Pope Leo XIV just posted that the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person. He added that the common good can be protected and justice can be done without killing the guilty, since modern detention systems can keep the public safe while still leaving room for redemption. He used the hashtag #NoDeathPenalty.
This is not a new position for him or the Church. Leo, the first American pope — elected in May 2025, formerly Cardinal Robert Prevost of Chicago — said the same thing in April, when he sent a video message to DePaul University backing American efforts to abolish capital punishment, and again in January in his address to the diplomatic corps. It follows the change Pope Francis made to the Catechism in 2018, which moved the Church’s official teaching to say the death penalty is inadmissible in all cases as an attack on human dignity. Before that revision, the Catechism had allowed it only as a last resort to defend human life.
The timing is deliberate. Saturday is the World Day Against the Death Penalty. The post also landed two days after the Pentagon announced it will livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people and wounding 32 others in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting. The execution is set for December 3 at Fort Hood. To be precise, the Pope’s post did not name Hasan or the execution — but it came just hours after his top deputy, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, said explicitly that the planned public execution was “unacceptable,” calling it “truly incomprehensible” and “unacceptable to turn death into a spectacle.”
The head of the U.S. bishops conference, Archbishop Paul Coakley, said he felt “shock” and “great sorrow,” calling the livestream plan “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death.” On the other side, the Trump administration has been expanding capital punishment: in April it moved to bring back the firing squad and the electric chair for federal executions, and Trump has framed the Hasan livestream as a deterrent — telling a Syracuse television interviewer the public execution would “set an example.”
In short, the Pope is restating the current Catholic teaching that even the worst criminals keep their human dignity, that society can protect itself without the death penalty, and that the possibility of redemption should not be closed off completely. Whether the December 3 execution goes ahead as planned remains to be seen — further legal proceedings could still delay it.