Pope Leo has made it official: St. John Henry Newman is a Doctor of the Church. In this I rejoice; Newman has long been a favorite of mine. I often taught his An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), a classic in the epistemology of religion, in my philosophy courses. Of late, though, it’s been his An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) that’s been of heightened interest.

Why so? One reason, among others, is that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith recently appealed to doctrinal development to explain why the Catechism of the Catholic Church now teaches that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” and that the Church works “for its abolition worldwide” (CCC 2267).

This new language would surprise Pope Pius XII. On his view, the death penalty might well be seen as a matter of justice. John Henry Newman would agree. In a letter to a nephew, dated 1875, he seems to defend the death penalty, “in the abstract,” as an instance “of the magistrate’s bearing the sword, and of the Church’s sanctioning its use, in the aspect of justice, as Moses, Joshua, and Samuel might use it, against heretics, rebels, and cruel and crafty enemies.”

Earlier Newman had cited the death penalty to illustrate the force of tradition. “There is no explicit written law [in England],” he wrote, “simply declaring murder to be a capital offence, unless, indeed, we have recourse to the divine command in the ninth chapter of the book of Genesis. Murderers are hanged by custom. Such as this is the Tradition of the Church” (Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, 1851).

But now comes a perplexity. Just recently, Pope Leo remarked that “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion’ but says ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life.” Where, one wonders, does Leo’s charge leave Newman, now a Doctor of the Church? Was Newman not pro-life?

As a friend of Newman, I contend that he was pro-life. For a start, his defense of the death penalty was brief and tangential to other issues. Not too much should be made of it. Moreover, were Newman with us today we should hardly expect that he would dismiss either the Catechism or the development of the magisterium on capital punishment that began with John Paul II’s sharp restriction of its use.

Nonetheless, prior to its fresh development, the Church’s acceptance of capital punishment seemed a settled matter. But, in retrospect, it was not. Let me call attention to a pair of considerations that help to explain why.

The first reason is that Thomas Aquinas, yes, the Common Doctor, offers flawed arguments for capital punishment. A first argument depends on a dubious analogy. He writes that “if the health of the whole body demands the excision of a member, through its being decayed or infectious to the other members, it will be both praiseworthy and advantageous to have it cut away.” In like manner, “if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on the account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed to safeguard the common good” (ST II-II, q. 64, art. 2). But the reduction of a person to an expendable part of the whole is mistaken. The nature of a part differs from that of a person—indeed, a human being made in the image of God.

His next argument is at least as suspect as the first. He tells us that “By sinning man departs from the order of reason and consequently falls away from the dignity of his manhood.” He then adds that “although it be evil in itself to kill a man so long as he preserves his dignity, yet it may be good to kill a man who has sinned, even as it is to kill a beast. For a bad man is worse than a beast, and is more harmful” (ST II-II, q. 64, art. 2, ad 3). But how can there be such a degradation? Even a murderer retains the intelligence and freedom that God bestows on our fallen human nature.

No doubt Thomas aims to underscore the maxim that punishment should be in proportion to the crime. Yet why suppose that this rule is inflexible? Given the unity of the virtues, forgiveness is an aspect of justice. Commensurate punishment does not require the destruction of an inviolable good.

However sweeping Thomas’s influence has been, advocates of the death penalty need to present arguments better than his to maintain their position. In the absence of such arguments, however, we often find an appeal to the Church’s longstanding and ordinary teaching in support of capital punishment. They contend that a change that rejects capital punishment would be a contradiction rather than a development of doctrine.

To my mind, however, this further charge is not persuasive. And why not? Because if we are to consider the development of doctrine, we must surely specify just which doctrine we are considering and how it is related to the full teaching of the Church. There’s an internal logic that comes into play.

We need to understand, then, that what the Church teaches about the death penalty depends on what she teaches about punishment, in particular, punishment as retributive. But her teaching on punishment itself depends on the nature of the common good. The nature of the common good, in turn, depends on the dignity of the person as created in the image of God. Thus Vatican II’s Gaudium et spes states that “Whatever violates the integrity of the human person…whatever insults human dignity [is] a supreme dishonor to the Creator.”

In this vein, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s recent document, “Dignitas Infinita” (2024), underscores the “ontological dignity” that each person has “simply because he or she exists and is willed, created, and loved by God” and insists that such dignity “remains valid beyond any circumstances in which the person may find themselves.”

Long reflection on the foundational doctrine that man is created in God’s image and thus can participate in His very life has now led the Church to reject capital punishment as incompatible with the dignity of the human person. Understanding this trajectory shows us the rich development of doctrine that the Catechism now reflects. Is this development surprising? So be it. Newman himself notes that some “changes which at first sight contradict that out of which they grew are really its protection or illustration” (Essay on Development, 184).

Ah, well, gentle reader. Enough for a blog post. I leave you with the insight of Flannery O’Connor, a self-proclaimed hillbilly Thomist. “Dogma is the guardian of mystery.” God’s creative love is, indeed, a profound mystery.