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Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, condemned the Trump administration on Friday for its plan to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009.
“It is with shock and great sorrow that I have learned of the Department of War’s decision to publicly livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan,” Coakley said in a statement released by the bishops’ conference. “Our God is the God of life. In no way can Hasan’s actions be condoned but this decision is a barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered.”
The archbishop quoted St. Paul’s instruction to the Romans, “Do not repay anyone evil for evil.” A public execution, even of a man who has done grave harm, “will only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people,” he wrote.
Hasan walked into a medical processing center at Fort Hood on Nov. 5, 2009, and opened fire on soldiers preparing to deploy. He killed twelve soldiers and one civilian, and he wounded 32 others.
A military jury sentenced him to death in 2013. President Trump approved the execution this month, and the Army scheduled the firing squad for Dec. 3 at 1 p.m., on the same base, on a Thursday afternoon close to the hour of the massacre.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth supplied the rest in an interview with Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec that aired Wednesday.
“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,” he said. Asked whether Hasan had made any final requests, Hegseth answered: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on Dec. 3.”
On Thursday the Pentagon confirmed that the execution will be livestreamed. The U.S. military has not put anyone to death since 1961, and the last public execution on American soil took place in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1936.
The United Nations human rights office has already warned that broadcasting the killing live would amount to a public execution.
Coakley’s statement draws the line exactly where Catholic teaching draws it. He names Hasan’s crime without softening it. What he refuses to accept is a government that would turn the killing of a prisoner into something to stream.
Nothing about this is new for him. After Oklahoma botched the execution of Clayton Lockett in 2014, Coakley said the episode “really highlights the brutality of the death penalty” and raised the idea of a moratorium.
In August, as his home state put another prisoner to death, he warned that Oklahoma “continues along an ominous path” (his statement asked Catholics to pray for the victims and the condemned man alike).
When the bishops elected Coakley president in Baltimore last November, I praised the choice. Plenty of my progressive friends thought I was being naïve. Coakley is no liberal, and he has never pretended to be one.
Eleven months later, I am more confident in him than I was that night. He has defended immigrant families against the administration’s ICE raids, and he stood with San Diego’s Muslims after the mosque shooting there in May. Friday’s statement came less than a day after the Pentagon confirmed its plans, which is fast for an institution that usually moves at the speed of a committee.
The timing matters. Nine days ago, Tennessee tried to kill Christa Pike with two doses of pentobarbital, and she survived. As I reported the next day, Gov. Bill Lee had denied her clemency two days earlier.
On Oct. 1, Tennessee’s three Catholic bishops (David Talley of Memphis, J. Mark Spalding of Nashville and Mark Beckman of Knoxville) joined Episcopal and Lutheran bishops in a letter asking Lee to commute her sentence. “Accountability need not require another death,” they wrote.
The bishops are following the man in Rome. On Sept. 30, 2025, outside Castel Gandolfo, Pope Leo XIV answered a reporter’s question about Cardinal Blase Cupich’s plan to honor Sen. Dick Durbin. “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 in April, on the same day the Justice Department revived the firing squad for federal executions. In a video message to an event at DePaul University marking fifteen years since Illinois abolished the death penalty, 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.”
His conviction predates the papacy by years.
On March 9, 2011, the day Gov. Pat Quinn signed Illinois’s abolition into law, a Chicago-born Augustinian named Robert Prevost typed a note 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,” he wrote, a message the public never saw until WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times found it through a records request last year.
The Pentagon has scheduled Hasan’s death for the first week of Advent, when the Church spends its days waiting for a child. Hegseth wants the country to gather around its screens that Thursday and watch soldiers shoot a paralyzed man in a wheelchair.
Coakley has answered on behalf of the Church before the date arrives, and he has answered well.
The families of the thirteen people Hasan killed deserve justice and the prayers of every Catholic in this country. None of that requires a livestream execution.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Archbishop Coakley, with Tennessee’s bishops and with Pope Leo XIV, along with countless others of goodwill who believe that a man’s dignity survives even the worst thing he has ever done.
We pray for the dead of Fort Hood and for the families who have carried that November afternoon for seventeen years. We also refuse to let our government teach Americans to treat a killing as entertainment.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that tells the truth about violence, whoever commits it. They want a Church with the courage to say that the state’s killing is still killing, and right now, with a firing squad scheduled for broadcast, that hunger is urgent.
If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a culture of death, I am asking you to join us.
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These people are killing pregnant women in the name of life being sacred even if baby is not viable. You can NOT condemn abortion and at the same time glorify the death penalty.
Yeah for the USCCB finally using their platform to call out immorality! I have often criticized them for remaining silent, so now I will give them some support.