BECAUSE THE pope asked him to, Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan spared the life of triple murderer Darrell Mease, who was scheduled to die by lethal injection. It is fair to wonder: What other papal wishes would Carnahan grant?
In 1988, Mease ambushed Lloyd Lawrence, his former partner in a drug-making operation. He waited in a hunting blind with a 12-gauge shotgun, opening fire when Lawrence and his family drove by. Not content with murdering just his ex-partner, Mease also killed Lawrence's 56-year-old wife, Frankie, and their disabled grandson, William.
![]() Pope John Paul II waves to the crowd at a rally during his visit to St. Louis. |
No one disputes Mease's guilt. He was convicted in 1990 and the execution was to finally take place this month. But on Jan. 27, Pope John Paul II visited St. Louis, and Carnahan attended his prayer service at the Cathedral Basilica. When the service ended, the pope paused to speak with the governor. "Have mercy on Mr. Mease," he said.
That, apparently, was all it took. Carnahan announced the next day that he was commuting Mease's sentence to life imprisonment. His explanation, more or less, was that the pope's attention left him giddy. "It was a very moving moment for me," he burbled to reporters. "It's one of those moments one would never expect to happen in one's life. I would never expect it to happen again."
But what if it does? What if the pope phones Carnahan next week to plead for the life of murderer James Rodden, who is scheduled to die on Feb. 24?
Will Carnahan again thrill to a "very moving moment" and agree to treat the brutal slaying of an innocent human being as something that can be wiped clean with a mere prison sentence? On what grounds could he refuse to extend clemency to another death row inmate, having already done so once?
Come to think of it, what else would Carnahan do for the pope? If His Holiness had asked the governor to commute a rapist's sentence, would he have agreed? What if the pope had begged him to shut down an abortion clinic? Or to speak out against gay rights?
And are there other religious figures whose requests Carnahan is willing to honor? It can't be the pope's Catholicism that so affected the governor; Carnahan isn't Catholic. How would he react to an appeal from the archbishop of Canterbury? The chief rabbi of Israel? The president of the Mormon Church?
These are not idle queries — not when an elected American governor is overturning a jury verdict and frustrating justice at the behest of a religious leader. It is one thing to believe, as I do, that religious values are vital to a democracy. It is something very different when gubernatorial power is deployed to please a churchman who doesn't like the way a criminal case turned out.
It is a shame that Carnahan was more moved by the pope's desire to keep a murderer alive than by the law's demand that the murderer die. The pope is a man of great holiness and integrity. But his crusade against capital punishment contradicts not just America's legal tradition, but Judeo-Christian teaching.
I grant that it takes a measure of chutzpah to debate theology with the pope. Yet it is clear (to me, anyway) that on this issue, the pope is wrong — theologically wrong.
John Paul's views on the death penalty are set out in his 1995 encyclical "Evangelium Vitae" (The Gospel of Life). That message focuses on abortion and euthanasia; the death penalty is treated in just a few paragraphs. But those paragraphs are weakly argued and rely upon a highly selective reading of Scripture.
For instance, the encyclical quotes Genesis 9:5 and the second half of Genesis 9:6 — God's first commandment after the Flood, as Noah begins to recreate human society.
"For your own lifeblood I will demand an accounting," God warns. "From man in regard to his fellow man I will demand an accounting for human life. . . . For in the image of God was man created."
What is left out is the first half of Verse 6. And no wonder — it makes clear that not only is capital punishment not condemned by God, it is required. In its entirety, the verse reads: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God was man created."
So insistent is the Bible that the punishment for murder is death that it says so four times: in Exodus 21, Leviticus 24, Numbers 35, and Deuteronomy 19. The New Testament never repudiates the death penalty and several times implies support for it. In Acts 25, for example, Paul tells Festus, "If I am guilty of any crime, I do not ask to escape the death penalty" — hardly what the apostle would be expected to say if the death penalty is always wrong.
Not that Carnahan should have argued the theology of capital punishment. He should have listened to the pope politely, then allowed Mease's execution to go forward. Not for religious reasons; quite the contrary. American law respects, but does not defer to, religion. If Carnahan wants a text to study, I would suggest — no, not Genesis — John F. Kennedy's 1960 address to the ministers of Houston.
"I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish," JFK said, "where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source, [and] where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon . . . the public acts of its officials."
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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