c. 2005 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops on Monday (March 21) launched a nationwide campaign against the death penalty, citing new evidence that support for capital punishment is slipping among Catholic faithful.

The new campaign, released during Holy Week when Christians recall Jesus’ state-ordered execution, comes in the wake of two recent Supreme Court decisions that outlawed executions for juveniles and the mentally retarded.

“I pray I will see the day when we have given up the illusion that we can teach that killing is wrong by killing people,” said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington.

Although the church has long opposed capital punishment, the new campaign is a sign that Catholic leaders think they have gained the moral upper hand, and public opinion is fluid enough to render the death penalty obsolete, if not extinct.

A new Zogby poll of 1,785 Catholics commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops found that support for capital punishment has slipped from a high of 68 percent in 2001 to 48 percent in the recent poll. Forty-seven percent supported the death penalty.

The poll found that minds can be changed _ nearly one-third (29 percent) of Catholics who oppose the death penalty said they had once supported it but have since had a change of heart.

Opposition was strongest among 18-28-year-olds, people who attended Catholic schools, and worshippers who attend weekly Mass. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

One of those Catholics who has changed his mind on capital punishment is McCarrick, who grew up in a family of New York City police officers and once favored the death penalty. He said he long ago changed his mind.

Pollster John Zogby said the results mirror a larger “seismic shift” in public opinion against the death penalty, fueled by the cases of death row inmates who were freed through advanced DNA testing, and overall unease with the soundness of the legal system.

Zogby said Catholics are not alone in their reassesement.

“What’s changed is the intensity (of opinion), which is now in favor of the opposition,” he said.

Bud Welch, who lost his daughter Julie in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, also changed his mind on the death penalty. He said the execution of convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh in 2001 brought him little peace.

“When we killed Tim McVeigh, it didn’t bring this little girl back,” he said, holding up a photo of his daughter. “It only took another life.”

Church teaching on the death penalty does not carry the same ironclad prohibitions as abortion, birth control or even homosexuality. Although the church allows capital punishment in limited cases, McCarrick said it is “very very difficult” to justify its use.

“In principle, the state does have that right, but it’s the use of that right” that the church objects to, McCarrick said.

McCarrick, the church’s unofficial liaison to lawmakers in Washington, said the church would seek to persuade politicians, including President Bush, that the death penalty is no longer warranted.

He and other church officials noted the confusion generated in last year’s presidential election when some bishops chided Sen. John Kerry for his support of abortion rights but did not apply equal criticism to Bush’s support of the death penalty.

John Carr, the bishops’ director of social policy, said the death penalty needs to become ingrained as part of the church’s consistent teaching of “life issues.”

“One of the moral values people are going to be talking about is respect for life _ respect for all life, innocent life, even life on death row,” he said.

MO/JL END ECKSTROM