12 December 2024 :

Pope Francis called for debt relief for the poor countries of the South of the globe and the universal abolition of the death penalty in his message for World Peace Day 2025, which takes place on January 1.
"I would like once more to propose a concrete gesture that can help foster the culture of life, namely the elimination of the death penalty in all nations," the Argentine pontiff said in the message, which the Vatican released on December 12.
"This penalty not only compromises the inviolability of life but eliminates every human hope of forgiveness and rehabilitation".
The pope reiterated his belief that foreign debt has become "a means of control whereby certain governments and private financial institutions of the richer countries unscrupulously and indiscriminately exploit the human and natural resources of poorer countries, simply to satisfy the demands of their own markets.
"Foreign debt and ecological debt are two sides of the same coin, namely the mindset of exploitation that has culminated in the debt crisis," he continued.
"In the spirit of this Jubilee Year, I urge the international community to work towards forgiving foreign debt in recognition of the ecological debt existing between the North and the South of this world. "This is an appeal for solidarity, but above all for justice".

10 December 2024 :

December 09, 2024 - USA. Pope Francis and many others urge Biden, a Catholic, to commute all federal death sentences
In letters released on December 9, 2024, hundreds of stakeholders urged President Joe Biden to commute all federal death sentences.
This collective request reflects broad, bipartisan acknowledgement of the flaws in the capital punishment system and aligns with the national downward trend of support for the death penalty, now at historic lows. 40 men remain on federal death row. Any grant of clemency would result in new sentences of life in prison without parole for these individuals.
More than 200 Black and indigenous faith leaders in the Faith Leaders of Color Coalition (FLOCC) told President Biden that federal commutation “would acknowledge and help redress the racial bias built into the federal death penalty system, allow vast government resources to be redirected to policies that actually improve public safety, and allow the families of victims and incarcerated persons to focus on healing instead of living in legal limbo.” Catholic Mobilizing Network (CMN), a national organization engaged with more than 30,000 Catholics across the US to end the death penalty, asked President Biden to bring  “an end to every form of death penalty…in the spirit of reconciliation.” Echoing these sentiments, on sunday December 8, Pope Francis, during the Angelus address, prayed that these death sentences be commuted, asking the faithful to “pray for the inmates on death row in the United States…that their sentences may be commuted or changed.”
A group of 29 retired correctional professionals also joined in the effort to urge President Biden to commute the federal row, citing the harm executions pose to corrections staff. Applauding President Biden’s opposition to capital punishment, the group said they ​“know first-hand the devastating toll executions take, not only on correctional professionals directly involved in the process but on their families and on the larger correctional community.” Clearing federal death row would allow the Bureau of Prisons to move towards “important policy goals” and “would free millions of federal dollars for other priorities, including improving safety for correctional staff through training and infrastructure improvements.”
Pro-life advocates, stressing their commitment to this value from conception to natural death, told President Biden that “human life, no matter the circumstances, is worthy of protection. There is no amount of judicial process that can overcome the truth that the death penalty is the purposeful taking of a human being’s life.”
During his 2020 presidential campaign, President Biden said he would work to eliminate the federal death penalty. During President Biden’s tenure, the Department of Justice paused executions, but continued to defend existing death sentences and authorized one new capital prosecution. The letters urge President Biden to go beyond the moratorium on executions and fulfill his campaign promise to end the federal death penalty. Biden made this promise in the wake of the executions carried out during the last seven months of President Trump’s first term, when the federal government executed 12 men and one woman in the midst of a global pandemic and despite serious concerns surrounding intellectual disability, mental incompetency, racial bias, prosecutorial misconduct, and more.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/religious-groups-former-corrections-officials-pro-life-voices-and-many-others-urge-president-biden-to-commute-federal-death-sentences
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2024-12/pope-appeal-prayers-federal-death-row-grace-inmates.html