Usually after praying the Sunday midday Angelus, Pope Francis makes appeals for prayer and dialogue regarding situations of conflict or natural disasters around the world. Today his list was lengthy, and one issue seemed to have just come to his mind.
With the various conflicts around the world, the Pope continues to beg for prayers for peace. Today he made special mention of Syria, as Assad has just fled the country hours ago.
After listing some of the warring countries, he said:
I appeal to governors and the international community, so that we may reach the feast of the Nativity with a ceasefire on all fronts of war.
Death Row
The Holy Father also added this appeal:
Today, it comes to my heart to ask you all to pray for the prisoners who are on death row in the United States. I believe there are thirteen or fifteen of them. Let us pray that their sentence be commuted, changed. Let us think of these brothers and sisters of ours and ask the Lord for the grace to save them from death.
In fact, there are many more than 13 or 15 people on death row in the United States. The number is actually well over 2,000. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 2,241 men and women are on state or federal death rows across the United States.
The Pope might have been thinking of the relatively small percentage who are on federal death row, which is 40.
This number has been a point of focus in recent weeks, as various Catholic and human rights groups are urging outgoing President Biden to commute their death sentences before he leaves office next month.
In the United States, just under half of the states already prohibit the death penalty (23 states), but others allow it (27 states), and it is allowed at the federal level.
One prominent group leading the call to Biden is the Catholic Mobilizing Network, which has a petition that can be signed here.
Invest in changing lives
Pope Francis has repeatedly spoken of the death penalty as “inadmissible” in today’s world.
Yes, as I have repeatedly emphasized, the death penalty is in no way a solution to the violence that can strike innocent people. Capital executions, far from bringing justice, fuel a sense of revenge that becomes a dangerous poison for the body of our civil societies. States should focus on allowing prisoners the opportunity to truly change their lives, rather than investing money and resources in their execution, as if they were human beings no longer worthy of living and to be disposed of.
In his novel The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky succinctly encapsulates the logical and moral unsustainability of the death penalty, speaking of a man condemned to death: “It is a violation of the human soul, nothing more! It is written: ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ and yet, because he has killed, others kill him. No, it is something that should not exist.”
