Pope Francis on Capital Punishment

There are some people who argue that having the death penalty is a Catholic doctrine and cannot be overturned.  See the weblink here.  The teachings of the Church have always advocated and upheld the value of human life and human dignity.  This moral teaching has not changed for over 2000 years. This moral teaching is still being taught. What has changed and can change is "tradition." Traditionally, it has been taught that the State has the divine authority to safeguard public safety even if it means to pass capital punishment. However, that trend is changing in today's society. According to Cardinal Dulles (the bold is mine):

 The respected Italian Franciscan Gino Concetti, writing in L'Osservatore Romano in 1977, made the following powerful statement:

In light of the word of God, and thus of faith, life all human life is sacred and untouchable. No matter how heinous the crimes . . . [the criminal] does not lose his fundamental right to life, for it is primordial, inviolable, and inalienable, and thus comes under the power of no one whatsoever.

If this right and its attributes are so ab solute, it is because of the image which, at creation, God impressed on human nature itself. No force, no violence, no passion can erase or destroy it. By virtue of this divine image, man is a person endowed with dignity and rights.

To warrant this radical revision one might almost say reversal of the Catholic tradition, Father Concetti and others explain that the Church from biblical times until our own day has failed to perceive the true significance of the image of God in man, which implies that even the terrestrial life of each individual person is sacred and inviolable. In past centuries, it is alleged, Jews and Christians failed to think through the consequences of this revealed doctrine. They were caught up in a barbaric culture of violence and in an absolutist theory of political power, both handed down from the ancient world. But in our day, a new recognition of the dignity and inalienable rights of the human person has dawned. Those who recognize the signs of the times will move beyond the outmoded doctrines that the State has a divinely delegated power to kill and that criminals forfeit their fundamental human rights. The teaching on capital punishment must today undergo a dramatic development corresponding to these new insights.

As a result, there has been a change to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  According to the Catholic Education Resource Center:

In a statement published Thursday morning, the Vatican announced an emendation to the section of the Catholic Catechism that deals with the death penalty, which will now read:

Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good. Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.”

Quoting a 2017 speech given by Pope Francis during a pontifical council, the document continues: “Consequently, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,’ and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”

In a letter released Thursday, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, the Vatican’s prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, characterized the change as an “authentic development of doctrine” in keeping with prior church teaching. Earlier, Ladaria wrote, more ambiguous approaches to the death penalty could be rationalized by the responsibility of governments to defend people against offenders. Ladaria confirmed in his letter that Pope Francis had specifically requested the changes.

This is not the first time that the catechism on the death penalty was changed.  According to that same article:

That said, the catechism itself is relatively recent, dating back to 1992 under John Paul II as part of a wider program to codify and clarify church teaching after the Second Vatican Council of 1962-’65. The 1992 version of the catechism noted that governments had the right to apply the death penalty under specific circumstances, but only when “bloodless means” are not “sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor” or “to protect public order.”

In 1997, an emendation to the catechism was published under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who would later become Pope Benedict XVI), clarifying that circumstances under which the death penalty might be acceptable were so rare, they were potentially nonexistent.

The final 1997 text states that the church traditionally “does not exclude recourse to the death penalty,” but with the caveat that it acknowledges the death penalty as legitimate only “if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.” However, the catechism goes on to say that in today’s society, “the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”

The language of the latest update, therefore, builds on the 1997 document, citing, in part, the universal development of adequate prison systems as proof that the death penalty is no longer necessary in rare cases to ensure public safety.