Should Pope Francis Change the Catechism on the Death Penalty?

I've said it before, but I'll say it again, Brian Holdsworth is wise beyond his young years!

His introduction:

Being able to rely on the Church to guide me in my life has been a constant source of liberation and comfort from all the dead-ends and anxiety a person without that kind of roadmap could face. So when it was recently announced that Pope Francis was revising the Catechism of the Catholic Church to say that capital punishment is always inadmissible, I have to admit, I was bothered a bit because I was familiar with several teachings and sayings by church fathers and doctors, saints, and other popes who have said otherwise. Now, since this news broke, several commentators, philosophers, and theologians have jumped on the topic to help us understand how to deal with this development because if the Catholic Church can change a teaching about what is true, then she can’t be the pillar of truth. So, I’m late to the party to offer my two cents because I’m not a theologian or a philosopher and I wasn’t sure if I’d have anything worth contributing to the conversation and if you want to check out what smarter and better educated people have said, go find Dr. Edward Feser’s article on First Things or listen to Trent Horn’s podcast for a couple of different perspectives on this. And if you do check them out, what you’ll find is a lot of conversation around the subtle nuances of papal infallibility and how the Catechism isn’t infallible and how this change doesn’t make capital punishment intrinsically evil which means that it doesn’t contradict previous allowances for it. And that’s all well and good and it’s helped me sort it out in my mind but after listening to and reading other commentaries from these much smarter people, I realized there was something I could add. The Catechism is a reference and summary of what the Church teaches and while it isn’t considered infallible, your average Catholic doesn’t know what the heck that means. The difference between inadmissible and intrinsically evil is so subtle that for faithful Catholics doing their best to keep up, they might as well be the same thing. And it’s no wonder the media has jumped all over this with headlines saying that Pope Francis just changed the Church’s teaching. If this (the Catechism) is supposed to represent Church teaching and they just changed something in it, it’s pretty hard to correct those headlines. And if the Pope can change this teaching, the thinking might go, what’s to stop him from changing others.
So regardless of what you think about the topic of Capital punishment, the perception of this precedent for your average Catholic (and non-Catholic for that matter) is that Church teaching can change. Now, again, if you explain what teachings are infallible and how this doesn’t represent a doctrinal change, you can correct those misconceptions, but the fact that doing so is such an uphill battle should remind us that more care needs to be taken with this kind of thing. The Catholic faith can’t be something that is only accessible to ivory tower academics and theologians who can grasp these nuances, but developments like this make it less accessible to every day Catholics, like me, and creates a lot of confusion and that’s what the Catechism was supposed to dispel. When it was published, there were a lot of competing claims about what the Church taught and this was supposed to clear that all up and thank God it did. But, with tampering like this, it just seems to be a regression back into confusion. The other serious risk with something like this is that it has the potential to undermine Pope Francis’ papacy because we’ve been hearing a lot, from him, about how we need to be less rigid and black and white on moral issues like divorce and remarriage and the reception of the sacraments. OK, so maybe there needs to be a greater appreciation for the nuances that exist in certain circumstances, but if that’s true, it sure doesn’t help when you turn around and address another moral issue like capital punishment and discard all the previously held nuances in favour of a very rigid and very black and white declaration about it. So, for my part, I’m going to stick with this earlier version of the Catechism and hope that we don’t decide to make any more unnecessary changes. What I would say in summary is that, the Pope and the bishops are supposed to shepherd Christ’s flock as mandated by Christ himself. Well, as a member of the flock, revisionist alterations like this just make me feel lost. We need our shepherds to clearly guide us in a way that is accessible, otherwise, I fear a lot of us will get scattered to the wilderness.