Newman on capital punishment – The Catholic Thing

Even if we just confined ourselves to scripture, or to the consensus of the Fathers of the Church, or to the consistent teaching of the popes down to Benedict XVI, there can be no question whatsoever that the Church has taught irreformably that capital punishment can be licit in principle. That is not to deny that some of the Fathers and some of these popes have recommended against using it in practice, but the point is that even they acknowledged that it is not intrinsically wrong to inflict the death penalty. The death penalty was not a topic St. John Henry Newman, the newly named Doctor of the Church, said a great deal about, but what he did say is important.