Support for the death penalty has long been strong in Texas, but a Catholic bishop says a death row inmate’s recent clemency could signal change.
The majority of Texans, including Texas Catholics, have shown support for the death penalty in the past despite church teaching that Catholics should oppose capital punishment on pro-life grounds, according to Crux Now. Texas bishops say that Gov. Gregg Abbot’s recent grant of clemency to death row inmate Thomas Whitaker shows that their pro-life argument is gaining slow momentum. Texas Catholics’ shift toward church teaching has the potential to affect public policy in the state, as evidenced by the recent decision by Abbot, a Republican who is Catholic.
The Catholic Church still has its work cut out for it among the lay people of Texas, Bishop Michael Olson of Fort Worth told Crux.
“I think at least we’re making headway in fostering greater awareness among our people about the ineffectiveness of the death penalty to curtail crime and to fulfill even the classical understanding of its permissibility. Our recent letter as Texas Bishops also talked about how its use is a failure to witness to the greater truths about the dignity of human life,” Olson told Crux.
“The big challenge we face as the Church and as bishops entrusted with the authentic teaching mission, is that Catholics tend to identify not so differently from the secular mainstream populace,” Olson added.
As for the death penalty, the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty interpreted a recent reticence among jurors and judges to dole out the death sentence as a sign of shifting attitudes among Texans. Kent Scheidegger of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation conceded that attitudes toward the death penalty are shifting among Texans, but told The Texas Tribune that the recent dip in capital punishment sentences ware largely due to the lower rate of murder in the state.
Texas Catholic laypeople also tend to deviate from church teaching on the subjects of immigration and refugees, Olson mentioned and said their positions on those subjects are more often informed by secular influences than current ecclesiastical influences. Olson said that one of the main works for the Catholic church in Texas is urging parishioners to observe and understand what he calls the “consistent ethic of life.”
“One can understand the importance of life issues, such as abortion, contraception, married life, euthanasia, assisted suicide, the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary means, but we also have to learn to make critical distinctions in light of our belonging to society as more than abstract individuals,” Olson told Crux. “The first society to which we belong is the family.”
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