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Hours after the president of the U.S. bishops called it barbaric, JD Vance stood at the Cincinnati airport on Friday and washed his hands of a public execution.
Reporters asked the vice president, a Catholic convert, whether the Pentagon’s plan to livestream the firing-squad death of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan squared with his faith. “I don’t know that that’s actually going to happen,” he said, before boarding a flight to a campaign rally in Lima, Ohio. Then he added: “If it’s ultimately livestreamed, I’m not going to be watching it.”
Matthew’s Gospel records an older version of that answer. Pontius Pilate took water, washed his hands before the crowd and declared himself innocent of a just man’s blood (Matthew 27:24). Then he handed Jesus over to be crucified.
Vance raised no objection to the execution, or to the broadcast. He promised only to look away.
Make no mistake: the Republican Party is anti-life.
For as long as I have been alive, American politics has run on the claim that the GOP is the party of life. It is one of the most durable lies of my generation, and Catholics have paid for it at the ballot box again and again.
This second Trump presidency has brought one strange mercy. Many of us grew up singing Bernadette Farrell’s hymn “All That Is Hidden,” which takes its title from Luke’s Gospel. The Douay-Rheims renders the promise this way: “For there is not any thing secret that shall not be made manifest.” This week, a cruelty the American right kept half-hidden for a generation came fully into the light.
A firing squad, with a livestream
On Monday, the Pentagon announced that President Trump had approved Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recommendation to execute Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, by Army firing squad. If it goes forward on Dec. 3, it will be the military’s first execution since 1961 and its first by firing squad since 1945. (Trump revived the firing squad as a federal method this spring.)
Hegseth added a detail on Thursday. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it,” he told Real America’s Voice.
Hasan’s crime was monstrous, and the Church asks no one to forget the soldiers he gunned down. What the Church asks is harder. Since 2018, the Catechism has called the death penalty “inadmissible,” because a person’s dignity survives even the worst thing he has done.
Archbishop Paul Coakley answered the Pentagon on Friday morning, calling the livestream “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death.” His statement came nine days after my home state of Tennessee failed to kill Christa Pike with two doses of pentobarbital.
Pope Leo XIV named this contradiction more than a year ago. Outside Castel Gandolfo on Sept. 30, 2025, the American pope told reporters: “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion,’ but says, ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life. Someone who says that, ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
Leo has defended this conviction since before the conclave.
In a 2023 address in Chiclayo, Peru, then-Cardinal Robert Prevost asked the Church to “again embrace Cardinal Bernardin’s proposal — perhaps now more urgently than ever,” a reference to the late Chicago archbishop’s consistent ethic of life.
A Catholic, he said, “cannot truly claim to be ‘pro-life’ by maintaining a stance against abortion while simultaneously advocating in favor of the death penalty.” (The translation is Mike Lewis’s, at Where Peter Is.)
Read it twice. Then look at what the Republican Party is doing this fall.
Not even pro-birth
For years, on the campaign trail in Tennessee, I made a simple case: life begins at conception, but it doesn’t end at birth. Sister Joan Chittister, the Benedictine nun from Erie, Pennsylvania, said the same thing to Bill Moyers on PBS in 2004.
Opposing abortion does not by itself make anyone pro-life, she argued, when the concern stops at a child born and never reaches a child fed, educated and housed. Her verdict: “That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth.”
For a long time, I thought Republicans had at least earned that lesser label. Even that turned out to be too generous.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act pulled $911 billion out of Medicaid, the program that pays for roughly four in ten births in this country. Catholic hospitals, where so many of those babies arrive, lean on Medicaid for nearly a quarter of their revenue, according to Sister Mary Haddad of the Catholic Health Association.
When the administration gutted USAID, the damage reached the Church’s work abroad. Catholic Relief Services, which drew about half of its $1.5 billion budget from USAID, began laying off staff in February 2025, and Caritas Internationalis called the cuts “catastrophic.” I have called them demonic, and I stand by the word.
A party that takes food and medicine from the poorest children on earth to post a savings figure has lost its moral bearings.
The rot runs through the whole party
None of this belongs to Trump alone, or to the MAGA faction that cheers him on. A few Republicans did object this week; Sen. Thom Tillis called the livestream “beyond disgusting” while insisting Hasan should still die.
And when the country’s highest-ranking Catholic, a man two popes have already corrected, treats a public killing as a matter of personal viewing habits, the rot has reached the whole body of the party.
My party, and the ballot
My own party is far from perfect.
I have spent much of my public life trying to widen its tent, and in 2016 I wrote in TIME that the Democratic Party was failing its own promise of inclusiveness. Democrats still owe a real welcome to Catholics who hold the Church’s full teaching on the unborn.
Their advantage on this question is that they have never draped themselves in the language of life while lining up a firing squad.
The midterms are 25 days away. Cardinal Robert McElroy put the choice plainly from the pulpit of St. Matthew’s Cathedral on Sept. 27, speaking about the administration’s war on immigrants: “We must seek to convert our political representatives from tolerating this evil or replace them.” (I covered that homily here.) His principle reaches a livestreamed firing squad just as easily.
I’ll write more about the election in the days ahead. For now, remember what your ballot is really carrying.
A couple of names will appear for your district in November; behind them stands our posterity, the country our children and grandchildren will inherit.
Parties are secular vehicles, built and driven by fallible people. None of them is the Kingdom of God, and no Catholic owes one a blank check, mine included.
Bring the whole of the Church’s teaching into the voting booth, from the child in the womb to the man facing a firing squad, and let it weigh every name on your ballot.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV, Archbishop Coakley, Cardinal McElroy and every Catholic (and every person of goodwill) who refuses to let the state turn a man’s death into content.
We believe that the child in the womb, the mother in the delivery room, the migrant in a detention center and the condemned man at Fort Hood all bear the same image of God. A movement that defends only some of them has stopped defending life at all.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that tells the truth about power, even when the powerful call themselves pro-life. With a vote 25 days away, that hunger has never been more urgent.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of every human life against a politics of spectacle and cruelty — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
The Republican Party is more pro-poverty than pro-life. They must’ve heard someone say the Good Lord loves poor people so they’re working overtime to make sure the Good Lord has plenty to love.
Granted, my first comment was too flip. On a far more serious note, this scares me with respect to the potential response. So I'm begging those who are so furious they might do something rash.
Please understand that violence tends to beget more violence. It should be crystal clear that executing anyone publicly is designed to do just that. They are practically BEGGING for a violent retaliation so they can call in the military or invoke martial law. DO NOT TAKE THAT BAIT!!!!