In his New Years address, Pope Francis appealed for his followers to to reject abortion, calling for a “firm commitment” to protect and respect life from conception to natural death. The 88 year-old Pope, led a New Year’s Day Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on Wednesday that was dedicated to Mary, the mother of Jesus. In recent years, the Pope has spoke out more emphatically about abortion than he did at the start of his pontificate
In his homily, he prayed that all would learn to care for “every child born of a woman” and to protect “the precious gift of life: life in the womb, the lives of children, the lives of the suffering, the poor, the elderly, the lonely and the dying.” In the first years of his papacy, he previously blasted small-minded rules” about hot-button issues such as abortion.
He also said “I ask for a firm commitment to respect the dignity of human life from conception to natural death, so that each person may cherish his or her own life and all may look with hope to the future,” he said, using the terminology of the church’s opposition to abortion and euthanasia. He has regularly referred to procuring an abortion as “hiring a hitman to solve a problem.”
He recently courted international controversy, in Belgium when he criticized its abortion law as “homicidal.” In recent statements, the Pope has also condemned executions. We reported how the Pope called for Christians to pray for an end to the death penalty in America. The Pope has condemned executions before but has rarely singled out a specific nation. While the Vatican itself abolished the death penalty in 1969, the issue has remained controversial in Catholic circles. For the vast majority of Church history, executions were considered legitimate.
In a statement to his 50 million X followers, the Pontiff said “Let us pray that their sentences may be commuted, changed,” he continued. “Let us think of these brothers and sisters of ours and ask the Lord for the grace to save them from death.” He added that he wanted his followers should pray “for those on death row in the United States.”
Over the history of the Catholic Church, hundreds of people were executed on orders of the Vatican. The Church Doctors, influential thinkers who form the bedrock of Catholic doctrine, view execution as a legitimate form of punishment. Important figures from Saint Ambrose to Augustine to Thomas Aquinas to Robert Bellarmine to Alphonsus Liguori all held that capital punishment was a vital function of the courts.
Over the last 25 years, the Holy See has shifted from its traditional perspective. John Paul II wrote in 1995 that leaders should “not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity,” adding that, in the modern world, “such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.” The Vatican no longer views capital punishment as appropriate in the modern world.
In a recent statement on the issue, Church officials wrote “increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes” and that more subtle methods of punishment have been introduced, “which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.”