EWTN News portal reports that Ohio Governor Mike DeWine commuted the death sentence of Gregory Lott, a 64-year-old man with intellectual disabilities, a decision applauded by the Catholic Mobilizing Network. This event, while seemingly a matter of criminal justice, reveals a profound modernist distortion of Catholic moral theology, where the concept of “redemption” is severed from the immutable demands of divine justice and the common good.
The Subversion of Divine Justice by Sentimental Humanism
The commutation of Gregory Lott’s sentence, praised by the executive director of the Catholic Mobilizing Network as a “pro-life decision,” represents a catastrophic confusion between the sanctity of innocent life and the state’s divinely ordained authority to punish the guilty. The modernist assertion that “no matter the harm one has caused or suffered, every person deserves the possibility of redemption” is a half-truth that, by omitting the necessary context of repentance and satisfaction for sin, becomes a pernicious falsehood. This sentiment, echoing the errors condemned in *Lamentabili sane exitu*, reduces the supernatural virtue of charity to a naturalistic humanism that prioritizes the subjective feelings of the criminal over the objective order of justice established by God.
The Catechism of the Council of Trent, reflecting the constant teaching of the Church, affirms that the civil magistrate bears not the sword in vain, but as an avenger of God’s wrath upon those who do evil (Romans 13:4). The death penalty, when lawfully imposed for grave crimes, is an act of justice, not a negation of the possibility of redemption. A murderer can indeed repent and save his soul, but this does not negate the temporal debt owed to the common good and to the order of justice violated by his crime. The modernist position, as articulated by DeWine and his Catholic apologists, effectively denies the state’s coercive power to inflict grave punishments, a doctrine explicitly condemned by Pope Pius IX in the *Syllabus of Errors* (Proposition 39), which rejects the notion that the state’s authority is not circumscribed by any limits.
The Linguistic Corruption of “Pro-Life”
The deliberate co-option of the term “pro-life” to describe the commutation of a convicted murderer’s sentence is a masterclass in modernist linguistic subversion. This rhetorical strategy, endemic to the conciliar sect, empties theological terms of their objective meaning and fills them with a subjective, sentimental content. The “seamless garment” or “consistent ethic of life” theory, promoted by modernist prelates, is a direct assault on the hierarchy of truths. It places the deliberate, unjust killing of an innocent unborn child on the same moral plane as the lawful execution of a guilty murderer, thereby relativizing the gravity of both acts. This is not Catholic doctrine; it is the “evolution of dogmas” condemned by St. Pius X, where the meaning of “life” and “justice” is changed to suit the spirit of the age.
Governor DeWine’s statement that his “moral justification I had for voting for the death penalty simply no longer exists” is a confession of his own subjective, modernist faith. It reveals a man whose moral compass is not fixed by the unchanging law of God but is swayed by the shifting winds of human sentiment and a false notion of “progress.” This is the very essence of the modernist error described in *Pascendi Dominici Gregis*: the substitution of the certain and unchanging doctrines of the Church with the uncertain and changing opinions of human conscience.
The Omission of the Common Good and the Victim
The article’s narrative is a textbook example of modernist omission. It focuses exclusively on the intellectual disabilities of the perpetrator and the supposed arbitrariness of the system, while remaining utterly silent on the primary purpose of punishment: the restoration of the order of justice and the protection of the common good. The victim, a man set on fire during a burglary, is reduced to a footnote, his family’s opposition to the death penalty presented as a mitigating factor rather than a separate, and potentially erroneous, judgment. Catholic teaching, as articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas, holds that punishment is not merely for the correction of the individual but for the “common good,” to ensure that “those who transgress may be corrected, and others may be deterred from sin” (*Summa Theologiae*, II-II, q. 68, a. 1).
By framing the issue solely around the criminal’s “marginalization” and “redemption,” the modernist perspective commits a grave injustice against the victim and society. It treats the state’s divinely delegated power of life and death as an intrinsic evil, a position that would render all civil government, as described by St. Paul in Romans 13, inherently unjust. This is a direct consequence of the laicism condemned by Pope Pius XI in *Quas Primas*, where Christ the King is removed from the public square, and His law is replaced by the dictates of human sentiment and a false notion of mercy that is, in truth, a cruelty to the innocent and a mockery of divine justice.
Source:
Anti-death penalty Catholic group applauds Ohio governor for sparing condemned man (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 25.06.2026