The Church teaches the death penalty is inadmissable in all cases
The Missouri Catholic Conference and Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty are among those asking Gov. Mike Parson to commute the death sentence of Christopher Collings to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Collings is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 3, at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre. He was convicted of raping and killing 9-year-old Rowan Ford in 2007 in Stella, a small village near Joplin in southwest Missouri.
“We do not seek to minimize the tragedy of Rowan Ford’s death. Her loss is felt deeply, and our hearts go out to her family and loved ones,” MADP wrote in an online petition for clemency. “However, executing Chris Collings will not bring her back. It will not bring the healing or justice that society hopes to achieve. Instead, it will perpetuate a broken system that devalues human life and fails to recognize the possibility of redemption.”
The Church teaches that capital punishment is inadmissible in all cases because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.
The Missouri Catholic Conference, the public policy arm of the Missouri bishops, is encouraging the faithful to contact Gov. Parson directly by calling (573) 751-3222 or emailing him through his office contact form at governor.mo.gov/contact-us/mo-governor.
Collings’ would be the fourth execution in Missouri this year. The state put to death Brian Dorsey in April, David Hosier in June and Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams in September.
Missouri is one of eight states to carry out executions this year, alongside Texas, Oklahoma, Utah, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina. If a December execution in Indiana moves forward as planned, it will become the ninth state to use capital punishment in 2024.
Call to commute federal death sentences
Catholic Mobilizing Network, a national organization that works to end the death penalty, is urging President Joe Biden to commute the sentences of all 40 men currently on federal death row before he leaves office in January.
Catholics are preparing for the year of “Pilgrims of Hope: Jubilee 2025,” a time when Pope Francis has called for “forgiveness, reconciliation and an end to every form of the death penalty,” Catholic Mobilizing Network executive director Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy said in a statement.
“President Biden was the first president to campaign on abolishing the federal death penalty. Given that his lame-duck period converges with the beginning of Jubilee 2025, it is fitting that he should act on his faith and do what is squarely within his constitutional authority to do,” Vaillancourt Murphy said. “His action could mark the beginning of the end of capital punishment in the United States.”
After 17 years with no federal executions, 13 federal death row prisoners were put to death by lethal injection in the final six months of President Donald Trump’s first term. After President Biden took office, Attorney General Merrick Garland in July 2021 issued a moratorium on federal executions while the Department of Justice reviewed its policies and procedures.
Although no federal executions have taken place since, the Biden administration has pursued the death penalty in federal cases, including the 2023 sentencing of the man who killed nearly a dozen people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.
Vaillancourt Murphy noted that President-elect Trump spoke of expanding the death penalty while on the campaign trail. Catholic Mobilizing Network’s work “will continue no matter who is in the White House,” she said, and pointed to the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s teaching that the death penalty “is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” and that the Church “works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”
“We know the death penalty does not deter crime or make communities safer,” she said. “Like the state systems, the federal death penalty system is broken. So we will keep praying and advocating and educating and sharing restorative practices until this system of death is dismantled and our communities flourish amid a culture of life.”
To sign the petition, visit stlreview.com/3ZdgLfV.
>> Execution vigil
If Christopher Collings’ execution continues as scheduled, the Archdiocese of St. Louis will join MADP for a peaceful vigil outside the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre during the execution on Tuesday, Dec. 3. A bus will leave the Cardinal Rigali Center at 4 p.m. that day. To RSVP, contact Marie Kenyon at (314) 792-7062 or mariekenyon@archstl.org.
>> Church teaching on the death penalty (updated 2018)
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 serioius 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.
Consequently, the Church teaches, in light of the Gospel, that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and the dignity of the person,” and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2267
