{"id":1007,"date":"2005-10-19T22:37:27","date_gmt":"2005-10-19T22:37:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/respect-life.html"},"modified":"2005-10-19T22:37:27","modified_gmt":"2005-10-19T22:37:27","slug":"respect-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/respect-life.html","title":{"rendered":"Respect Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Archbishop Chaput on the Death Penalty<\/a><\/p>\n

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Catholic teaching on the death penalty is best understood by viewing it through two lenses: what it is; and what it is not.
The Church\u2019s critique of capital punishment is not an evasion of justice. Victims and their survivors have a right to redress, and the state has a right to enforce that redress and impose grave punishment for grave crimes.<\/p>\n

It is not an absolute rejection of force by the state. The death penalty is not intrinsically evil. Both Scripture and long Christian tradition acknowledge the legitimacy of capital punishment under certain circumstances. The Church cannot repudiate that without repudiating her own identity.<\/p>\n

It is not an idolatry of individual rights \u2014 in this case, the rights of the murderer. Catholic social teaching rests on two equal pillars: the dignity of the individual person, and the common good. The right to life of the convicted murderer must be balanced against society\u2019s right to justice and security.<\/p>\n

Finally, it is not a false equation of related but unequal issues. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Archbishop Chaput on the Death Penalty Catholic teaching on the death penalty is best understood by viewing it through two lenses: what it is; and what it is not.The Church\u2019s critique of capital punishment is not an evasion of justice. Victims and their survivors have a right to redress, and the state has a right…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nRespect Life - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/respect-life.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Respect Life - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Archbishop Chaput on the Death Penalty Catholic teaching on the death penalty is best understood by viewing it through two lenses: what it is; and what it is not.The Church\u2019s critique of capital punishment is not an evasion of justice. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}