Even before France's National Assembly abolished capital punishment in 1981, the nation's Catholic bishops had already said the death penalty was incompatible with the Gospel
France has paid tribute to Robert Badinter, the Socialist politician who began his term as the country's Minister of Justice (1981-86) fighting to end the death penalty. Badinter, who later became president of the Constitutional Court and then a senator,
died on February 9 at age ninety-five.
Forty years later, Guy Aurenche -- a French human rights lawyer and longtime leader of the Action by Christians Against Torture (ACAT) -- remembers Badinter's intervention, a few weeks after the National Assembly's vote to end capital punishment. "I want to thank the Catholics and the Church who participated in the awareness campaign for the abolition of the death penalty," the former justice minister declared during a debate organized in the autumn of 1981 at the Institut Catholique in Paris.
Indeed, in the several years leading up this, Catholic abolitionists did much of the spadework. "It was from the grassroots that awareness arose," emphasized Aurenche, who was then a young lawyer and fledgling president of ACAT.
The involvement of the French bishops
The French Catholic bishops began efforts to outlaw capital punishment back in the mid-1970s. Cardinal François Marty of Paris, who was already a member of the French branch of ACAT, was one of the most active. He notably weighed-in on the 1976 trial of Patrick Henry, a criminal who kidnapped, held captive, and killed a seven-year old boy.
The cardinal warned against "the temptation to demand swift justice, or even to call for a summary execution" in the case. "If we want to safeguard the notion of human personhood, now threatened, we must resist the temptation of vindictive anger," he said.
Bishop André Fauchet of Troyes – where Henry's trial took place – was also instrumental. In a survey published in 2000, the daily newspaper Libération revealed that the bishop's commitment weighed on the scale and on the conscience of Catholics. "Voting for the death penalty was incompatible with their Christian faith. And their bishop reminded them of that," the paper said.
Bishop Fauchet would go on to be elected chairman of the French Bishops Conference's (CEF) commission social issues. Under his leadership the CEF issued a document in 1978 that strongly urged the abolition of the death penalty "To condemn a man to death is to deny him the possibility of redemption. For a Christian, it is to doubt the power of grace, the universality of redemption, and the possibility of conversion," it said. "The right to life is absolute, and the death penalty is one of the forms of contempt for human life."
The bishops' commission had worked on the text at the request of the CEF permanent council: it was still necessary for this position to be officially recognized. "At the end of this reflection, can we affirm, as bishops, that the death penalty is unacceptable?" the document asked. "For their part, the signatories of this note believe that the death penalty should be abolished in France," it said.
Updating the Catechism of the Catholic Church
"Ten bishops in favor of the abolition of the death penalty," was the headline in a January 1978 issue of L'Aurore, a now-defunct Socialist newspaper. Indeed, the bishops' text did not go unnoticed, as Robert Badinter noted years later in his book L'Abolition. "The episcopal declaration spoke eloquently of the incompatibility between the death penalty and Christianity," he pointed out in the volume, which was published in 2000.
Of course, the "Catechism of the Catholic Church" had long allowed that capital punishment might be justified in the rarest of cases. But L'Osservatore Romano, in a January 23, 1977 article on Patrick Henry's trial, noted Badinter's effort to end the death penalty. "Every human life is sacred and inviolable. Regardless of the crimes he may have committed, however sullied his conscience may be, a person does not lose his fundamental right to life - a primary, inviolable, and inalienable right," the Vatican paper said.
But it was only many years later that the words in the Catechism regarding capital punishment were updated. This was done by Pope Francis in June 2018 when he added this clause to article 2267: "The Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that 'the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person', and it works with determination for its abolition worldwide."
