28 June 2005 :

on the Compendiun of New Catechism to be presented tomorrow, HOC General Secretary Sergio D’Elia declared:
“We have never been fundamentalist about death penalty abolition – in fact we campaign for a UN moratorium on capital executions with a view to abolition country by country – so we will certainly not be the ones to criticize the New Catechism for the Catholic Church’s pragmatic, reasonable and anti-prohibitionist stance, not dissimilar to Marco Pannella’s, on certain issues. “I take issue with the most of the rest of the content, on which the ‘no’ expressed by the Catholic Church is absolute and does not even admit the smallest and rarest of exceptions. “The Church’s relativist stance on the death penalty is only a reflection of its own history and traditions. “In the Papal State, between 1796 and 1864, the ‘master of justice’ Mastro Titta carried out 516 executions on his own; in the Vatican city-state the death penalty was effective up to 1968 and up to 1992 it was considered legitimate by the Catholic Church’s Catechism. 
“The Church’s justicialism is still evident when, even today it sets against the ‘innocent life’ of the embryo with the ‘guilty one’ of the ‘unjust aggressor’, the person condemned to death that in ‘cases of absolute necessity’ can be executed.”