NEWS BRIEFS Jan-29-2002 - By  - U.S.

Death penalty opposition seen in keeping with church tradition

CHICAGO  -- Pope John Paul II's teaching that the death penalty should be imposed rarely, if ever, represents "a continuity with tradition rather than a reversal," Cardinal Avery Dulles said at a Jan. 25 conference on capital punishment. "The classical position has been modified, not reversed," said the Jesuit theologian in remarks that led off "A Call for Reckoning: Religion and the Death Penalty," organized by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life at the University of Chicago Divinity School. "It has been a legitimate development of doctrine," the cardinal said of the church's teaching on capital punishment. "Self-defense of society continues to justify the death penalty." Defending society includes preserving moral order, not just physical safety, Cardinal Dulles said. "One could conceive of a situation where, if justice were not done by executing an offender, it would throw society into moral confusion," he said. "I don't know whether that requires any more than that it (the death penalty) remain on the books, symbolically, that it be there for society to have recourse to."