De capitis

Fr dear Fr: What then is your considered parish position and the generic church position in your religion to the issues of capital punishment now that another inmate on death row has been pardoned today?

Aha “De capitis” was the expression that the Roman pagan magistrates used to sentence a poor Christian to the execution chambers, though many of those Christians did not even get this accord of mercy when the magistrate would say - “Ad bestias” - to be thrown to the lions, so no mercy there. Fr B in his Good Friday Sermon on the subject of the Passion mentioned that the acceptance of Jesus of the intervention of Pontius Pilate was itself an implicit acceptance of the issue of capital punishment, in sum that there will be rare moments when the state qua state has the power to take away the life of a criminal when that criminal is inveterate and society needs to be protected from him or even her. A rare occasion indeed. Rarer still too since the 1992 Catholic Catechism was formulated by the bishops and cardinals reflecting upon 2,000 years of theology around parish-based catechesis, since when the issue came up for discussion and debate, on the one hand, the bishops did not wish to deny the power of the state to take away an inveterate criminal life, but on the other hand did not wish to hand over too much power to the state such that this would be a frequent or habitual disposition as per Saudi Arabia and the troubling conviction of young women on the word of the testimony of two males - no due process, no fair trials. Also when the issue came up for review again after 1992, when the final version in the official Latin text was being translated and transposed in 1997 into the firmer formulae and more eternal passages of the Latin Textus Receptus, and then again in 2022 with the digital and direct intervention of the Magister in Doctrina, Pope Francesco, the bishops surviving from the original commission of enquiry decided to add another shaving of prudence to the official formula such that de facto in praxi it would be difficult to justify capital punishment that was habitual and frequent and state capricious. Take for instance the trial of Julian Assange, wherein no defences and no procedural let offs are allowed to stand against a violent ponderous statelet getting smaller and smaller in its mindset over yonder near Bermuda. So there we are, we shall hear the phrase “De capitis” a little while longer yet. Two poles of the debate that will oscillate a little further yet, on the one hand the right of the state to curtail the activities and memories of the serial killers in society for instance who are a serious threat to women, on the other hand the right of the inmates to appeal against a sentence on death row, Justin Casey, just in case a criminal is wrongly convicted and wrongly processed out of the problem which is recognised in British Law as “malicious prosecution” and “wrongful detention and arrest”, as per those sad cases of lynchings by lynch mobs of young teenage black boys in that terrible time sadly not too long ago when America was beset by terrifying racism of a societal and endemic and institutional kind. Too many boys went to their deaths despairing of the justice system in those unhappy times, despairing of the help too of their white chaplains, much in the manner of single white male inmates in a woke nazi or rose fascist society of a future highly justiciated California. California, yes.