Thinking of the death penalty

Today’s blog from the Department of Justice, Peace & Human Development of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) focuses on the death penalty. It begins with this quote from Pope Francis:

“All Christians and men of good will are thus called to fight not only for the abolition of the death penalty, whether legal or illegal, and in all its forms, but also to improve prison conditions, with respect for the human dignity of the people deprived of their freedom”

The entry is titled, Yes. The Church Is Opposed to the Death Penalty. This may take some by surprise, but opposition to the death penalty has been a Catholic teaching for many years.

Pope Saint John Paul II prayed the following at a Papal Mass at Regina Coeli Prison in Rome on July 9, 2000: "May the death penalty, an unworthy punishment still used in some countries, be abolished throughout the world." He also spoke out against it on many occasions, such as the previous year when he said the following on a visit to the United States:

A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil. Modern society has the means of protecting itself, without definitively denying criminals the chance to reform. I renew the appeal I made most recently at Christmas for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary.

In 1999, the USCCB issued A Good Friday Appeal To End The Death Penalty. They wrote, in part:

For more than 25 years, the Catholic bishops of the United States have called for an end to the death penalty in our land. Sadly, however, death sentences and executions in this country continue at an increasing rate. In some states, there are so many executions they rarely receive much attention anymore. On this Good Friday, a day when we recall our Savior’s own execution, we appeal to all people of goodwill, and especially Catholics, to work to end the death penalty.

There is much more information on the website of the Catholic Mobilizing Network to End the Use of the Death Penalty.

The Affordable Care Act

Over at the blog for U.S. Catholic magazine, Scott Alessi has an aptly titled post: As Affordable Care Act rollout continues, we need less rhetoric, more clarity. In additions to providing links for more information, he writes:

Before praising or condemning the ACA based on rhetoric, every American should take the time to try to understand exactly how it will work and what the potential outcomes of the law's implementation will be. While there are certainly still flaws in the law or issues to be worked out, all this arguing about the Affordable Care Act has done nothing to help people actually understand how it works, or how it can benefit them.

The entire post is here.

Majority misunderstands Obamacare

According to Stanford social psychologist Jon Krosnick, PhD, and colleagues at GfK, the Associated Press and elsewhere, people’s understanding and view of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) would improve if education efforts were to correct public misunderstanding of the law:

Survey participants had been asked, among other things, 18 questions about whether a certain provision was in the bill passed by Congress, and while often-large majorities gave correct answers regarding many provisions, 0 percent answered all questions correctly.  

“No Americans correctly understood what is and is not in the ACA,” Krosnick said. “Many people did not know that [certain] elements of the bill are included in it. And many people believed that the bill included elements (e.g. so-called “death panels”) that are not actually in the ACA.”  

The researchers probed further to find that the majority of participants favored most of the elements of the health law that the researchers looked at; in fact, only three plan elements were not favored by the majority. The majority of participants also opposed policies that were sometimes erroneously thought to be part of the law – fewer than 20 percent, for example, supported “death panels.” In addition, the results show that the more accurate a person’s beliefs were about the 18 elements that the researchers asked about, the more he or she liked the law.  

“We can infer that if people were to learn fully what the ACA includes, public approval of the bill would increase,” said Krosnick.

You can read more here.