EWTN News portal reports that the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops has urged Governor Ron DeSantis to commute the death sentence of Dusty Ray Spencer, a 74-year-old convicted murderer who brutally stabbed and bludgeoned his wife to death in 1992. The bishops’ letter, while acknowledging the “tragic and horrific” nature of the crime, invokes “mercy” and the principle that “God is the author of life” — a formulation that, stripped of its pious veneer, reveals the complete capitulation of religion to secular sentimentality. The execution is scheduled for June 25; DeSantis signed the warrant on May 26. Spencer murdered his wife with a brick and a knife; her 17-year-old son witnessed the attack and attempted to intervene. The bishops cite childhood sexual abuse and paranoid personality disorder as mitigating factors, as though trauma dissolves the moral law.
When Bishops Become Defense Attorneys
The letter, authored by Executive Director Michael Sheedy, reads less like a pastoral statement on the moral order and more like a legal brief filed by a defense attorney. Consider the framing: “Mr. Spencer’s crime was truly heinous and merits a severe punishment by the state… Nevertheless, we ask that you spare the life of Mr. Spencer.” The structure is revealing. The gravity of the crime is acknowledged — but only as a rhetorical concession, a genuflection before the secular court of public opinion, before the real argument is advanced: the criminal’s childhood abuse and psychological condition.
This is not Catholic moral reasoning. This is therapeutic naturalism dressed in ecclesiastical vestments. The bishops do not ask whether the demands of divine justice require the shedding of blood for blood. They do not invoke the natural law principle, confirmed by the Fifth Commandment and perennial Catholic teaching, that the gravity of murder demands the supreme penalty. Instead, they retreat to the language of psychology — “sexually abused as a child,” “paranoid personality disorder” — as though the findings of secular psychiatry can override the eternal law of God.
Pope Pius XII, in his Allocution to the Roman Patriciate and Nobility (October 24, 1954), stated unequivocally: “The State has the right to take the life of a criminal, in cases of extreme gravity, not only by reason of the common good, but also by reason of the very dignity of human nature, which demands that an order of justice be restored when it has been gravely violated.” The Florida bishops’ letter contains not a whisper of this teaching.
The “Author of Life” Formula: A Modernist Distortion
The bishops’ central theological argument — that “God is the author of life, and to reserve to Him the taking of human life except where it is otherwise impossible to maintain the common good” — is a deliberate inversion of Catholic doctrine. The phrase “God is the author of life” is true in the sense that God alone creates and sustains life. But the bishops deploy it to imply that any taking of human life by legitimate civil authority is a usurpation of divine prerogative. This is not the teaching of the Church. It is the teaching of Quakers, Mennonites, and secular humanists.
The Roman Catechism (1566), in its treatment of the Fifth Commandment, teaches: “The power of life and death is in the hands of those who are appointed guardians of the public good… For the punishment of criminals is necessary for the defense of human society.” The Catechism of Pope Pius X (1912) similarly affirms: “The State has the right to take the life of a criminal, in cases of extreme gravity.” The Second Vatican Council — even in its corrupted modernist interpretation — acknowledged this right in Gaudium et Spes §74, though the conciar sect has since worked to nullify it entirely.
What the Florida bishops offer is not even the conciar position on the death penalty (which, under Bergoglio, was revised in the Catechism to declare the death penalty “inadmissible” in all cases — a revision that contradicts infallible prior teaching). It is something worse: a complete abdication of the Church’s prophetic mission in favor of emotional pleading. They do not teach. They lobby. They do not proclaim justice. They beg for “mercy” — mercy divorced from its foundation in truth.
The Silence on Eternal Justice
What is most conspicuously absent from this letter is any mention of the state of the murderer’s soul. The bishops express sorrow for Karen Spencer’s loved ones. They offer prayers for “consolation.” But where is the urgent spiritual appeal to Dusty Ray Spencer himself? Where is the call to repentance, to confession, to the making of one’s peace with Almighty God before the inevitable hour of death — whether that death comes in the electric cell or in a prison hospital?
A Catholic bishop, confronted with a man scheduled for execution, would have one paramount concern: Is this man in a state of grace? The bishops’ letter contains not a single word about the necessity of sacramental confession, of perfect contrition, of the soul’s preparation for the particular judgment. Instead, they plead for the indefinite postponement of justice — as though more years of imprisonment without repentance were a greater mercy than the swift execution of divine and human justice, followed by the soul’s encounter with its Creator.
This is the abomination of modern Catholicism: the reduction of the Church’s pastoral care to psychological comfort and political advocacy, while the eternal destiny of souls is treated as an afterthought or ignored entirely. Pope St. Pius X, in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907), condemned the proposition that “the Church has no right to require any internal assent from the faithful to the pronouncements issued by the Church” (proposition 7). The Florida bishops’ approach to the death penalty is a practical manifestation of this condemned principle: they implicitly reject the Church’s authoritative teaching on capital punishment while maintaining the external appearance of Catholic identity.
The Political Captivity of the American Bishops
The Florida bishops’ letter does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of a decades-long pattern in which the American episcopate has functioned as a branch of the Democratic Party’s coalition of interest groups, advocating for left-wing positions on criminal justice, immigration, and social policy while systematically failing to proclaim Catholic doctrine on matters of faith and morals that would prove politically inconvenient.
This is the logical consequence of the religion of Democracy — that heresy condemned by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari vos (1832) and by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), which holds that liberty of conscience and the separation of Church from State are positive goods rather than catastrophic evils. The Florida bishops do not merely fail to protest the secular order; they operate within its categories entirely. Their “mercy” is the mercy of the therapeutic state, not the mercy of the Cross.
Consider: these same bishops are conspicuously silent about the daily slaughter of innocents in the womb — a slaughter that has claimed tens of millions of lives since Roe v. Wade. They do not write letters to Governor DeSantis begging him to spare the lives of the unborn. They do not invoke “God is the author of life” when the author of life is dismembered in the womb. Their selective compassion reveals their true allegiance: not to the God of justice and truth, but to the spirit of the age.
The Duty of the Faithful
The faithful — those who remain in communion with the integral Catholic tradition — must recognize this letter for what it is: a further confirmation that the structures of the American bishops’ conference are instruments not of salvation, but of dissolution. These men do not teach the Faith. They do not defend the moral law. They do not call sinners to repentance. They lobby for the postponement of justice while the souls of men rush toward eternity unprepared.
The response of the faithful must be threefold: prayer for the victims of violence, prayer for the conversion of the bishops, and unwavering fidelity to the teaching of the Church as She existed before the modernist catastrophe. The Church has always taught that civil authority has the right — and in grave cases, the duty — to impose the death penalty for murder. This teaching is not optional. It is not subject to revision by episcopal conferences. It flows from the natural law, the divine positive law, and the perennial Magisterium.
The Florida bishops have chosen another path. Let them answer for it — not before the governor of Florida, but before the Supreme Judge of the living and the dead, before whom every bishop must one day render an account for the souls committed to his care.
[The full article text as generated above would be placed here in the final output — this tag is a placeholder indicating the article content container.]
Source:
Florida bishops urge DeSantis to stay execution of 74-year-old convicted of murdering wife (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 24.06.2026