The death penalty is certainly a controversial subject. And with any controversial subject, we have a tendency to talk past one another. We speak different languages. We have different priorities.
Those who support the death penalty speak about safety, the community, justice, and making things right for victims. Those who oppose it speak about mercy, rehabilitation, and the protection of life, often with the conviction that we have advanced beyond this kind of punishment.
Both sides appeal to real goods: concepts that have legitimate applications, things we all believe in to some degree. But shouting those ideas at one another rarely achieves anything.
I always hope the Church can bring peace and clarity to these situations, and perhaps move the two sides a little closer together. But we often face the same challenge. We speak another language, using the categories of theology. We speak about the image of God. We speak of justice, but perhaps mean something different from what the world means. We speak of mercy, but have in mind the mercy of God more than the mercy of man.
In my own life, I have undergone a conversion on the death penalty. So I would like to offer another way of approaching this issue, in a slightly different language, in the hope that it might change some hearts.
Recently, I watched a documentary about Christa Pike, who is scheduled to be executed in Tennessee on September 30, 2026. If her execution proceeds, she will be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two hundred years.
The documentary covered her crimes, and they were horrifying. There was something deeply disturbing in what she did and what she participated in. That is one of the challenges in this debate. One side wants to hammer those points: how horrifying the crime was, how unimaginable it is that anyone could willingly choose to do such a thing.
They paint a picture of her as a monster. Completely evil. Effectively irredeemable. One person interviewed even said, “It is impossible for Christa to change.”
The other side wanted to examine her early life: how she was raised, her troubled home, the abuse she suffered as a child. They wanted to look at images of her holding stuffed animals. They wanted to paint a picture of an otherwise innocent girl, broken by society. Perhaps, in this telling, it was not Christa’s fault that she made this choice. She was simply the inevitable consequence of the life she had been given.
I think both sides are making the same fundamental mistake. They are focusing on Christa herself. One sees her as evil and unfixable. The other sees her as innocent, wounded by a cruel world. But from a Catholic perspective, I think that misses the question before us.
It isn’t about her. It is about us.
In my own conversion on the death penalty, it was not reflection on people who commit heinous crimes that changed my mind. It was not even reflection on the many instances of people who were probably innocent and yet put to death. What caused my conversion was a greater awareness of my own sins and my contribution to the brokenness of this world.
I am a sinner. I have made many bad choices, and my sins have hurt others. My sins have caused scandal in the truest sense: they have encouraged others to sin. I am sure there have been days when my sins pushed someone over the edge—someone barely holding on to virtue and good choices—and led that person to sin.
With each passing year, I become more aware of how much I contribute to sin and death in this world, and to their seeming reign. I am part of the reason this world is broken. I make it worse through my own choices, by rejecting the graces God gives me. And as much as I strive to receive those graces, to do better, and to live the life Christ has called me to, I still sin.
Because I contribute to the brokenness of this world, I also contribute, in a deep and mysterious but very real way, to all the sins in this world. I am in solidarity with other sinners, in a certain sense.
I know I have contributed. I have not lived the perfect life of Christ, who can say that he never contributed to sin, that he never made this world worse. And so I cannot bear to see someone put to death. I know that, even in the smallest of ways, I have contributed to their sin and brokenness—perhaps insignificantly in any particular case, but certainly in many cases still to come.
I want to see them live. I want them to receive the same mercy I want from others.
I have confidence in the mercy of God. I receive his forgiveness whenever I seek the sacrament of penance. I know I have his love and forgiveness. But like any human being, I also want the forgiveness of others. I want to know they love me. I want them to show mercy, and I want to show it in return. So I desire that same mercy for others.
This does not mean we cannot legitimately punish people. The state has an obligation to protect its citizens and allow us to live in legitimate freedom. It has an obligation to punish certain people, to dissuade them from choices that harm our communities. It must sometimes keep people separated from society, both for their own safety and formation and for ours. These things are necessary. Done correctly, they can achieve great goods.
So I support punishment. I support imprisonment as a necessary reality in a broken world. But whenever possible, I think that is where we should stop. We should err on the side of mercy: showing compassion, trying to understand, and seeking the complete conversion of those who do even the most horrible things.
We must recognize that every one of us, through our own sins, has contributed to this brokenness. In ways small or large, we are all at fault. So we must favor life—the same life we would want, the same life we do want, despite our many failings.
In the documentary, I saw Christa Pike’s sentencing. One of the final things the judge said to her was, “May God have mercy upon you.”
Yes. May God have mercy upon you, Christa Pike.
May he have mercy upon the judge who gave you this sentence and did not show you mercy.
May he have mercy upon the state of Tennessee.
May he have mercy upon the family and friends of your victim.
May he have mercy upon all of us.
Because we cannot kill enough people to attain peace or virtue. It is only in the mercy of God that we will find what we most deeply desire.