(LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Christoph Schönborn fondly remembered how he helped Pope Francis change the Catechism on the death penalty.
In an interview with the Austrian newspaper Die Presse regarding the pope’s death, Schönborn said, “I had several encounters with him (Francis) in the context of the death penalty.”
“It was about the Catechism,” the cardinal said. “It was about a wish, which also ultimately corresponded to the wish of Pope John Paul II, that the Catechism should speak a clear word against the death penalty.”
“At that time (of John Paul II), the resistance in the Church was still too great. Pope Francis also said a very clear word in his speech on the 25th anniversary of the publication of the Catechism about the development of doctrine, that the development of doctrine has continued.”
Schönborn was the editor of the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, published under the pontificate of John Paul II.
In 2018, Pope Francis changed the Catechism of the Catholic Church and called the death penalty “inadmissible.”
This change contradicts traditional Church teaching, which has always upheld the death penalty as a valid and just form of punishment in some instances.
Catholic professors Edward Feser and Joseph Bessette authored the 2017 book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, which lays out Catholic teaching on the matter.
READ: Allowing death penalty is Catholic doctrine and cannot be overturned: two Catholic profs
Feser, an assistant professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College, told LifeSiteNews at the time that the new teaching, “like many of Pope Francis’s doctrinal statements, is obscure.”
“On the one hand, the CDF letter announcing the change asserts that the new teaching ‘is not in contradiction’ with previous teaching. On the other hand, the pope is saying that the death penalty should never be used – which goes beyond John Paul II’s teaching that it should be ‘very rare’ – and Francis justifies this claim on doctrinal grounds, rather than the prudential grounds that John Paul appealed to,” he said.
“Moreover, Pope Francis claims that the use of capital punishment conflicts with ‘the inviolability and dignity of the person,’ which makes it sound like it is intrinsically contrary to natural law. So, the actual substance of the teaching seems to be that capital punishment is intrinsically wrong. If that is what the pope is saying, then he is contradicting scripture, tradition, and all previous popes, and is therefore committing a doctrinal error, which is possible when popes do not speak ex-cathedra (from the chair),” he added.
Church historian Roberto de Mattei argued that “the lawfulness of the death penalty is a truth de fide tenenda, defined by the ordinary and universal Magisterium of the Church, in a constant and unequivocal manner.”
“Whoever affirms that capital punishment is in itself an evil falls into heresy,” de Mattei added.
Moreover, Francis’ position on the development of doctrine that Schönborn mentioned in the interview has been rebuked by numerous Catholic scholars.
READ: Scholars raise concerns over Pope Francis remarks on how doctrine develops
Oxford professor Dr. Joseph Shaw suggested that one reason the Pope may have proposed a “development” of the teaching on capital punishment is that it “may seem the easiest topic to use in order to persuade an important group of conservative Catholics that the Church’s doctrine can be reversed.”
“Once they are persuaded of that, then they will not be able to resist any other doctrinal reversals,” he said.
