On the Right - Execution Days Ahead?(opinions, including that of Cardinal Avery Dulles, on capital punishment)(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, MARCH 23

A new play opens next week in New York on Nuremberg justice. The four defendants (including star Maximilian Schell) are judges who collaborated in the Nazi enterprise. The prosecutor meets privately with the chief defendant, just before the curtain closes, and says, "I'll make you a wager." The defendant, having just been sentenced to life in prison, isn't in the mood for wagers, so he just grunts, whereupon the prosecutor says, "I bet you people are out on the streets in five years." A doom-sounding voice comes in as the curtain closes, divulging that that is exactly what happened to those defendants. In the big trial, 1945-1946, only Rudolph Hess actually spent his whole life in prison; most who get lifetime sentences (there are exceptions: Sirhan Sirhan's eleventh appeal has just been denied) are let out after a while, but whenever this happens, there is someone there to complain. Their voices are heard on Broadway, in 2001.

That is a situation that strengthens the hand of those who believe in capital punishment, one strength of which act is precisely the finality of the judgment. But abolitionists gain strength every day, and agitation on the subject crops up in the media and in the mail weekly. First Things, the lively monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, enters the fray in the current issue with an essay by the august Avery Dulles. He is the son of John Foster Dulles, who, to the dismay of his Presbyterian parents, entered the Catholic priesthood as a young man and, last month, was made a cardinal. In between, he developed his enormous skills as a theologian, and now he writes, "Catholicism & Capital Punishment."

It goes almost without saying that Cardinal Dulles opposes capital punishment, but in his learned essay on the subject he leads ambivalent Catholic opinion less successfully than he no doubt hoped. The background is this: American Catholic bishops, echoing the pronounced views of Pope John Paul II, have opined against capital punishment, but with less than the two-thirds vote required to make for an "official" episcopal statement.

What Dulles does is examine the four grounds traditionally cited in defense of capital punishment. Rehabilitation was one of these, by which was meant that, as ...