By Michael Miner
Prejean means to bend the river. The river is her church’s centuries of tolerance of capital punishment. “Rivers do not bend in one fell swoop,” she said the other day in a speech in Chicago. “It’s a long, long history, going back to Thomas Aquinas and before him even Augustine, who was saying evil people could be coerced with the sword. Probably we could trace it back to Constantine, where the church became aligned in some ways with empire and the force of the empire and the right of the state to use the sword for whatever purposes.”
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She sent him a letter. “I told him how great his encyclical was and all the good stuff in his encyclical. But I said, ‘Your Holiness, when you said that line, in cases of absolute necessity people can be executed by God’s grace…’ Harry Connick Sr. is the Catholic district attorney of New Orleans who goes for the death penalty every bloomin’ chance he gets. The BBC was doing a story on me, and they had a quote from him saying, ‘As the pope said, in cases of absolute necessity we can use the death penalty.’ So I was able to quote to the pope Harry Connick Sr. using his words for death.”
She said she told the pope, “The death penalty is a contradiction of the gospel of Jesus.”
After speaking, Prejean invited questions. In her opening remarks she’d observed that in recent years Illinois “has executed 12 people and had to free 11–an almost 50-50 ratio.”
If newspapers did this, there would probably be fewer death sentences and more convicts condemned on shaky evidence to life behind bars, out of sight and out of mind.
Civilians are comfortable weighing in on the conduct of other civilians, but in times when civilians and servicemen are separate castes, soldiers get a pass. We reflect, there but for the grace of God and Richard Nixon, who wisely abolished the draft, go I. We hang yellow ribbons, and we don’t judge.
