THERE is no beating around the bush: Pope Francis changed the teaching of the Catholic Church on capital punishment. He did so by revising the relevant text in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the authoritative volume containing Church doctrines.

The old text in Paragraph 2267 stated: “Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.”

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