In the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, opponents of the death penalty are mounting a campaign to convince President Biden to commute the sentences of everyone on federal death row. Doing so would be a vindication not only of his announced anti-death penalty position but also of his Catholic faith.
Biden is only the second practicing Catholic to serve in the Oval Office, the first being President John Kennedy. Although Biden was denied communion at a Catholic Church in South Carolina in October 2019 because of his position on abortion, his Catholicism did not play a significant role in his presidential campaign.
When asked about that incident, Biden said, “I am not going to discuss that. That is just my personal life.”
In June 2021 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops revived this “personal” issue when it again considered whether Biden should be able to receive communion. After Biden was elected, traditionalists among the bishops formed a working group to study the question.
José Gomez, Archbishop of Los Angeles and president of the conference warned that “Our new President has pledged to pursue certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity, most seriously in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender.”
As his term began, other Catholic bishops “pushed to deny Biden communion due to his support of abortions. However, the Vatican issued a warning to not create division over the issue of Biden receiving communion… “
Pope Francis settled the issue by reminding the bishops that they are “pastors, not politicians.” The Pope unequivocally stated, “I have never refused the eucharist to anyone.”
Sixty years earlier, the specter of anti-Catholic prejudice led Kennedy to address the question of how his Catholicism would affect his conduct in the White House. In April 1960, Kennedy told the American Society of Newspaper Editors , “ I am not ‘trying to be the first Catholic President’…I happen to believe I can serve my nation as President - and I also happen to have been born a Catholic.…. (T)he Catholic Church…has no claim over my conduct as a public officer sworn to do the public interest.”
Yet once he assumed the presidency, JFK continued “to keep an unmistakably Catholic spiritual routine.”
As to Biden, the BBC reports that “On the matter of faith, President Joe Biden is not shy. Each weekend that he is in town, he goes to Mass in Washington. A motorcade takes him on Saturday evenings or Sunday mornings to Holy Trinity, the church where President Kennedy, the only other Catholic US president, used to attend services.”
Biden “makes the sign of the cross at public events, and his Catholicism is woven into his speeches and policies.”
That is why Catholic groups are now leading the way in calling on the president to do something about capital punishment before he leaves office. Spearheading this faith-based effort is the Catholic Mobilizing Network. The group reminded the president that he campaigned on abolishing the federal death penalty. It also promised to “keep praying and advocating and educating and sharing restorative practices until this system of death is dismantled and our communities flourish amid a culture of life.”
A Catholic Review article describes the Church’s current position on capital punishment. “The Church,“ it says, “opposes the use of the death penalty as inconsistent with the inherent sanctity of human life, and advocates for the practice’s abolition worldwide. In his 2020 encyclical ‘Fratelli Tutti,’ Pope Francis…‘stated clearly and firmly that the death penalty is inadequate from a moral standpoint and no longer necessary from that of penal justice.’”
Moreover, six years ago, the Pope updated the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s teaching on the death penalty. The new text says that ‘[T]he Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person’….”
This year, announcing the Church’s 2025 Jubilee of Hope, Pope Francis again called for “the abolition of the death penalty, a provision at odds with Christian faith and one that eliminates all hope of forgiveness and rehabilitation.”
In the same vein, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops describess the death penalty “an attack on the dignity of the human person…because it asserts that someone is beyond redemption.” Biden has the power to bring the teaching of the Church to life and offer redemption to the forty people on the federal death row, fifty-six percent of whom are people of color.
Like its counterpart at the state level, the federal death penalty system is rife with arbitrariness and discrimination. Some awaiting execution at the United States Correctional Facility in Terre Haute, Indiana, may be innocent or victims of glaring miscarriages of justice. As the Innocence Project warns, “Continuing the federal death penalty increases the risk of killing innocent people and deepening systemic inequalities….(T)he federal death penalty (is) error-prone, unreliable, and deeply unjust.”
One example of that fact is the case of Billie Allen, a 47-year-old man who was arrested at age 19 on charges of allegedly shooting a security guard during an armed robbery in St. Louis, Missouri. He has been on federal death row for twenty-seven years. During Allen’s trial, his lawyers did not bother to present evidence from an alibi witness. In addition, all the key witnesses against Allen changed their testimony dramatically from their initial recollection of events. The prosecution presented false testimony, claiming, among other things, that Billie confessed while presenting no evidence of that confession. Moreover, as Amnesty International notes, “Police recovered blood evidence from a bulletproof vest worn by one of the assailants. DNA testing excluded the murder victim and Billie Allen as sources of the blood.”
Sadly, this is an all too familiar story in capital cases at the state and federal level. President Biden knows this.
Now is the time for him to act on that knowledge. And if that is not enough, he should let his Catholic faith guide him to see the path to hope, forgiveness, redemption, and justice for people like Billie Allen and his death row companions.
As the United States Supreme Court noted almost two hundred years ago, granting clemency is an “act of grace.” Today the Catholic Church teaches that grace is “a free and undeserved gift from God.”
Now, our devout president can give that Godly gift and spare life. There is no time to waste.
