Theologian shares how it’s ‘heresy’ to call death penalty ‘intrinsically evil’
A Dominican priest shared Dr. Alan Fimister’s statement that the death penalty is not evil in itself and that judging its necessity in modern society falls to the laity, not Church leaders.
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Thu Oct 15, 2026 - 1:56 pm EDT
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(LifeSiteNews) — Dominican priest and theologian Father Thomas Crean, O.P., shared on X a post by Dr. Alan Fimister asserting that the claim that the death penalty is malum in se (intrinsically evil) constitutes heresy.
The post, which Crean amplified on Wednesday, outlines a precise distinction between the roles of the Magisterium and the laity regarding capital punishment.
“The claim that the death penalty is malum in se (intrinsically evil) is a heresy,” Fimister affirmed. “The specification of the conditions under which the death penalty can be legitimately employed falls within the competence of the magisterium.”
“The judgement of whether those conditions are fulfilled is reserved by divine law to the laity,” he continued.
“When members of the hierarchy attempt to express views in an official capacity on whether those conditions are fulfilled their remarks are either obiter dicta (remarks made in passing, i.e. non-binding opinion) or they act ultra vires (beyond one’s authority),” the theologian clarified.
These statements contribute to ongoing efforts by orthodox theologians and clergy to provide clarity to the Church’s age-old teaching on this moral question in the wake of Pope Francis’ ambiguous 2018 revision of paragraph 2267 of The Catechism of the Catholic Church.
The revised text states that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” and that the Church “works with determination for its abolition worldwide,” replacing earlier language that affirmed that “the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty.”
The very same day that this change was announced, LifeSiteNews published an opinion article by Fimister in which he described the new text as “distressingly ambiguous.” He wrote that “the legitimacy of the death penalty in principle is the teaching of scripture, the unanimous doctrine of the fathers and the teaching of all of Pope Francis’s predecessors” and that while the new text “need not be read” as denying that principle, it “will certainly tend to create an impression of rupture.”
He further said that any judgment that present-day detention systems render the death penalty unnecessary is a prudential one properly reserved to the laity: “It is the task of the magisterium to lay out the principles of faith and morals and the task of the laity to conform the civil order to those principles and so to judge their application in various concrete circumstances.”
Echoing his immediate predecessor, Pope Leo XIV has utilized this new language in his own statements on this topic including in a social media post last Saturday stating the “death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”
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Additionally, in an April 24 video address to a DePaul University event marking the 15th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois, the American pope declared that “the dignity of the person is not lost even after very serious crimes are committed” and repeated that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”
He has also proposed that support for the death penalty means one is “not really pro-life” which can erroneously suggest that like abortion, capital punishment is also intrinsically evil.
According to multiple scholars, these claims contradict nearly two millennia of Catholic teaching. They cite multiple demonstrations from Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition to affirm their case that the death penalty is not intrinsically immoral.
These include Genesis 9:6 which states: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image.”
Furthermore, St. Paul affirms in Romans 13 that the state “does not bear the sword in vain” but is “the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.”
With regards to affirmations from Sacred Tradition, Pope Leo X, in the 1520 bull Exsurge Domine condemning errors of Martin Luther, rejected the claim that capital punishment is “against the will of the Spirit.”
The Catechism of the Council of Trent likewise upheld its legitimacy. Pope Pius XII explicitly taught that a murderer “has deprived himself of the right to live,” so that the state does no wrong in executing him.
And though urging great restraint, Pope St. John Paul II acknowledged that the death penalty could be legitimate in rare cases necessary to protect society.
Amid a discussion of Pope Leo’s Saturday statement, Catholic philosopher Edward Feser – who has argued for the infallibility of the traditional teaching – proposed a solution to this confusion, tweeting that if the pope and the Vatican “would just clearly and explicitly reaffirm ‘The death penalty is not intrinsically wrong…’ before going on to criticize its use in practice however harshly they like, it would instantly resolve this problem… There is no rational basis for refraining from doing this.”
Fr. Crean, a friar of the English Province of the Order of Preachers resident at St. Dominic’s Priory in London, holds degrees from Oxford University, the Institut Saint-Thomas d’Aquin in Toulouse, and a doctorate in sacred theology from the International Theological Institute in Austria. He was among the first signatories of the 2017 Filial Correction concerning Amoris laetitia and is the co-author, with Fimister, of Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy (2020). His other works include God is No Delusion and a commentary on St. Luke’s Gospel.
Fimister, a native of Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and former assistant professor of theology at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver (later at Holy Apostles College and Seminary), holds degrees from Oxford University and the International Theological Institute, as well as a Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen on Thomistic political theory. He is director of the Dialogos Institute and author of Robert Schuman: Neo-Scholastic Humanism and the Reunification of Europe (2008) and The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man (2023).
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- Alan Fimister
- Capital Punishment
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- Catholic Church
- Catholic Teaching
- Death Penalty
- death penalty revision
- Fr. Thomas Crean
- Pope Francis
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