Pope Leo XIV has delivered a fresh broadside against Donald Trump’s justice agenda by condemning capital punishment as an attack on human dignity, just hours after the president’s administration announced it would reintroduce execution by firing squad and expand the range of methods used to carry out federal death sentences.
The pontiff spoke on Friday in a video message marking the 15th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty in his home state of Illinois, declaring that “the right to life is the very foundation of every other human right” and that “the dignity of the person is not lost even after very serious crimes are committed.” It was the second consecutive day on which Pope Leo had spoken out against capital punishment, with the remarks landing as Trump’s Justice Department moved to add firing squads, electrocution and gas to lethal injection as available methods of federal execution.
The announcement marked a significant escalation in federal death penalty policy. The Biden administration had previously removed single-drug lethal injections using pentobarbital from the federal protocol over concerns about unnecessary suffering. Trump, who ended a 17-year pause in federal executions during his first term — overseeing 13 executions in his final six months in office, more than any president in modern history — has now reauthorised their use and is seeking death sentences against 44 defendants. Only three individuals remain on federal death row following Biden’s decision to commute 37 sentences to life imprisonment.
The Pope’s intervention reignites a feud that has simmered since early April, when Leo condemned Trump’s warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran failed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and criticised US threats to strike civilian infrastructure as violations of international law. Trump responded on Truth Social on 12 April, accusing Leo of being “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy,” and posted an AI-generated image of himself in papal robes before swiftly deleting it following a fierce backlash from Catholics and even some MAGA supporters. Trump claimed he thought the image showed him “as a doctor.”
Tensions appeared to ease briefly last week after Pope Leo clarified that his opposition was to war in general rather than the Iran conflict specifically, and said his remarks about “a handful of tyrants spending billions on war” had not been directed at Trump. Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, welcomed the clarification warmly, writing on X that while “real disagreements have happened and will happen,” he was grateful for the Pope’s message and said the administration would work to apply “the moral principles of the Gospel in this messy world.”
That goodwill appears short-lived. In Friday’s message, Leo reiterated that the Catholic Church considers capital punishment “inadmissible” because it constitutes “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” citing the teachings of Pope Francis and his predecessors. He also noted that effective detention systems existed that could protect citizens “without completely depriving those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption.”
On the same day, the Pope also urged the United States and Iran to return to diplomatic talks, calling for a “culture of peace” to replace the resort to violence. Asked aboard his plane whether he condemned Iran’s recent wave of executions, Leo said he condemned “all actions that are unjust” and included capital punishment explicitly in that condemnation. “When a regime, when a country takes decisions which take away the lives of other people unjustly, then obviously that is something that should be condemned,” he said.
The death penalty has been abolished in 23 US states, with moratoriums in place in three others.
