Capital Punishment and Roman Catholic Moral Tradition, Second Edition
by E. Christian Brugger

This second edition of E. Christian Brugger’s classic work Capital Punishment and Roman Catholic Moral Tradition traces the doctrinal path the Church has taken over the centuries to its present position as the world’s largest and most outspoken opponent of capital punishment.

Brugger argues that by beginning a conversation on the death penalty, the pontificate of John Paul II marked a watershed in Catholic doctrine. That conversation is not over the question of practical support for the death penalty; on that level, the Catholic Church is abolitionist. Rather, the conversation concerns the implications of the “legitimate defense” paradigm for Catholic teaching. Brugger suggests that John Paul personally doubted the per se legitimacy of capital punishment, and so set up an analysis in which the justification for retributive killing drops out. As the Successor of Peter, he knew that to teach that capital punishment as intentional killing was intrinsically evil was beyond what the Church ever taught. Instead, John Paul II laid down a theoretical foundation in which the assessment of an act of capital punishment was essentially that of an act of private self-defense writ large for the community.

However, if the death penalty is and can only be rightly assessed as a form of self-defense, what are the implications for the Church’s traditional retribution-based model of lethal punishment? How does this square with what the Church has historically taught? Brugger believes that the implications of Pope John Paul II’s novel move have yet to be seriously analyzed.

New to this edition is Brugger’s examination of Pope Benedict XVI’s contribution to Catholic thinking on the death penalty. He argues that Benedict maintained the doctrinal status quo of his predecessor’s teaching on capital punishment as self-defense, with detectable points of reluctance to draw attention to non-traditional implications of that teaching.

E. Christian Brugger is the J. Francis Cardinal Stafford Professor of Moral Theology at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary.

Capital Punishment and Roman Catholic Moral Tradition, Second Edition 
E. Christian Brugger
Publication Date: September 25, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-268-02241-9 / Paperback $29.00 / 320 pages
ISBN: 978-0-268-07597-2 / Adobe PDF e-book Perpetual Ownership $29.00 / 30-day Ownership $7.00
To order: http://undpress.nd.edu/books/P03149?keywords=Capital+Punishment#description