“The commandment “Thou shalt not kill” has absolute value and applies to both the innocent and the guilty”, he said on Sunday.
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In particular, the Holy Father appealed “to the consciences of government leaders” that they might join the “international consensus for the abolition of the death penalty” – and spoke directly to Catholic leaders, asking them, as a “courageous and exemplary act”, to not carry out any death sentences during the Holy Year of Mercy.
Pope Francis waves to the crowd from the window of the apostolic palace overlooking St. Peter’s square during his Sunday Angelus prayer on February 21, 2016 at the Vatican. The Jubilee Year of Mercy was launched by Francis on December 8, 2015 and will continue until November 20. Even criminals “maintain the inviolable right to life, the gift of God”.
The pontiff said that there is now “an opposition increasingly strong to the death penalty, even for the legitimate defense of society”, because according to him, modern means exist to “effectively punish a crime without definitively denying the one who committed the possibility of redemption”.
Speaking before Congress during his September U.S. tour, he said abolishing the death penalty “is the best, since every life is sacred, every human person is endowed with an inalienable dignity, and society can only benefit from the rehabilitation of those convicted of crimes”.
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian”, Pope Francis said.
For several centuries, the Catholic Church has been in favor of capital punishment in extreme cases, but the stand of the church started changing after John Paul became the Pope, NBC quoted Reuters.
Francis has repeatedly called for a global ban on capital punishment.
Following his elevation to the post of pope about three years back, Francis also visited some jails to personally examine the conditions prevailing in the prisons. The final day of his trip through the Central American country saw the Pope specifically address the immigration system between Mexico and the United States, petitioning for recognition of the problems migrants face.
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Trump also warned that “if and when” ISIS attacks the Vatican, which “as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy”, the Pope would have only “wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened”.
