As we usher in the Jubilee Year and California prepares to kill another
one of my cohorts, I sincerely hope that your words: "We invite you to walk
with us as disciples on a journey of conversion," (1) mean that you are
prepared to lead Catholics on a real journey of conversion to the political
capital of California and lend your body and voice to the call for a moratorium
on executions and the abolishment of capital punishment in California, and are
not simply rhetorical metaphor.
In
my conversations with priests, nuns and parishioners it is apparent that
Catholics who support capital punishment may do so, in part, out of fear of
ostracism from their secular communities and they may feel more comfortable in
adopting the Church's new view that all life is sacred from conception to
natural death, if you would offer them your hand, stand beside them for their
community to see and lead them, physically arm in arm, in a statewide march for
life in this Jubilee Year.
The people need to see you in the phalanx for life. The Holy
Father has moved the church beyond the question of guilt in this controversy and
illuminated the path for you by his actions in St. Louis, when he confronted the
Governor of Missouri to spare the life of a condemned man he was about to
execute. The Holy Father's GOSPEL OF LIFE (2) clearly states that no crime
should go unpunished and Catholics need you to explain that they are not
advocating setting the guilty condemned free, but that punishment need not
entail the extermination of a human being. They need more than your words. They
need your strength to hold their heads up high among their secular peers.
You need to take your people by the hand in a sojourn of
faith to Sacramento and let the secular powers know that the era of politics of
death and fear has ended. That it is the time to stop the killing! That the
political capital spent on judicial homicides would be better spent on life
affirming matters to lift all to the heights of their abilities and not be
crushed beneath the heel of oppression. That their casual attitude of
legislating death contributes to the culture of violence and is teaching our
children (3) that scores may be settled by vengeance "even to the point of
taking a human life." (4)
I suggest that each bishop invite the faithful in his
diocese to accompany him to the state capital this spring, when the annual
state budget is being manipulated into expenditures on the machinery of death;
in a march to abolish capital punishment and adopt the alternative sentence of
life without parole as this state's ultimate criminal sanction. It is your
physical presence that is needed in this secular matter, not just your sectarian
words.
Steven
King Ainsworth, Death Row, San Quentin (5)
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