EWTN News reports that the Trump administration has announced the reinstatement of federal firing squad executions, alongside lethal injection protocols, to “strengthen” the federal death penalty. The article juxtaposes this with a video message from Robert Prevost — the usurper occupying Peter’s throne under the name “Pope Leo XIV” — delivered to abolitionist activists at DePaul University, in which he declared that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” The conciliar sect updated its Catechism in 2018 to explicitly call for the worldwide abolition of capital punishment. Leo XIV further stated aboard the papal plane that he “condemns the taking of people’s lives” and “condemns capital punishment,” affirming that human life must be respected “from conception to natural death.” The article frames these as simultaneous and opposing developments: the state moving to expand executions while the neo-church calls for their abolition. What the article conceals — and what demands ruthless exposure — is that the conciliar sect’s position on capital punishment represents not a development of Catholic doctrine but a manifest betrayal of it, a surrender to the spirit of the world, and a hallmark of the Modernist revolution that has consumed the structures occupying the Vatican.
The Teaching of the Immutable Catholic Church on Capital Punishment
The Catholic Church, in her authentic Magisterium spanning two millennia, has consistently and unequivocally affirmed the legitimacy of capital punishment as an exercise of lawful public authority. This is not a peripheral opinion but a doctrine rooted in Divine Revelation, solemnly defined by ecumenical councils, and taught by popes without interruption until the conciliar apostasy.
The theological foundation is established in Sacred Scripture itself. In Genesis 9:6, God declares: “Whosoever shall shed man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for God made man to his image.” This is not a ceremonial prescription of the Old Law abrogated in the New Covenant; it is a precept of the natural law, spoken by God Himself as the Creator and supreme Lawgiver, binding upon all peoples and all ages. The Apostle Paul, writing under divine inspiration in Romans 13:4, confirms that the civil magistrate “beareth not the sword in vain: for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil.” The sword — the power of life and death — is entrusted by God to legitimate public authority precisely for the punishment of evildoers. To deny this power is to deny the plain sense of Divine Revelation.
The Roman Catechism (the Catechism of the Council of Trent, 1566), which remains the most authoritative catechism of the Catholic Church, teaches with perfect clarity: “The power of life and death is permitted to many pastors of the Church, because the punishment of death is a remedy to expel the wicked from the Church, and to preserve the good… Far from being guilty of breaking the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ the public authority that puts criminals to death rather observes this commandment, since it acts as the legitimate avenger of the innocent.” The Catechism further explains that the civil law, when it inflicts capital punishment, acts not as the destroyer of life but as the executor of God’s justice: “The same divine law which forbids the killing of a man, allows certain exceptions, as when God authorizes the killing of a man by the public authority acting in his name.”
Pope Pius XII, in an address to the Italian Association of Catholic Jurists on December 5, 1954, explicitly reaffirmed this doctrine: “The Church has never said that the individual does not have the right to defend himself, even to the point of killing an aggressor if necessary. Similarly, the public authority does not have the right to put a criminal to death unless the crime is so grave that the defense of society requires it and there is no other way to protect society.” Pius XII further stated: “Even when the execution of a condemned man is certain, the State does not dispose of the individual’s right to existence. It is reserved to the public authority to deprive the condemned of the right to existence, in the exercise of a right of its own, to the good of the community.”
The 1917 Code of Canon Law (Canon 9) recognized the legitimacy of the ius gladii — the right of the sword — as consonant with divine law. The Roman Catechism, the ordinary and universal Magisterium of the popes, and the constant teaching of the Church all converge on this point: legitimate public authority possesses, by divine law, the right and sometimes the duty to inflict capital punishment for grave crimes.
The Conciliar Betrayal: From Doctrine to Apostasy
The 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church promulgated by John Paul II — himself a manifest heretic and apostate whose “canonizations” are null and void — represented the first step in the erosion of this immutable teaching. While it nominally acknowledged the theoretical legitimacy of capital punishment, it so restricted its application as to render it practically inadmissible, reducing the cases in which it could be employed to “practically nonexistent” scenarios.
The 2018 revision under Bergoglio went further, declaring capital punishment “inadmissible” under all circumstances and calling for its universal abolition. This revision was explicitly described by its authors as a “development” of doctrine — the very language of condemned Modernism. The Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX condemned the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80). The 2018 revision is precisely such a reconciliation — a capitulation to the secular humanist and Masonic agenda that has waged war against the Church’s social reign for centuries.
Robert Prevost’s statements — that the death penalty is “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” and that he “condemns the taking of people’s lives” — are not merely disciplinary prudential judgments. They are presented as doctrinal affirmations, rooted in the revised Catechism, and declared with magisterial authority. They represent a direct contradiction of the teaching of the Roman Catechism, the solemn pronouncements of Pius XII, and the plain sense of Sacred Scripture.
The conciliar sect’s position rests on a fundamentally Modernist anthropology: the exaltation of the “dignity of the person” as an autonomous, self-referential value, detached from the order of divine justice. This is the same anthropocentrism condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), where he exposed the Modernist error of placing the foundation of religion in human consciousness rather than in objective divine truth. The “dignity” invoked by Leo XIV is not the Catholic understanding of man as created in the image and likeness of God — a dignity that is real but that man can forfeit through grievous sin — but the liberal, Enlightenment notion of inherent and inviolable autonomy that no authority, human or divine, may override.
The Silence on Divine Justice and the Common Good
What is most striking — and most damning — in the statements attributed to Leo XIV is the complete silence on divine justice, the common good, and the legitimate authority of the state as taught by the Church. The article, echoing the conciliar sect’s framing, presents the question solely in terms of “dignity” and “humane treatment” — categories drawn from secular human rights discourse, not from Catholic moral theology.
The Catholic teaching on capital punishment is not rooted in cruelty or vengeance. It is rooted in the common good — the supernatural and natural end of civil society as defined by the Church. Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (December 11, 1925), taught: “The State is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men.” The state’s authority derives from God, and its laws must be ordered to the commandments of God. When the state exercises the ius gladii, it acts as “God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil” (Romans 13:4). To deny this is to deny the social kingship of Christ — the very doctrine that Quas Primas was promulgated to affirm.
The conciliar sect’s abolitionism is not a development but a repudiation of the social reign of Christ the King. It is the logical fruit of the conciliar declaration Dignitatis Humanae (1965), which enshrined religious liberty as a natural right — a proposition directly condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (Proposition 77: “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship”) and by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos (1832). If the state may not defend the faith, neither may it fully defend the natural order — including the order of justice that demands the punishment of the wicked.
The Firing Squad and the Order of Natural Law
The article notes that the Trump administration’s reinstatement of firing squads is presented alongside lethal injection, with the Justice Department describing pentobarbital as “the gold standard” and “more humane.” The conciliar apparatus and its media organs seize upon such details to reinforce the narrative that execution is inherently inhumane — a narrative that serves the abolitionist agenda.
From the perspective of unchanging Catholic doctrine, the method of execution is a question of prudence and practical governance, not of moral principle. The moral principle is that legitimate public authority possesses the right to inflict death for grave crimes. Whether this is carried out by hanging, firing squad, lethal injection, or any other means that accomplishes the sentence efficiently and without gratuitous cruelty is a matter of human law and administrative judgment. The Church has never taught that any particular method of execution is intrinsically evil. The Roman Catechism’s teaching on the “sword” encompasses all lawful means by which the state exercises its divinely delegated authority.
The conciliar sect’s focus on the “humaneness” of execution methods is itself a symptom of the dictatorship of relativism — the reduction of moral questions to sentiment and feeling, divorced from the objective order of divine law. It is the same spirit that animates Dignitatis Humanae, the Novus Ordo Missae, and the entire conciar project: the substitution of the supernatural order with a naturalistic humanism that worships “the dignity of the person” while denying the sovereignty of God.
The Neo-Church as Servant of the World
The juxtaposition presented in the article — the state acting to strengthen capital punishment while the “pope” calls for its abolition — is not a conflict between the Church and the world. It is a conflict between legitimate civil authority exercising its God-given power and a counterfeit church that has abdicated its divine mission.
Pope Leo XIII, in the encyclical Immortale Dei (1885), taught: “The Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, each the highest in its kind, and each fixed within definite limits, determined by its own nature and special object.” The state’s authority in temporal matters — including the administration of criminal justice — is real, legitimate, and derived from God. The Church’s role is to guide the state toward the supernatural end, not to deny the state’s legitimate authority in its own proper sphere.
The conciliar sect, by condemning capital punishment as such, has overstepped its competence and contradicted the teaching of the Church. It has done so not in fidelity to the Gospel but in obedience to the spirit of the world — the same spirit that animates the United Nations, the European Union, Freemasonry, and every other force that seeks to dethrone Christ and establish the autonomy of man.
The faithful Catholic, adhering to the integral teaching of the Church before 1958, recognizes that the state’s exercise of capital punishment is not merely permissible but can be an act of justice — a participation in God’s own justice, ordered to the common good. The neo-church’s abolitionism is not a prophetic witness to the Gospel. It is apostasy — a betrayal of the social kingship of Christ and a capitulation to the enemies of the Church.
Conclusion: The Enduring Authority of Christ the King
The Catholic Church teaches, and has always taught, that Jesus Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords — that His reign extends over all nations, all societies, and all aspects of human life, including the administration of justice. Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas, declared: “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church… but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.”
The state that exercises capital punishment in accordance with divine law and the common good acts as the minister of God. The counterfeit church that condemns this exercise acts as the minister of the world — of that “synagogue of Satan” which Pope Pius IX identified in the Syllabus of Errors as the force behind the Church’s persecution.
The faithful must reject the conciar sect’s abolitionism as they reject all its other novelties: as a betrayal of the Faith, an abandonment of the Church’s mission, and a surrender to the enemies of Christ the King. Non possumus — we cannot follow the neo-church into apostasy. We must hold fast to the integral Catholic faith, which teaches that justice is not merely “dignity” but the order established by God — an order that the state is bound to uphold, and that the Church is bound to defend.
Source:
White House to bring back firing squads as Pope Leo XIV calls for U.S. death penalty to be abolished (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 24.04.2026