When Leo XIV states that “one is not truly pro-life who opposes abortion but admits the death penalty”, he not only launches a contemporary slogan: with a single stroke he sweeps away centuries of Catholic teaching, upheld by saints, doctors, and canonized popes. The Church’s tradition is clear and constant: abortion is always an abominable crime against the defenseless innocent, while the death penalty, under certain circumstances, can be a legitimate exercise of authority to protect the common good.The clarity on this point was not the heritage of a few, but a truth that runs through the entire history of the Church. Canonized authors as diverse as St. Ephrem, St. Hilary, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Peter Canisius, St. Robert Bellarmine, and St. Alphonsus Liguori agreed in recognizing that capital punishment, although in many cases not recommended to be applied, is in principle morally legitimate. It was not a secondary matter: all distinguished with clarity between killing the innocent—always illicit—and punishing the guilty—possible under legitimate conditions—.Even St. John Henry Newman, who is to be proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in a month by Leo XIV himself, developed the same idea in his Lecture 8 of the Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, where Newman assumed as evident that civil authority had in its hands the power to apply the death penalty, in continuity with the Church’s moral tradition.On the other hand, the condemnation of abortion has been very firm. St. Thomas described it as a particularly grave crime because it eliminates the human being in its first stage of life and deprives it even of the possibility of baptism. St. Alphonsus qualified it without mincing words as direct homicide and always illicit. Popes like Innocent I and Pius V reiterated the same doctrine, the first in his letters to the bishops, the second imposing automatic excommunication on anyone who procured it. Pius X, in his Major Catechism, made it clear that the fifth commandment prohibits every attack on innocent life, but does not exclude the right of authority to apply just penalties, including capital punishment, against proven criminals.
All this forms part of a single doctrinal thread: abortion never, under any circumstance; the death penalty, only under strict conditions and with legitimate authority. The Church always knew how to distinguish what today has been presented as a confusion that is difficult to understand. That is why Leo XIV’s words are so striking. By presenting himself as a judge of what it means “to be pro-life,” he lightly disauthorizes giants of the faith: from the Fathers like Ephrem and Augustine to later doctors like Thomas Aquinas, Bellarmine, or Newman. And along the way, he undoes the coherence of a doctrine maintained for centuries.