The Catholic Church opposes the death penalty. Why don't white Catholics?

On Thursday, a slew of American Catholic publications, including America Magazine, National Catholic Register, National Catholic Reporter, Our Sunday Visitor, and Patheos Catholic announced their joint commitment to abolishing the death penalty in the United States. Prompted by an upcoming Supreme Court hearing on the use of certain drug combinations in lethal injections, the statement represents a rare and welcome moment of unity among Catholics of varied political commitments. No such unity can be found among the 78.2 million American Catholics themselves, and that’s because one group opposes these publications’ position on the death penalty: white Catholics.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church holds that if non-lethal methods are sufficient for preventing a criminal from doing further harm, then those methods should be preferred over lethal punishment. It isn’t difficult to imagine why: The Catholic Church values a consistent respect for human life, the kind of approach Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernadin called “a seamless garment”—that a person’s guilt or innocence is irrelevant to the inherent value of their life. That’s why the Church has long opposed capital punishment. Pope John Paul II was an especially eloquent and dedicated advocate for life. Pope Francis, too, has called for the abolition of the death penalty, saying, “It is impossible to imagine that states today cannot make use of another means than capital punishment to defend peoples’ lives from an unjust aggressor.”

With overwhelming papal consensus and such sound theological reasoning on the Church’s side, one might presume American Catholics are generally united in opposing the use of capital punishment. But that isn’t the case, and a 2014 Pew report found that a significant racial gap divides American Catholics on the subject of capital punishment.