As stories of executions hit the news in recent weeks, I thought of St. Thomas More, who went to the scaffold more joyfully than most and even kissed his executioner.
“I forgive you right readily,” Robert Bolt’s More tells the executioner in the film version of Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, handing the axeman a coin. “Be not afraid of your office; you send me to God.”
The coin was tradition in that era – executioners asked for forgiveness, and those executed gave the executioner a coin to ensure the act was swift.
Christa Pike’s execution on Sep. 30 wasn’t swift, or even effective. She survived a botched lethal injection at a Nashville prison. As of this writing, her lawyer says she is awake and walking.
(This even makes a person look nervously at More’s actual quotes recorded at his execution: “Strike not awry.”)
It’s not that there’s not much comparison of More and Pike.
Now 50, Pike was 18 when she and her boyfriend tortured and killed a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in 1995.
That doesn’t mean the U.S. state of Tennessee did anything close to right by her.
While Pike was in hospital and her lawyers were filing motions to make sure the state doesn’t have another go at her, the Pentagon announced plans to livestream the Dec. 3 execution of former U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, who likes to be called Secretary of War, said Hasan’s execution would be livestreamed for the public, as “people need to understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things.”
Saturday was World Day Against the Death Penalty. Pope Leo XIV marked the day on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.
“The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” he wrote.
“The common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment,” the pontiff wrote.
“[E]ffective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens while at the same time do not completely deprive those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption,” Leo also wrote, quoting the revised 2018 Catechism.
Leo’s X remark came the day after Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin answered a direct question about the events as the cardinal left a conference in Rome.
“It is truly incomprehensible that anyone would want to use this system today,” Parolin told journalists, referring to the proposed livestreaming go the execution of Hasan. “It is certainly not acceptable to make death into a spectacle.”
Parolin added the Church “is totally opposed to the death penalty.”
Conservative Catholics often complain that the Catholic Church always taught that the state may execute, so the 2018 change contradicts that. The Papal States even carried out executions until the year it was conquered by the Kingdom of Italy.
The critics often ignore other aspects of opposition, especially the effect it has on executioners.
Even in More’s time, those who did the killing were often outcasts in society. There was a reason they asked for forgiveness.
Methods were even designed to protect the executioner’s conscience: One rifle in a firing squad traditionally carries a blank, so no soldier knows whether his shot killed.
The “long drop” in hanging was also created to help ease the psychological effects that killing by often choking them to death had on the executioners.
These effects also hit members of the military, whose actions kill others, sometimes even civilians, as “collateral damage.”
Yet in the 21st century, many people are celebrating these deaths – even calling them “good” as opposed to “necessary evil.”
Many Conservative Catholics insist they are supporting justice and the rule of law.
It is not just the conservatives; death is being accepted by liberal Catholics, too.
For half a century, organizations such as Catholics for Choice have promoted abortion. In the 21st century, the emphasis has turned to Assisted Suicide.
Many of the countries promoting the physician-assisted suicide of patients are traditionally Catholic, like Belgium and Luxembourg.
Luxembourg’s Grand Duke Henri, a Catholic, even refused in 2008 to sign the euthanasia law on grounds of conscience, so parliament amended the constitution to remove the requirement that laws must meet his approval.
In other countries – including the United States – Catholic officials support the measure, including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul. (To be fair, conservative Catholic governors such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott allow the death penalty.)
Those Progressive Catholics supporting abortion and assisted suicide say they are supporting freedom and giving mercy to those suffering from pain.
In A Man for All Seasons, More gives both forgiveness and the coin freely, and the executioner still does the deed. Forgiveness did not stop him; the coin did not oblige him.
Catholics today stand on their own scaffold, not as the condemned, but as the one with the axe.
On the right, it is the death chamber and the counting of bodies found around the battlefield (and when wars happen under Democratic presidents, liberal Catholics tend to be much more tolerant of collateral damage).
On the left, it is “helping people to die” and allowing the abortions no one has to see (and there are supporters of both on the libertarian right, and conservatives are happy to do business with them).
There are signs people around the world are nervous over this endorsement of death: Assisted suicide lost in England, and the Catholic vice president of the U.S. said – when asked about the livestreamed execution – “I’m not going to be watching it.”
Catholics are wanting absolution and payment: Their prize may be political power or just a culture-war win.
The Church still offers what More offered his executioner: Forgiveness, freely given.
The harder question is the one the executioner faced. Having been forgiven, do we still want the coin?
Follow Charles Collins on X: @CharlesinRome
