Reverend Timothy Broglio, Archbishop for the Military Services USA, has issued a statement calling on Catholics in the U.S. Armed Forces to not participate in the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan for his 2009 shooting spree that killed more than a dozen people in 2009 at a U.S. Army base in Fort Hood, Texas.
Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist who reached the rank of Major, came to oppose U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and grew more radical upon learning he was slated for deployment sometime in 2009. On May 9 of that year, he entered Fort Hood with two handguns and went on a shooting spree, killing 13 and wounding at least 31, until he was stopped by a police bullet that left him paralyzed.
He reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the rampage, and it later came out he was a practitioner of Sharia law, had attended a Virginia mosque led by pro-terrorism imam Anwar al-Awlaki, and had previously advocated Muslims “ris(ing) up against the U.S. military.”
Hasan was convicted in August 2013 and sentenced to death less than a week later. Last week, the Army set his execution date for December 3 at Fort Hood, following approval by President Donald Trump. It will be the Army’s first firing squad execution since World War II. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced plans to livestream the execution, sparking controversy even among supporters of capital punishment. President Donald Trump is reportedly considering canceling the livestream.
In his October 12 statement, Broglio expressed sympathy for the families of Hasan’s victims before “repeat(ing) the opposition of the Catholic Church to capital punishment,” asserting the “dignity of the human person is again at stake.”
“Thirdly, do we really want to imitate the terrorists of this world and make a public spectacle of barbarically killing our adversaries?” the archbishop asked. “The crime committed by Nidal Malik Hasan was heinous, but does exposing the public to his execution serve any purpose? Has the potential moral injury, which the members of the firing squad might experience, been considered? Will the exposure of a live-stream to the young and impressionable during the 250th anniversary year of our independence be able to be repaired? The U.S. military generally enjoys a good reputation in the world. Is there really a value to throwing them in the same boat with terrorists by broadcasting the image of the execution of a man in a wheel chair to the whole world? Does this decision reflect the dignity of the human person?”
Broglio urged those in power to, “at the very least, do what is possible to keep the exposure to the live-streaming of the proposed execution from the vision of the young and impressionable” He closed by declaring, “I oblige any Catholics assigned to the firing squad to request to be excused from this action contrary to the teaching of the Church,” falsely likening it to a “procured abortion.”
Broglio’s statement compounds an ongoing debate over what the Catholic Church really teaches on the issue.
In 2018, the late Pope Francis complicated the discourse about the religious permissibility of capital punishment when he issued a papal decree revising n. 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to declare that a “new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state,” and therefore “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” It also declared that the Church “works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”
The passage previously read that authorities should limit themselves to “non-lethal means (…) to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor” and “cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity ‘are very rare, if not practically nonexistent,’” but granted that “traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty” when absolutely necessary.
Pope Leo XIV has doubled down on Francis’s direction, repeatedly describing the death penalty as “inadmissible.” Christian supporters of capital punishment point to Genesis 9:6 which states: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image.” Other popes throughout history, such as Pope Leo X, Pope Pius XII, and St. John Paul II, have affirmed the legitimacy of capital punishment in at least some circumstances.
Capital punishment is one of the most contentious issues in modern politics, with ambivalence often crossing the usual partisan lines. Proponents argue it a necessary deterrent, that it is a key tool in pushing violent offenders to plead guilty in order to evade it, and that nothing less than death can adequately register societal condemnation for humanity’s worst crimes. Opponents argue death is irreversible in cases of wrongful convictions, that its implementation often constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment,” and that society should draw a hard line against taking any life when not strictly necessary to defend one’s self or others from danger (a standard liberal opponents do not apply to their support of abortion-on-demand).
As for the administration’s proposal to broadcast it, public execution used to be commonplace in past centuries, with gallows erected in town squares for public hangings of criminals. But as execution methods became more sophisticated and societal mores changed, so too did the normalcy of displaying state-sanctioned killings. Today, members of the public and press may attend executions, but the last public execution in the United States was of convicted murderer Roscoe “Red” Jackson in 1937.
Calvin Freiburger, Lifesite News
