With Jubilee Year Over, Catholics Must Re-double Efforts to End Capital Punishment
NOLA. Com
Proclaimed by Pope Francis and urging the faithful to live as “pilgrims of hope,” who manifest mercy, the Jubilee Year ended January 6, 2026. But, with U.S. states carrying out 47 executions in 2025 – the most in more than 15 years – as the Jubilee Year encouraged them, Catholics must work to end the death penalty with greater urgency, involving more Catholics.
Catholic abolitionists, as the Jubilee Year began, naturally identified themselves as the pilgrims the late pope called them to become as they savored one of the abolitionist movement’s greater victories: December 23, 2024, President Joe Biden commuted 37 federal death row prisoners’ sentences to life-without-parole (L.W.O.P.).
Supported by the U.S. bishops, the Catholic Mobilizing Network (C.M.N.) organized these advocates to write letters to the editor and op-eds, call the White House and sign petitions urging their Catholic president to choose mercy.
Biden’s decision to commute was remarkable coming from the senate’s chief architect of the 1994 crime bill, which expanded crimes eligible for the federal death penalty by 60.
Pope Francis’ 2018 catechism revision of the Church’s capital punishment teaching likely informed the devout Catholic president’s state killing reversal.
The revision irrevocably upended the Church’s traditional view: capital punishment was an “acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the common good.” The catechism now states: “In the light of the gospel, the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”
Campaigning for the presidency in 2020, Biden promised to end the federal death penalty and incentivize death penalty states to abolish it. He unfortunately didn’t fulfill those promises.
Though not as complete as we hoped because three persons on federal death row and four on military death row weren’t spared, Biden’s commutations nonetheless provided Catholic abolitionists a true Jubilee moment.
Dubiously led in 2025 by Florida with 19, executions this year accelerated nearly twice the rate of recent years – 24 in 2023, 25 in 2024 – dissipating our triumphal moment’s headiness. Despite this grim reality, there’s still reasons to be encouraged when confronting state killing. Jury verdicts and public polling reflect support for capital punishment continues to decline.
Juries, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (D.P.I.C.), only returned 23 death sentences in 2025, less than the 26 returned in 2024 and two more than the 21 returned in 2023. In capital murder trials in 2025, also according to the D.P.I.C., juries choose L.W.O.P. over death 56 percent of the time.
Growing opposition to capital punishment is also reflected in opinion polls. A 2025 Gallup Poll found 52 percent of Americans supported state killing, a historic low compared to the 1994 Gallup poll that demonstrated 80 percent supported capital punishment, the highest support recorded.
As was true with capital murder juries this year, a 2019 Gallup survey reported 60 percent of Americans believed L.W.O.P. was the more appropriate punishment for capital murder than capital punishment, which 36 percent supported.
This people’s increasing disaffection from state killing should foster Catholic abolitionists’ hope that universal abolition in the U.S. is closer than they think.
Catholics who attend mass weekly are uniquely, well positioned to advance this movement’s great victory. Association of Religion Data Archives (A.R.D.A.) polling, in 2024, reported only roughly 40 percent of weekly communicants supported capital punishment.
Their reluctance to endorse state killing should compel these Catholics to become abolitionist leaders, who persuade others to join our movement, building the necessary momentum that ends state killing in the U.S.
Catholic capital punishment opponents should adopt the C.M.N. model to achieve that momentum: education, advocacy and prayer.
Investigating capital punishment, Catholics will discover, according to the D.P.I.C., for every eight death row inmates executed, one is exonerated.
Catholics will also learn how states’ illusions about more humane ways to kill only lead to new, crueler murder methods. Consider Alabama’s experience with nitrogen gas executions.
In October 2025, Anthony Boyd – a 54-year-old Black man, with a compelling innocence claim – became the eighth man in the state to die from this experimental method, which suffocates people by releasing nitrogen gas.
Witnesses to Boyd’s murder describe him convulsing and thrashing and gasping more than 225 times during his 40 minute ordeal. In her dissent on the court’s order refusing to stay Boyd’s execution, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said this execution method would subject Boyd to “intense psychological torment.”
For every eight persons executed in the U.S., one is exonerated. D.P.I.C.
Troubled by capital punishment’s fallibility and repulsed by its barbarism, educated Catholics will advocate more for its abolition. Imagine, for instance, the impact Ohio’s two million Catholics – 16 percent of the state’s population – could have if they lobbied for pending legislation to repeal the state’s death penalty, with 56 percent of Ohioans supporting L.W.O.P. over capital punishment.
Engaging with C.M.N. and the most prominent abolitionist group, Death Penalty Action will enhance Catholics’ advocacy.
Our faith must guide and sustain our work. Because encountering so much death can understandably become dispiriting, we’ll need to rely upon God’s help, mercy and grace. And we most importantly must find a community of believers, who reinforce our abolitionist commitment.
This solidarity should encourage us to shape a society where more offenders receive justice and mercy, more victims are made whole and victims and offenders reconcile. Advancing this holistic vision we’ll convince others: we can be safe and hold murderers accountable without descending to the perpetrator’s level.