Pope Leo XIV describes capital punishment as an ‘assault on the inviolability and dignity of the particular person’ in publish on X.
Printed On 10 Oct 2026
Pope Leo XIV has declared that the dying penalty is “inadmissible” whereas his house nation, the USA, pronounces plans to livestream an execution by firing squad.
Marking World Day In opposition to the Dying Penalty on Saturday, the pope reiterated the Catholic Church’s educating on capital punishment, writing on X that it was “inadmissible as a result of it’s an assault on the inviolability and dignity of the particular person”.
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“The widespread good will be safeguarded and the necessities of justice will be met with out recourse to capital punishment,” his post mentioned.
“Efficient programs of detention have been developed that defend residents whereas on the identical time don’t utterly deprive those that are responsible of the potential for redemption,” added the chief of the Catholic Church.
The American Pope’s feedback come days after US Secretary of Protection Pete Hegseth mentioned on Thursday that the firing squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan on December 3 will likely be livestreamed.
Hasan was convicted of killing 13 folks and wounding 32 others in a taking pictures on the Fort Hood navy base in 2009.
Pope Leo didn’t particularly discuss with the deliberate execution, or final month’s botched execution try on Christa Pike, who survived two doses of the deadly injection in Tennessee.
However his publish got here hours after his prime deputy, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, advised Vatican Information that the plan to livestream Hasan’s execution was “unacceptable”.
It was Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, in 2018 who first amended official Catholic educating to declare capital punishment “inadmissible” in all circumstances.
Beforehand, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the official compendium of church educating, mentioned the church didn’t exclude recourse to capital punishment “if that is the one doable manner of successfully defending human lives in opposition to the unjust aggressor.”
The deliberate livestream of Hasan’s execution has sparked outrage throughout the US political divide. Republican consultant Austin Scott mentioned he supported executing Hassan however that “livestreaming executions is what Jihadists do. America is best than that.”
Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat on the Senate Armed Providers Committee, mentioned Hasan ought to “face justice”, however that public executions are “the form of factor that Iran and the Taliban do. Is that this who we need to be related to?”
On Thursday, a Pentagon official confirmed the plans, however on Friday, Vice President JD Vance, who’s a practising Catholic, expressed doubt on whether or not the livestream can be going forward, telling reporters that whether it is, “I’m not going to be watching it.”
