The Catholic Church has consistently taught that the state has the authority to use the death penalty, in cases of "absolute necessity," though with the qualification that the Church considered such situations to be extremely rare.
St. John Paul II said that "the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil." He also spoke of his desire for a consensus to end the death penalty, which he called "cruel and unnecessary."
And Benedict XVI exhorted world leaders to make "every effort to eliminate the death penalty" and said that ending capital punishment was an essential part of "conforming penal law both to the human dignity of prisoners and the effective maintenance of public order."
In a 1986 letter to the bishops on the pastoral care of homosexual persons, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stated that "it is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action … but the proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered."
"When civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase," the congregation stated.
In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texan anti-sodomy law in the case Lawrence v. Texas, on the basis of the right to due process.
Reacting to that decision, Bishop Wilton Gregory, then the Bishop of Belleville and president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the court "has chosen to view homosexual behavior between consenting adults as a matter of privacy. However, human sexuality cannot be viewed this way. Sexual activity has profound social consequences which are not limited to those immediately engaged in sexual acts."
He added that "The Catholic Church teaches, in agreement with other faith traditions and with what were once the norms generally accepted by society, that sexual activity belongs to the marital relationship between one man and one woman in fidelity to each other. This relationship is the basis of the family which is the basic unit of society. Respect for the purpose of human sexuality and the family needs to be reaffirmed in our society; and anything which reduces respect for them – such as yesterday's Supreme Court decision – is to be deplored."