SPENGLER: Pope Francis Is Woefully Wrong about the Death Penalty.

The ancient rabbinic view is close to that of St. John Paul II in the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae. He argued that the death penalty should be “very rare and practically non-existent.” But there is a great gulf fixed between “very rare and practically non-existent,” and the complete abolition of the death penalty, as Pope Francis now teaches. The abolition of the death penalty in principle would in my view weaken the foundation of all states, and most emphatically that of the best of states. It would do irreparable harm to the legitimacy of modern states, an elusive issue that is set in clear relief by the issue of the death penalty.

Consider an extreme example. The State of Israel has executed just one criminal since its founding in 1948, namely Adolf Eichmann, whose crimes surpass the human capacity to absorb horror and whose life was an affront to God as well as man. Israel now confines in prison Arab terrorists who willfully murdered young children and old people, but has never executed any of them; whether it should have done so may be debated, but the fact is that Eichmann’s crimes are of an entirely different order than that of a mere bus-bomber or child rapist.

For Israel, Eichmann had to be executed as a matter of raison d’etat. The nation-state of the Jewish people cannot fulfill its purpose if it is unable to rid the world of a monster who organized the systematic murder of millions of Jews.

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