More than 300 “faith leaders” from at least 17 religious traditions, including Catholics, sent a letter to the Ohio General Assembly urging the abolition of the death penalty, calling it “state-sanctioned murder” and affirming that it “serves no moral moral purpose.” The letter, organized by Ohioans to Stop Executions (OTSE), was supported by Catholic religious sisters and parish priests, and separately echoed by the Catholic Conference of Ohio. The Catholic Conference’s executive director, Brian Hickey, stated that lawmakers have a “unique opportunity” with House Bill 72 to “end state-sanctioned death in Ohio” while also ensuring state funds will not pay for abortion or assisted suicide, adding: “We are actively meeting with Ohio legislators and urging them to stand against the culture of death and defend the sanctity of life in all stages and circumstances, as Pope Leo XIV continues to urge Catholics and all people of goodwill to do.” This statement explicitly invokes the authority of the current antipope, Leo XIV (Robert Prevost), to lend weight to the cause. The article notes that Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, a Catholic, has delayed executions due to drug procurement difficulties and is expected to issue a statement after the May 5 primary. The article cites a message from Leo XIV to activists at DePaul University, in which the antipope offered his “support to those who advocate for the abolition of the death penalty in the United States of America and around the world.” The entire campaign is framed in the language of “justice,” “redemption,” “empathy,” and “transformation” — naturalistic categories that systematically exclude the supernatural order of divine justice, the authority of the state to punish evil, and the Church’s own immutable teaching on the legitimate use of the death penalty. This is not a plea for justice; it is a wholesale capitulation to the culture of death, dressed in the vestments of false compassion, and it represents the logical terminus of the conciliar revolution’s abdication of the Church’s divine mission.
The Usurpation of Divine Justice by Naturalistic Humanism
The letter signed by these so-called “faith leaders” declares: “As people of faith, we are committed to policies rooted in justice and grounded in the promise of redemption… we stand together against state-sanctioned murder… we are motivated by the restorative power of empathy and investments in transformation.” The language is revealing. “Justice” is stripped of its supernatural and retributive content and reduced to a thisworldly, therapeutic concept. “Redemption” is emptied of its soteriological meaning — the redemption of souls through the Most Precious Blood of Christ — and transformed into a vague promise of social rehabilitation. “Empathy” and “elevation of the common good” are elevated above the eternal law of God. This is precisely the error condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors, which rejects the proposition that “moral laws do not stand in need of the divine sanction, and it is not at all necessary that human laws should be made conformable to the laws of nature and receive their power of binding from God” (Proposition 56). When “faith leaders” speak of justice without reference to the divine lawgiver, they are not speaking as Catholics; they are speaking as liberal Protestants, Unitarians, and naturalists who happen to occupy Catholic structures.
The letter’s claim that “the death penalty serves no moral purpose” is a direct contradiction of two millennia of Catholic teaching. The Church has consistently taught that the state, as the custodian of the common good, possesses the legitimate authority to inflict the death penalty when it is necessary to protect society and to vindicate the moral order established by God. This teaching is not a disciplinary opinion subject to the winds of “modern progress”; it is rooted in divine revelation, the natural law, and the unanimous consent of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. St. Augustine, in De Civitate Dei, affirms that the power of the sword is entrusted by God to the magistrate for the punishment of evildoers. St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, q. 64, a. 2), teaches that it is lawful to kill evil-doers by the authority of the sovereign, just as it is lawful for a physician to amputate a diseased limb for the health of the whole body: “Therefore if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good, since ‘a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump’ (1 Cor. 5:6).” The Catechism of Pope Pius V and the Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent both affirm the legitimacy of capital punishment. The proposition that the death penalty “serves no moral purpose” is not merely an error; it is a heresy against the natural law and divine revelation.
The Conciliar Sect’s Abdication of Authority and Its Prostration Before the World
The invocation of “Pope” Leo XIV by Brian Hickey of the Catholic Conference of Ohio is particularly instructive. The current antipope on the usurped throne of Peter offered his “support to those who advocate for the abolition of the death penalty” and prayed “that your efforts will lead to a greater acknowledgement of the dignity of every person.” This is the language of the conciliar sect — the language of Dignitatis Humanae, the declaration on religious freedom that marked the formal apostasy of the post-conciliar structure from the social reign of Christ the King. It is the language of “the dignity of every person” abstracted from the supernatural order, from the reality of sin, from the necessity of grace, and from the eternal destiny of souls. It is, in short, the language of the cult of man, which Pius IX condemned as the very essence of liberalism and modernism.
What is conspicuously absent from the entire article is any mention of the supernatural destiny of the human soul, the reality of mortal sin, the necessity of repentance before death, the existence of hell, or the authority of the Church to teach on matters of faith and morals with binding force. Marsha Forson of the Catholic Conference of Ohio speaks of “the hope of life — life eternal” and “each person’s fundamental identity and value is renewed not in the good or evil [that the person] has done but in the inestimable price of Christ’s sacrifice.” This is a half-truth that functions as a lie. It is true that Christ’s sacrifice is of inestimable value. It is false — and heretical — to suggest that a person’s moral state is irrelevant to his eternal destiny. The Church teaches that “he who does not believe is already condemned” (John 3:18) and that “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb. 11:6). The omission of the necessity of faith, repentance, and the state of grace is not an oversight; it is the defining characteristic of the conciliar sect’s naturalistic humanitarianism, which substitutes the worship of God with the worship of man.
Interfaith Syncretism as the Litmus Test of Apostasy
The letter was signed not only by Catholics but by “Protestant pastors, rabbis, Muslims, Zoroastrians, and Unitarian Universalists.” This interfaith coalition is not incidental; it is the raison d’être of the entire enterprise. The conciliar sect, since the promulgation of Nostra Aetate at the Second Vatican Council, has systematically dismantled the Church’s exclusive claim to be the one true religion founded by God and has embraced the modernist error condemned by Pius IX: “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church” (Proposition 18, Syllabus of Errors). When Catholics stand alongside rabbis, Muslims, and Unitarians to issue joint statements on moral matters, they are implicitly denying the divinity of the Church and the necessity of the Catholic faith for salvation. This is not ecumenism; it is religious syncretism, which Pius XI condemned in Mortalium Animos as a betrayal of the divine mandate to teach all nations.
The Culture of Death and the Contradiction of “Consistent Life Ethic” Rhetoric
Brian Hickey claims that the Catholic Conference is urging lawmakers to “stand against the culture of death and defend the sanctity of life in all stages and circumstances.” This phrase — “the culture of death” — was coined by the antipope John Paul II and has been adopted as a slogan by the conciliar sect to describe a supposed continuum of evils: abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, and war. The rhetorical sleight of hand is obvious: by placing the death penalty in the same category as abortion, the conciar sect creates a false moral equivalence that obscures the fundamental difference between the deliberate killing of the innocent (which is always and everywhere intrinsically evil) and the lawful punishment of the guilty by legitimate authority (which can be a moral obligation). The Church has never taught that the death penalty is intrinsically evil; she has taught that it may be licit and even necessary. The conciliar sect’s insistence on abolition is not a “development of doctrine”; it is a rupture with doctrine — the very error condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu, which rejects the proposition that “truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him” (Proposition 58).
The Silence on the Supernatural: The Gravest Accusation
The most damning feature of the entire article is what it does not say. There is no mention of the sacraments, no mention of the necessity of confession and absolution for the remission of sins, no mention of the reality of hell as the just punishment for unrepented mortal sin, no mention of the authority of the true Church to bind and loose, no mention of the social reign of Christ the King over all nations and all aspects of civil governance. The entire discussion is conducted on the plane of naturalistic humanism — “empathy,” “transformation,” “restorative justice,” “common good.” This silence is not accidental; it is theological apostasy made manifest in journalistic form. When Catholic structures speak of morality without reference to the supernatural order, they have ceased to be Catholic in any meaningful sense. They have become, as Pius IX warned, instruments of the “synagogue of Satan” — not because they consciously serve evil, but because they have abandoned the only standard by which good and evil can be judged: the immutable law of God as taught by His one true Church.
The campaign to abolish the death penalty in Ohio, led by the conciar sect and its interfaith allies, is not a work of justice. It is a work of revolution against the divine order — a further step in the dismantling of Christian civilization and its replacement with the religion of humanity, which is the religion of the Antichrist. The faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith must reject this campaign utterly, affirm the legitimate authority of the state to punish evildoers with death when justice demands it, and pray for the restoration of the social reign of Christ the King, before whom every knee shall bow, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth.
Source:
Catholic, Interfaith Leaders Press Ohio Lawmakers to Abolish Death Penalty (ncregister.com)
Date: 05.05.2026