Capital Punishment Essay - Opposition To the Death Penalty :: Argumentative Persuasive Essays

Opposition To the terminal Penalty During the spring semester I read Evangelium Vitae The Gospel of Life. Paragraphs 27 and 56 of this encyclical prompted a discussion of the death penalisation with other students. Their starting signal reaction was that the Pope was against it and that he was saying that the penalty has no justification. in that respect was general resistance to the suggestion that while the Popes attitude toward the death penalty is, to put it mildly, unfavorable, he did not flat out say that it was immoral, wrong, without justification. sort of apart from exegesis of the encyclical, a majority of student-friends were against the death penalty. Period. Were they in favor of bread and butter imprisonment? Absolutely. Dont put killers and the like to death, just lock them up and launch away the key. Isnt that what the Pope was saying in paragraph 56? The run of public opinion against capital penalisation rises, he writes, both in the Church and i n civil society, and there is a growing want to limit its use even to the point of total abolition. Nowadays we argon able to protect society from the offender without taking his life. Lock him up and he will pull in lots of time to repent and preserve himself. Our discussion accordingly turned to the question of life imprisonment. While this admittedly looks attractive when compared to the death penalty, considered in itself it is a terrible thing. However bactericidal and humane his quarters might be, the thought of a human world locked up for life gives pause. Surely only the most grievous offenses could precedent such unspeakable punishment. Are there really any offenses that severe? In Italy, new-fashionedr in the spring, I became aware of a consort against life imprisonment. What I detected, rightly or wrongly, was an animus against punishment as such. When I gingerly introduced the subject of Hell, those who had spontaneously rejected capital punishment and then had some second thoughts about life imprisonment when looked at in itself and not as an alternative to the death penalty seemed be given toward a creative interpretation of eternal punishment. And of course there have been eminent theologians who have wondered aloud about the doctrine of Hell. Even Jacques Maritain, late in his life had written equivocally on the subject.