As Trump Revives Firing Squads, Pope Leo XIV Salutes Efforts to End Death Penalty

Hours after the Justice Department authorized firing-squad executions for the first time since the 19th century, Leo XIV saluted the fifteenth anniversary of Illinois's abolition of the death penalty.

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The Justice Department announced on Friday that federal executions can once again be carried out by firing squad, a method the United States government has not authorized since the 19th century.

Hours later, Pope Leo XIV released a video message to activists gathered at DePaul University in his hometown of Chicago. The occasion was the fifteenth anniversary of Illinois’s abolition of the death penalty.

“The Church affirms that the dignity of the person is not lost even after very serious crimes are committed,” the pope told the room.

In the short video, Leo offered what the Vatican described as his “support to those who advocate for the abolition of the death penalty in the United States of America and around the world.”

He celebrated Governor Pat Quinn’s 2011 decision to sign the repeal into law, cited the Catechism’s teaching that capital punishment is “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” and asked that the Illinois witness inspire others to take up “the same just cause.”

That was the public word.

The private one, which American Catholics only learned about last summer after a public-records request by WBEZ Chicago and the Chicago Sun-Times, was sent fifteen years ago. On March 9, 2011 — the day Governor Quinn signed the abolition into law — a Chicago-born Augustinian priest typed a short message into a form on the governor’s website.

“Dear Governor Quinn, THANK YOU for your courageous decision in signing into law the elimination of the death penalty. I know it was a difficult decision, but I applaud your vision and your understanding of the very complex matter. You have my full support!”

The signature at the bottom read “Robert F. Prevost.” Fourteen years later, he would be elected the first American pope.

I wrote about that letter last August, when the archives first surfaced it, because of what it revealed about the future Pope Leo XIV: years before he was elected to the papacy, he was already on the record against capital punishment. The message to Quinn was nothing more than a private thank-you typed into a web form — a Chicago priest quietly applauding a governor whose courage he admired.

Friday’s DePaul address is that same conviction, grown up and broadcast to the world.

The timing was auspicious. A day earlier, speaking to reporters on the papal plane as he returned from his apostolic visit to Africa, the pope was asked about Iran’s recent surge of executions. He answered: “I condemn the taking of people’s lives. I condemn capital punishment.”

Last September, Leo told the country exactly what that conviction means for the American pro-life movement. “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion,’ but says, ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life,” he said at Castel Gandolfo, adding a line many U.S. bishops are still wrestling with: those who condemn abortion while embracing “the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States” are, in the pope’s judgment, also not pro-life.

Quoting Francis by name at DePaul, Leo reminded American Catholics that the teaching is not his invention. “This is why Pope Francis and my recent predecessors repeatedly insisted that the common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment,” he said.

The line could be read as a reminder to Catholics drawn to Washington’s new execution regime: they have placed themselves at odds with the entire Catholic magisterium, Francis included.

The federal government on Friday deepened that rupture.

The Justice Department’s order expands the available execution methods to include firing squads, gas asphyxiation, and electrocution, alongside the existing lethal-injection protocol. Washington intends to accelerate the machinery of state-sanctioned killing, even as the American-born pope tells his home country to go a different direction.

The juxtaposition matters for another reason.

Almost a year into his papacy, Leo has shown no interest in retreating from American political argument.

He has denounced ICE raids in his hometown of Chicago, stood with Cardinal Blase Cupich on immigration, and urged U.S. bishops to speak louder when Washington turns cruel. The Illinois message on Friday fits that pattern; it is not a departure from it.

Which raises a question American Catholics have been circling for months.

When the federal government of the United States revives the firing squad — and the man in the white cassock, a Chicago-native priest, declares again that human dignity survives even our worst crimes — it is fair to ask who is actually leading the free world on the moral questions that still matter.

The answer, for now, is Pope Leo XIV.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with the abolitionists who gathered at DePaul this weekend, with the nuns, priests, and Illinois Catholics who helped end state killing fifteen years ago, and with a pope who still believes — as he did in a short note to Pat Quinn in 2011 — that no human being forfeits the image of God, even after committing the worst of crimes.

In an America that now counts firing squads among its federal execution methods, Catholic faith cannot be collapsed into a partisan talking point. The Gospel demands more of us than that.

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If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the machinery of state-sanctioned killing — I am asking you to join us.

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