level.

The author of Sisters: The Extraordinary Lives of Serena and Anna Marie Branson, Chris Byrd is available to speak to your group about capital punishment.

Image: Maria Oswalt / Unsplash