Pro-life vs. pro-life?
• Oct 20, 2025
According to Pope Leo, “Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life.” (“Pro-choice Illinois senator declines Catholic award,” October 17)
For decades, I’ve worked for protection of preborn babies, affirming the “absolute inviolability of innocent human life” (Evangelium Vitae, 57). John Cardinal O’Connor told me by letter it was clear to him that I am “actively seeking to protect the sanctity of human life.”
I hold with the Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566) that the just use of execution to “punish the guilty and protect the innocent” is “an act of paramount obedience" to the commandment prohibiting murder, and that it naturally tends to the preservation of human life. The first edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) said the common good requires rendering the aggressor unable to inflict harm, which grounds the traditional Church teaching on the right and duty to punish commensurately with a crime’s gravity, “not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty,” where bloodless means are insufficient to protect human lives and public order.
Please explain how I, without dissent or deviation from 19 centuries of pro-life Church teaching, went from being pro-life to being “not really pro-life.”
—Steve Serra, Mission Viejo
