Background
The death penalty had support from early Catholic theologians; Saint Ambrose encouraged members of the clergy to pronounce and even carry out capital punishment; Saint Augustine answered objections to capital punishment rooted in the fifth commandment in The City of God. Augustine's argument is as such: "Since the agent of authority is but a sword in the hand, it is in no way contrary to the commandment `Thou shalt not kill' for the representative of the state's authority to put criminals to death". Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus also argued that civil authority to carry out capital punishment was supported by scripture.
Pope Innocent III required Peter Waldo and the Waldensians to accept that "secular power can, without mortal sin, exercise judgement of blood, provided that it punishes with justice, not out of hatred, with prudence, not precipitation" as a prerequisite for reconciliation with the church. During the Middle Ages and into the modern period, the Inquisition was authorized by the Holy See to turn over heretics to secular authority for execution, and the Papal States carried out executions for a variety of offences.
The Roman Catechism (1566) codified the teaching that God had entrusted civil authorities with the power over life and death. Doctors of the Church Robert Bellarmine and Alphonsus Liguori, as well as modern theologions such as Francisco de Vitoria, Thomas More, and Francisco Suárez continued this tradition; Pope Pius XII issued an allocution to medical experts to that effect.
Read more about this topic: Capital Punishment In Vatican City
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