"And the Church has always recognized that governments and civil authorities have the right to carry out executions in order to protect their citizens' lives and punish those guilty of the gravest crimes against human life and the stability of the social order."
He also noted that "in recent decades, there has been a growing consensus - among bishops' conferences around the world and in the teachings of the Popes and the Catechism - that use of the death penalty can no longer be accepted."
"The Church has come to understand that from a practical standpoint, governments now have the ability to protect society and punish criminals without executing violent offenders. The Church now believes that the traditional purposes of punishment - defending society, deterring criminal acts, rehabilitating criminals and penalizing them for their actions - can be better achieved by nonviolent means," the Archbishop of Los Angeles said.
"The Catechism now says the death penalty is 'inadmissible' - it should not be used - because it violates the dignity of the person and because 'more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.'"
Archbishop Gomez added that the revision "is not equating capital punishment with the evils of abortion and euthanasia. Those crimes involve the direct killing of innocent life and they are always gravely immoral. By definition, the lives of almost all those on death row are not 'innocent.'"
He said that "I do not believe that public executions serve to advance that message in our secular society."