c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ By most accounts, Missouri’s Supreme Court justices had their eyes peeled on Pope John Paul II when they postponed an execution originally scheduled for Jan. 27 _ during the pope’s visit to St. Louis. The announcement in November again raised attention to what has become a papal crusade to extinguish the death penalty.

The pontiff has inserted himself in numerous capital cases around the world, most recently in the Philippines, where President Joseph Estrada, a self-described loyal Catholic, has rebuffed his appeals to block the execution of a convicted rapist.

John Paul and his emissaries are increasingly colliding with secular authorities that administer the ultimate penalty. Less visibly, though inescapably, they are also jostling with a force from within _ the Roman Catholic Church’s own long entanglement with the institution of capital punishment.

As they press more firmly against the death penalty, Catholic leaders frequently find themselves haunted by this ecclesiastical past.

For example, Estrada answered the Vatican and Filipino bishops by declaring that Catholic teaching justifies the execution of”evil”men, such as Leo Echegaray, 38, a house painter who was due to die by lethal injection on Jan. 4.

The Filipino Supreme Court stepped in with a temporary restraining order, delaying what might yet become the first use of capital punishment in the largely Roman Catholic country since 1976. Echegaray was found guilty of raping his daughter, several times, when she was 10.

As pro-death penalty Catholics often do, Estrada quoted chapter and verse from the teachings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century Italian philosopher and theologian.”It may be good to kill a man who has sinned even as it is to kill a beast,”the president said, quoting Aquinas.

Estrada, if he were looking to really provoke, might have lifted the example of pontiffs in the far-off past who ordered executions of heretics and even, in one infamous round, thousands of thieves in papal-held territories.

Or he might have noted that as recently as 1969, the Vatican’s own legal code included a provision for capital punishment, as James G. Megivern relates in his 1997 book,”The Death Penalty: An Historical and Theological Survey”(Paulist Press).

At the time, Pope Paul VI quietly retired the statute that made death the punishment for anyone who tried to assassinate a pope in Vatican City.

Megivern, who teaches history and religious studies at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, said the shift in official Catholic thought on this subject has been astounding though gradual.”What we’ve seen is a genuine conversion, on the part of the hierarchy,”Megivern said in an interview.”But I think the Catholic laity is still puzzled by the change.”He noted that in opinion polls, American Catholics mirror the prevailing sentiment in favor of capital punishment in the United States.

One lay person who has followed the pope into battle against the death penalty is Charles E. Rice, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind. A former defender of capital punishment, Rice now argues publicly against the practice. He says John Paul swayed him.”He’s not just some guy mouthing off,”said Rice, a papal loyalist.”He’s the vicar of Christ. He’s the authentic interpreter of the natural law, the law of God.” Rice and others point out that the church still recognizes the state’s right, in theory, to impose the death penalty.

But quoting the pope’s 1995 encyclical letter,”The Gospel of Life,”he said authorities should exercise this right only in”cases of absolute necessity,”in other words, to protect the populace from a particular aggressor.

And here’s the rub: modern society, according to the pope, has other ways of preventing a convicted killer from killing again. It has the advantage of effective incarceration. That means cases of absolute necessity _ when capital punishment is morally justified _ are”very rare, if not practically nonexistent,”in the pope’s words.

Allowing for a certain theoretical consistency, Megivern, a Catholic layman, is still more impressed by the church’s departure from what he considers a bloody past.

In his analysis, church officials are actually finding their way back to the teaching of the first Christians. These early faithful, while not challenging the Roman Empire’s right to execute criminals, typically forbade followers of Jesus from shedding blood, including that of the guilty.

As Megivern shows in his book, various historians have presented a common narrative of subsequent events.

The drift from a position of absolute nonviolence began in the fourth century, as Christianity and the Roman Empire converged in an alliance of cross and sword.

To a heavy degree, the question of capital punishment was settled in the Middle Ages with the question of how to punish heretics. By the 13th century _ when Aquinas wrote _ theological speculation about the immorality of capital punishment was nearly unthinkable. The few who speculated along these lines became candidates themselves for that same fate.

The union of church and gallows carried over into the Renaissance era, despite reforms in other areas of ecclesiastical life. It also went beyond the burning of heretics. As a temporal power, the Vatican faced the vexingly mundane question of how to fight crime.

The man dubbed”the Iron Pope”rose to power in 1585 with a promise to crack down on banditry, which had coagulated into bloody brigades around Rome.

In his first campaign, Pope Sixtus V executed over 7,000 brigands.

That season, according to one evocative comparison related by Megivern, the severed heads of bandits mounted on hills in the countryside outnumbered melons in the marketplace.

Four centuries later, the church appears to be grappling with the ghosts of its still-vivid past. On several occasions recently, John Paul has voiced contrition for violence committed or condoned by the church, in what were, historians note, raucously violent times, generally.

The church has also set about the subtler task of recasting the traditional death-penalty doctrine to which many Catholics, such as the Filipino president, cling.

Protestant reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin were equally zealous in their defense of death as a morally permissible punishment, Megivern points out. Luther wrote,”If a thief will not quit his stealing, let him be hanged on the public gallows.” Theology aside, history has influenced the church. Analysts recall the revulsion over World War II atrocities and the advent, more recently, of legal abortion and euthanasia. What the pope has denounced as a”culture of death”has moved churchmen, notably the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, to articulate a”consistent ethic of life.” Many observers expect the pope to renew his appeal for abolition of the death penalty while in St. Louis, Jan. 26-27. Darrell J. Mease, 42, who was convicted of murdering a drug partner and his partner’s wife and grandson, will live while the pope is in the city _ but not for long after, say authorities. The state’s high court has set his new execution date for Feb. 10.

DEA END BOLE