Francis has ordered a revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, asserting that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” He has committed the Church to working for its abolition worldwide.

The catechism’s paragraph on capital punishment, 2267, had already been updated by St John Paul II in 1997 to strengthen its scepticism about the need to use the death penalty in the modern world and, particularly, to affirm the importance of protecting all human life.

The latest change builds on the development of Catholic Church teaching against capital punishment.

Announcing the change on August 2, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said: “The new text, following in the footsteps of the teaching of John Paul II in ‘Evangelium Vitae,’ affirms that ending the life of a criminal as punishment for a crime is inadmissible because it attacks the dignity of the person, a dignity that is not lost even after having committed the most serious crimes.” “Evangelium Vitae” (“The Gospel of Life”) was St John Paul’s 1995 encyclical letter on the dignity and sacredness of all human life. The encyclical led to an updating of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which he originally promulgated in 1992 and which recognised “the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty.”

At the same time, the original version of the catechism still urged the use of “bloodless means” when possible to punish criminals and protect citizens.

The catechism now will 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.