The Catholic Church worldwide is working hard for the repeal of the death penalty. This is a topic that even within the Church and within Christianity itself we have a difference of opinion. It is not a position that the Church calls intrinsically evil. The Church had no difficulty with the death penalty for centuries but there has been a change. She is trying to convince us that we should see the life in prison without parole as a sufficient penalty for even the most heinous of crimes.

Cardinal Stephen Kim had a intense opposition to the death penalty. Part of the reason was that he knew many of those who were sentenced from his visits to the prisons. He got to know them personally and suffered when they were killed. He knew that many who were sentenced to death where from the underprivileged social class and background.

Here in Korea the opinion is very much for the death penalty so the movement to change the sentiment on this subject will not be easy. I can recall stories of children and families being killed for the simple reason that the fathers of the family went to the North at the start of the Korean War. The wounds that were inflicted at that time were such that they are still too raw to even attempt to make amends, even after the passage of so much time. No one even wants to bring it up in conversation.

A great deal of this is retribution: the eye for eye approach to justice. The vast majority of democratic countries in Europe and Latin America have abolished capital punishment over the last fifty years, but the United States, and most democracies in Asia, and almost all totalitarian governments retain it.

There is no scientific proof that nations with capital punishment have a lower rate of crime; the risk of the death penalty does not seem to deter crime. Many feel that the capital punishment brutalizes us, makes us insensitive to the precious nature of every single human life."

John L. Allen in one of his blogs mentioned, “The Church now has two categories of moral teachings: what we might call "ontic" or "inherent" absolutes, such as abortion, euthanasia, and the destruction of embryos in stem cell research, which are considered always and everywhere immoral because of the nature of the act, and "practical" absolutes, i.e., acts which might be justified in theory, but which under present conditions cannot be accepted.” This is a very succinct way of putting it and helps us understand why we have so much difficulty in coming to some sort of consensus on this issue. For some the distinction does not mean much.

The Catechumenate in Korea

Back in 2006 the Korean Government published the report on the 2005 census. The religious statistics were interesting for the government figures of Catholics were larger than the Catholic Church’s own figures by many hundreds of thousands. It was assumed that the difference in the figures was that those who were attracted to Catholicism would consider themselves such for the census. In a report on these statistics in the Independent News Service Here and Now (www.nahnews.net) they mentioned that this is not all an unmitigated blessing.

The reason for those coming out to the Church can me extremely varied and not always for religious reasons. This is not surprising but the catechetical period should be one in which these motives are changed or sublimated to a different level. This means that the catechetical period is extremely important.

In recent months the reason for the interest shown in the Church has a great deal to do with our first Cardinal who died on Feb. 16th at 86 years old. He was a defender of human rights against the dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s. He was respected by many in our society more than 400,000 people paid their respects at his wake and funeral on Feb.20th. Just to day we had a visit from another parish and they mentioned that there were a large number of people who came out to the Church without anyone inviting them. This they attribute to the publicity that surrounded the death of Cardinal Kim.

The Church, as with all of us, the difference of what is said and what is done is not always the same and this does pose many problems. Many of those who enter the community are disappointed in what they see and drop out; others fail to be attracted because of what they see. We are not always the positive advertising for Christianity that we were meant to be. Hopefully we will be more demanding on what we expect of those entering the Community during the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (the period of the catechumenate).