Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City said the botched execution on April 29 of an Oklahoma inmate “highlights the brutality of the death penalty” and should bring the nation to “consider whether we should adopt a moratorium on the death penalty or even abolish it altogether.” The planned execution of Clayton Lockett, a convicted killer, in McAlester, Okla., using a new three-drug lethal injection protocol, failed, leaving Lockett showing signs of pain and causing prison officials to halt the procedure. Lockett later died of a heart attack. The state attorney general’s office agreed to a six-month stay of execution for Charles Warner, an inmate scheduled to be executed two hours after Lockett. Gov. Mary Fallin also ordered the state’s department of corrections to conduct a “full review of Oklahoma’s execution procedures to determine what happened and why” during the execution. Archbishop Coakley, in a statement on April 30, said, “How we treat criminals says a lot about us as a society.” The culture of death, he added, “threatens to completely erode our sense of the innate dignity of the human person.”
Oklahoma Bishop: Death Penalty ‘Brutal’
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In this episode of Inside the Vatican, Colleen Dulle and Gerard O’Connell discuss the 2025 Jubilee Year, beginning on Christmas Eve 2024 and ending in January 2026.
Pope Francis prayed that the Jubilee Year may become “a season of hope” and reconciliation in a world at war and suffering humanitarian crises as he opened the Holy Door in St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve.
‘If God can visit us, even when our hearts seem like a lowly manger, we can truly say: Hope is not dead; hope is alive and it embraces our lives forever!’
Inspired by his friend and mentor Henri Nouwen, Metropolitan Borys Gudziak, leader of Ukrainian Catholics in the U.S., invites listeners in his Christmas Eve homily to approach the manger with renewed awe and openness.
I was not choosen by the Lord to juge anybody ...
If the Pope is ever assigned jury duty, that is exactly what he will have to do.
This jury was assigned to judge and proclaim an appropriate sentence. To do otherwise would have been a failure of their duty.
When people cry about the death penalty, they seem to be ignoring what happened to the victims to get the accused a guilty verdict with a sentence of death.