[Veritas]

Right to Life is the main organisation representing pro-life anti abortionists in Australia.

Right to Life in my state of New South Wales recently had as its feature article in its magazine an attack on capital punishment which seemed to make capital punishment as bad as abortion.

I was very angry after reading the article and have decided to suspend my financial membership of Right to Life as a result.

I phoned Right to Life to tell them and ended up having a debate with the person on the phone who kept telling me that their position was simply what the Church taught. He told me that they had checked their position with the life office of the diocese who agreed with what they said.
I repeatedly stated that the Church did NOT absolutely condemn capital punishment, but had only said in recent documents that they would prefer it only to be used in extreme circumstances; I further stated the Church taught that abortion was ALWAYS wrong and never permitted.

I once read a comment by an English Protestant Evangelical theologian who said he knew that once Britain outlawed the death penalty it would soon allow abortion – and he was absolutely correct.
I, like him, see a connection between a false, apparently compassionate, concern with not executing murderers, who have deliberately taken a human life, and a free allowance of the killing of the innocent unborn.
Of course there have to be numerous safeguards surrounding capital punishment to make sure that it is not used by the state to exterminate dissenters or eliminate the less than physically perfect; and of course the horror of an innocent person being executed must be safeguarded against by every possible means. However, the Church has, for almost two millennia, allowed for the use of capital punishment, based on the Scriptural rule that he who takes a human life should forfeit his own. This is showing the sacredness of life, it is so sacred that anyone who deliberately takes an innocent life should forfeit his own. The recent comment by Pope John-Paul II about capital punishment was not an infallible statement and does not absolutely ban a Catholic supporting capital punishment.

Right to Life had no right to link abortion and capital punishment as being virtually the same. I will suspend my support for this organisation and try and find some other groups who are fighting abortion who I can give financial support to.

[Matthew]

It should have been clear to them from the Catechism of the Catholic Church which clearly states it is not intrinsically evil.

John Paul II's statement regards the advisability of it, not whether it is evil in itself.
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As charity towards God has grown cold, the mutual charity of men among themselves has likewise cooled.

Leo XIII