A recent article by Stephen Bainbridge in TCS Daily goes into some of the teaching of the Catholic Church on the death penalty, but does not really clarify things quite fully enough. For example, he says:
…the Catechism does not ban the death penalty per se. Instead, it leaves open room for the exercise of prudential [...]

In reply to a follow-up here, another posting on Sacramentum Vitae raises a rather large number of issues, but I will confine myself to replying only to what seem to me to be the substantial ones. Michael says:
Now I had also asserted that Aquinas justified the "torture" as well as the execution of heretics. [...]

Michael Liccione at the Sacramentum Vitae blog has replied to my previous posting, and his reply needs addressing here, since it did not quite seem to meet the points I raised. So, I suspect that I should say more around certain issues, to try to clarify them. Michael summarizes my posting as:
Paul insists that [...]

In a recent post on the First Things blog, law professor Robert T. Miller complains that Catholic bishops are going beyond teaching about faith and morals, stepping into the arena of prudential judgments about empirical circumstances, and thus — Miller claims — leaving their legitimate area of authority. Yet Miller's arguments are not well founded, [...]

The discussion of Catholic teaching on capital punishment — particularly relevant because of the recent execution of Saddam Hussein — has not always been precisely focused. And even an article by Cardinal Dulles does not necessarily help provided that needed focus. Catechism 2267 and the papal encyclical Evangelium Vitae are quite clear that capital punishment [...]