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Pope Leo XIV called the death penalty “inadmissible” on Saturday morning, in a post on X marking the World Day Against the Death Penalty.
“The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” the pope wrote. Justice and the common good, he added, can be secured through “effective systems of detention” that “do not completely deprive those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption.”
By late morning in the United States, the post had drawn nearly 3 million views.
Leo never named the United States. He had no need to.
The message belongs to the calendar, since the world day falls on Oct. 10 every year.
Pope Francis marked it in 2024 with a post calling the death penalty “always inadmissible,” while Leo let last year’s observance pass without one.
Providence handled this year’s timing. Two days earlier, the Pentagon announced that it would livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army major who killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood in 2009.
A death staged for an audience
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a conservative outlet on Thursday. The execution is set for 1 p.m. on Dec. 3 at Fort Hood, Al Jazeera reported, the same hour Hasan opened fire 17 years ago. President Donald Trump had authorized the firing squad on Monday.
Asked whether the broadcast would happen, Trump shrugged off the question. “Well, they’re making a determination about that, but he will be killed,” he told reporters on Friday.
Hasan’s crime was monstrous, and no Catholic is asking anyone to pretend otherwise. Alonzo Lunsford, a former Army staff sergeant whom Hasan shot seven times, has said his faith required him to forgive the man. He also begged the country not to watch. “Don’t do that because when you do that, you’re dishonoring those that made the supreme sacrifice,” Lunsford told Fox News.
Parolin: “Total opposition”
The Vatican answered before the pope did. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, spoke with reporters on Friday evening at a Rome event honoring St. John Henry Newman.
“It is truly incomprehensible that anyone would want to use this method in this day and age,” Parolin said. “It is certainly unacceptable to turn death into a spectacle. However guilty the person may be, there are other ways.”
Then he stated the Church’s teaching without qualification. “The Church’s position is one of total opposition to the death penalty,” the cardinal said, calling it “incompatible with human dignity” and adding that it “does not serve as a deterrent.” He also told reporters a formal statement from the Holy See would follow.
Archbishop Paul Coakley, the president of the U.S. bishops, had already called the plan “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death” that “must be reconsidered.”
Americans are with Leo
On this question, the pope’s own country is standing with him, and the evidence keeps piling up inside Trump’s party. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina called the livestream “beyond disgusting.” Sen. John Curtis of Utah warned that “a civilization erodes when it cultivates an appetite for executions as a form of entertainment,” and Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia said flatly that “live-streaming executions is what jihadists do.”
Nikki Haley, Trump’s own former U.N. ambassador, joined them. Even JD Vance, a Catholic convert, could only promise reporters at the Cincinnati airport that he would not tune in, as I wrote earlier today.
Underneath the outrage sits a long shift in public opinion. Gallup found last October that 52% of Americans support the death penalty, the lowest level since 1972, and among adults under 35 the figure falls to 41%, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. A generation is walking toward the pope’s position on its own.
The loudest dissent came from MAGA voices in the pope’s replies. One verified account, Erin Derham Van Swol, told the Vicar of Christ to stop making up his own rules and to “read your Bible again with humility.”
Another poster called the message “in direct contradiction of Scripture” and signed off with a sneer: “Sola Popa.”
A third account opened with “Are you sure, Your Holiness?”
He is sure. Pope Francis revised the Catechism in 2018 to teach that the death penalty is inadmissible, and Leo has now repeated those words to an audience of millions. Strangers on X are free to argue with the Church, though they should know which side of the argument they are on.
Providence keeps its own calendar
This is the second time in ten days that events have lined up behind the pope, and it is hard to read the calendar any other way: Providence seems to stand with Leo too. On Oct. 1, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee ignored Leo and his state’s bishops and sent Christa Pike to a botched execution. A week later, the Pentagon proposed to turn the next one into content.
Leo named the contradiction a year ago. Speaking to reporters at Castel Gandolfo on Sept. 30, 2025, he put the matter in terms no campaign consultant can spin. “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion,’ but says, ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life,” the pope said.
He returned to the subject on April 24, the same day the Justice Department cleared the way for federal firing squads. In a video message to an event at DePaul University marking 15 years since Illinois abolished the death penalty, with former Gov. Pat Quinn in the room, Leo offered his support “to those who advocate for the abolition of the death penalty in the United States of America and around the world.” The Church affirms, he said, “that the dignity of the person is not lost even after very serious crimes are committed.”
The conviction predates the papacy. Accepting an honorary doctorate at the Universidad Católica Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo in Chiclayo, Peru, in 2023, then-Cardinal Robert Prevost said a Catholic “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.)
Cardinal Parolin’s “total opposition” leaves the Republican Party nowhere to hide. A party that schedules a firing squad for a streaming audience cannot keep its claim to the pro-life movement, whatever its platform says about the unborn. Republicans run the White House, the Pentagon and both chambers of Congress, and so far their leaders have offered a shrug from Trump and averted eyes from Vance.
Catholics owe these men something harder than outrage. We either replace them or we convert them, and the work of conversion starts with telling them plainly that the pope means what he says.
Leo has already done his part. On a Saturday in October, with the Pentagon counting down to Dec. 3, he reminded the world that even Nidal Hasan was made in the image of God.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV, Cardinal Parolin and the millions of Americans (Catholics and countless others of goodwill) who refuse to let a human death become a viewing event, no matter how grave the crime behind it.
In a season when our government treats killing as content, we are rooted in a faith that believes no one lies beyond the reach of redemption. The survivors of Fort Hood deserve justice and peace, and neither one arrives through a livestream.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for that witness. They want a Church that keeps faith with the Gospel when the powerful want an audience.
If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of every life against a politics of spectacle and death, I am asking you to join us.
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Are there "serious consequences" for the mass death and suffering that Hegsdeath and #47 and company have directly and often gleefully caused? And while we're at it, the mass death and suffering indirectly but definitely caused by far-right powerful people gleefully enacting their "policies"? No? Different strokes for different folks and cherry-picked "justice" reigns supreme, just like the way the Supreme Court justices operate?
I nearly choked when I read and heard about this ... it is deplorable. I am glad the United States Bishops and Pope Leo are speaking out about it .... we need ALL religious congregations and churches to speak out.....