Civil values ​​of an extraordinary pope and the abolition of the death penalty.

Luis Arroyo Zapatero and Antonio Muñoz Aunión

Honorary Rector of the University of Castilla La Mancha and president of the International Social Social Society / Prof. International Law of the University of Jaen and director of the International Death Penalty Network

The first surprise that Pope Francis gave us was that he not only went to Catholics or only Christians, but to all people of good will. And the first surprise for jurists was that on his first Holy Thursday in 2013 Instead of going to wash the unpolluted feet of twelve cardinals in the Vatican he went to the youth jail of Regina Coeli and washed the feet of precisely twelve young people, two of them women and, To top it off, One of them Muslim. Everything said was like this. You have returned this last Holy Thursday. Just in case, A few days later he published an "apostolic exhortation", with a severe criticism of what has been called neoliberalism and that had led to the crisis of 2008, condemning misery to millions of people and denounced that treating them as "discarded". Soon the first encyclical, Laudato yes, with which he ended the frivolous or denialist treatment of climate change.

By informing me of the entire life of the new Pope, I warned that the precipitous visit to the island of Lesbos had a lot to do with the status of Italian emigrants from his parents and with the tragedy that usually accompanies migrations, as happened to those who embarked on the ship for which they had paid the tickets that were going to transfer them to the Americas and wreck and not a few died, and in which they did not embark because they could not yet sell all their belongings.

Pope Francis had already demonstrated against the death penalty without exceptions to criminalists around the world and his international scientific organizations in Rome in 2014. In the same procedure he formulated the full disqualification of life imprisonment as a undercover death penalty. But although the catechism written in the edition of 1992 By John Paul II he had widely disqualified the death penalty, I maintained it as an exception in the section 2267 For "cases in which this is the only way to effectively defend human lives from the unfair aggressor", a clause that allowed its abusive use in many countries, as happens to the systems that are intended exceptional. In that exception the extremist Catholics were supported to defend or excuse it.

The 20 march 2015 A private audience of the Pope with Federico Mayor Zaragoza took place, President of the International Death Penalty Commission, that had been created in the 2010 At the request of President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. We were accompanied by Asunta Viva, General Secretary of the Commission, Roberto Carles, General Secretary of the Latin American Association of Criminalists and Criminologists and who subscribes. It impresses severely being alone with the Pope around the table of that office that we have seen so many times when he receives the heads of state. Seeing the Pope dressed up and speaking in Spanish produced an almost physical sensation. Not him, Neither Federico Mayor stopped talking about everything, less than the death penalty, because Francisco, when sitting on the table towards greater text and said "on this matter I already occupy me". So older happened to alert about the peace men who had been killed from Kennedy to Isaac Rabin. Francisco said in Argentino who was "a great". The Pope told what he intended to say in the American Congress and at the UN at the time his immediate trip, What took the greatest to prevent him from Republicans, although as a reader of his first apostolic exhortation he knew he was well enlightened. We did not know until later, But the Pope had just been informed that the next morning in an outdoor mass in Naples a possible attack of the mafia had been detected, that does not forgive the Pope to excommunicate them. The same thing happens to them that not a few Catholic conservatives, They don't like the Pope to tell them what is wrong.

A few months later we went to the Vatican to present to the Pope the book that scientific societies had edited accompanying his text "for a really human justice". When after delivering José Luis de la Cuesta the book I went to present, He didn't give me a chance to finish. "You are the death penalty", And then he ordered “and tell the older and our friend of Seville -Milá de Salinas assumption, founder of the Spanish Association against the Death Penalty in 1977- that I have put Cardinal Schönborn from Vienna to study the matter and I have told him to hurry ”. So it was, fortunately, and the 1 August 2018 The Spanish Jesuit Cardinal Luis Ladaria announced it, President of what was first Inquisition, then Holy Office and that from 1965 It is called Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. It's not just a name change, It is the resignation to the purifying fire.

The letter, expressly approved by the Pope, states that, If in the past the death penalty could seem an acceptable instrument for the protection of the common good, Today is increasingly alive the awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after having committed very serious crimes. He also says that a new understanding of the meaning of criminal sanctions has been extended, that must be oriented above all to the rehabilitation and social reintegration of criminals and, in the end, that effective detention systems have been implemented that guarantee the necessary defense of citizens, All of which has resulted in a new consciousness that recognizes the inadmissibility of the death penalty. The letter assumes previous arguments of the Pontiff himself, especially that the death penalty implies a cruel treatment, Inhuman and degrading, which applies with broad social and racial discrimination and that is irreparable to judicial errors. To base everything he refers to the letter delivered to the President of the International Commission Federico Mayor Zaragoza. Indeed, The Pope, As he told us at the mentioned meeting, He had taken care of the matter and fulfilled what was in the sphere of his competition, while maintaining its commitment to the international abolitionist movement. The Pope has reaffirmed the meaning of the reform of the catechism in his speech to the members of the International Death Penalty on the occasion of his visit the 17 from December to 2018. Recognizes there the Pope that, In the previous time, The first reforms of the relevant article of the Catechism, “The current degree of the development of human rights had not been reached and the resource to the death penalty was presented as a logical and fair consequence. Even in the pontifical state this inhuman form had been used, ignoring the primacy of mercy on justice ”. With the renewed catechism the official doctrine is that “the death penalty is always inadmissible, because it undermines the inviolability and dignity of the person ".

For church times the process has been very fast. To base the abolition on the idea of ​​the dignity of human beings was a great contribution to 70 Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Francisco has been very consistent with his reform and renewed ideas program since his first apostolic exhortation of 2013 and his critical vision of the international economic order, With its encyclical on the care of the environment, Laudato yes, With his campaign against hunger or his key diplomatic actions in places of war such as Ukraine, Iran, Syria and in recent years again about Ukraine and on Gaza, or in risky visits such as the Central African Republic or Chile, although here for many different reasons.

The Pope was above all a normal person, that had known ordinary studies, The friendships and treatment of boys and girls had lived the Argentine tragedy in which the violence that incorporated sectors of liberation theology responded by genocidal military who, yes indeed, They were of daily mass and after receiving the communion from the Nuncio and the primacy they ordered coldly throwing the prisoners from military aircraft on the high seas, After countless torture. He did what he could be superior to the Jesuits and "what he could" is always a lot in a dictatorship and has great merit. Between a violent theology and a genocidal theology to him he was entrusted. Until the last day. It is worth reading the text of his blessing City and the World Sunday on the Vatican page and complete it with what was its first Sunday of Resurrection in the year 2013. It looks clear that it was a reformist beneficial, A friend of good will beings, an unconditional of those in need and discriminated. In this stormy time we have lost a good compass to pursue the common good.

But also the last day has prompted us to believe in hope, a principle that is also the title of your latest book, Hope never disappoints, And that leads me to remember his first holy year, that of the Misericordia, which is the classic word for what we call today Solidarity.