Card. Prevost: You can’t be pro-life without opposing capital punishment

In a 2023 address, Prevost—now Leo XIV—adopted Bernardin's 'seamless garment' ideology, declaring that opposing abortion necessarily entailed opposing capital punishment.

May 20, 2025

In a 2023 address, Robert Francis Prevost—now ‘Leo XIV’—adopted Bernardin's 'seamless garment' ideology, declaring that opposing abortion necessarily entailed opposing capital punishment.

Mike Lewis of Where Peter Is has translated an address given by Cardinal Prevost in 2023, at the 25hth anniversary of the Universidad Católica Snato Toribio de Mogrovejo (USAT) in his diocese of Chiclayo, Peru.

Reviving the controversial “seamless garment” metaphor of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Prevost calls for Catholics to adopt a “consistent ethic of life.” He approvingly cites Cardinal Cupich’s push for “reclaiming and further developing the concept” and “expanding it into what he calls a new, integral ethic of solidarity.”

Prevost bases the imperative for this expansion in the concept of synodality:

If the Church takes seriously Pope Francis’s call to embody a synodal Church, we must instill an integral ethic of solidarity into every dimension of our lives.

He mentions synodality on four occasions in this short address.

In this talk, Prevost attempts to link opposition to abortion (as well as euthanasia) with capital punishment. In doing so, he blurs the clear moral distinction between the deliberate killing of the innocent—which is always and everywhere a grave evil—and the legitimate execution of the guilty, which is affirmed by Scripture, Tradition, and the perennial magisterium.

Bernardin’s vision suggested understanding the Church’s moral teachings as responding holistically to the many challenges affecting human life, as if they were threads woven into a single garment. This perspective outlines a path for the Church, one which remains relevant today. For instance, a Catholic cannot truly claim to be “pro-life” by maintaining a stance against abortion while simultaneously advocating in favor of the death penalty. Such a position would lack coherence with Catholic social teaching. Our thinking and teaching must manifest coherence, consistently defending the value of human life from its beginning to its natural end.

Elsewhere, he makes the same points:

In Cardinal Bernardin’s words, across the spectrum of life—from genetic research, abortion, capital punishment, modern warfare, to the care of the terminally ill—these diverse issues are fundamentally rooted in one essential Catholic principle: the loss of even a single human life is a profoundly significant event.
Seen in this context, abortion, war, poverty, euthanasia, and capital punishment share a common identity: each one is rooted in a denial of the right to life. We could add other contemporary issues to this list, such as the implications of artificial intelligence, human trafficking, and the rights of immigrants, among many others.

There are two effects that flow from Bernardin’s presentation:

The relativisation of abortion and euthanasia, by treating these intrinsically evil crimes as equivalent to matters whose morality depend on the circumstances (war, capital punishment, etc.)
The dogmatisation of opposition to capital punishment.1

Bernardin attempted to avoid this charge, as Prevost points out:

At the same time, Cardinal Bernardin emphasized clearly that each issue has its distinct moral character. Any effort to conflate these issues, without properly understanding their relative moral importance, would diverge from Catholic teaching. In other words, the Cardinal did not claim that all life issues were morally equivalent.

In spite of his claims not to conflate moral categories, Bernardin’s “consistent life ethic” inevitably blurs distinctions, creating a broad equivalence in tone and priority—even when this is denied in theory. This equivalence becomes apparent in the claim that those engaged in pro-life work “must be equally visible” in supporting other causes, such as the “quality of life” of groups such as “undocumented immigrants”:

If we hold—as indeed we do—that the right of every unborn child must be protected by civil law and backed by civil consensus, then our moral, political, and economic responsibilities cannot end at the moment of birth. We must strive to ensure that every child born into this world receives the care they require, safeguarding their rights to life, health, and education.
Those who champion the right to life for the most vulnerable among us must be equally visible in supporting the quality of life of others who are vulnerable, including the elderly, children, the hungry, the homeless, and undocumented immigrants.

Claims like this are only ever applied to pro-lifers. Nobody suggests that those engaged in care for the elderly or the homeless “must be equally visible” in working against abortion. Common sense tells us that Catholics (and indeed, all men of good will) are entitled to engage in whatever works of mercy appear prudent and necessary to them in their given spheres, and that focusing on one or the other is perfectly normal (all things being equal, and providing there is no sense of denying truths of the faith or the moral law). This asymmetric moral burden is a tell: it reveals that the real target is not inconsistency, but Catholic doctrine itself.

In any case, Prevost does strongly suggest that abortion and the death penalty are morally equivalent:

For instance, a Catholic cannot truly claim to be “pro-life” by maintaining a stance against abortion while simultaneously advocating in favor of the death penalty.

His caveats about moral equivalence seem, therefore, to be about the other issues he mentions (war, poverty, education, etc). This is further supported by his other interventions on the topic of the death penalty.

However, we are obliged to point out that both (1) the intrinsic evil of abortion (as an example of the killing of the innocent), and (2) the legitimacy of capital punishment are truths which have been revealed by God and proposed by the Church.

Indeed, capital punishment has been positively sanctioned by divine revelation.

Any suggestion to the contrary is not a “development,” but a denial of revealed dogma.

Read the rest over at Where Peter Is.

Postscript

Prevost explicitly roots his moral framework in Joseph Bernardin’s “seamless garment” idea and Cardinal Cupich’s proposed “integral ethic of solidarity.”

But in his Encyclical Quod Apostolici Muneris, Pope Leo XIII condemns precisely this kind of flattening of moral distinctions—one that, in the name of compassion and solidarity, leads to doctrinal confusion and, often enough, socialism in disguise. He writes:

5. For, indeed, although the socialists, stealing the very Gospel itself with a view to deceive more easily the unwary, have been accustomed to distort it so as to suit their own purposes, nevertheless so great is the difference between their depraved teachings and the most pure doctrine of Christ that none greater could exist: “for what participation hath justice with injustice or what fellowship hath light with darkness?”
Their habit, as we have intimated, is always to maintain that nature has made all men equal, and that, therefore, neither honor nor respect is due to majesty, nor obedience to laws, unless, perhaps, to those sanctioned by their own good pleasure.
But, on the contrary, in accordance with the teachings of the Gospel, the equality of men consists in this: that all, having inherited the same nature, are called to the same most high dignity of the sons of God, and that, as one and the same end is set before all, each one is to be judged by the same law and will receive punishment or reward according to his deserts. The inequality of rights and of power proceeds from the very Author of nature, “from whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named.”
But the minds of princes and their subjects are, according to Catholic doctrine and precepts, bound up one with the other in such a manner, by mutual duties and rights, that the thirst for power is restrained and the rational ground of obedience made easy, firm, and noble.

With regard to the death penalty, Pope Leo XIII also emphasises the authority of the state:

6. Assuredly, the Church wisely inculcates the apostolic precept on the mass of men: “There is no power but from God; and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist purchase to themselves damnation.”
And again she admonishes those “subject by necessity” to be so “not only for wrath but also for conscience' sake,” and to render “to all men their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due, custom to whom custom, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor.”
For, He who created and governs all things has, in His wise providence, appointed that the things which are lowest should attain their ends by those which are intermediate, and these again by the highest.

This principle undergirds the Church’s consistent teaching that rulers may, in justice, execute criminals for grave crimes—not out of vengeance, but for the common good, restitution, and deterrence. Prevost’s formulation, by contrast, treats all killing as morally equivalent, regardless of the object or circumstances—effectively collapsing the categories of innocent life (abortion, euthanasia) and guilty life (capital punishment) into one indistinct moral blob. This contradicts both reason and revelation.

Finally, we should note that Pope Leo XIII sets out the key way to ensure justice, true liberty and the legitimate rights for all: the Church teaching the truth with authority, including in solemn and terrifying warnings to princes and rulers.

7. But that rulers may use the power conceded to them to save and not to destroy, the Church of Christ seasonably warns even princes that the sentence of the Supreme Judge overhangs them, and, adopting the words of divine wisdom, calls upon all in the name of God:
“Give ear, you that rule the people, and that please yourselves in multitudes of nations; for power is given you by the Lord, and strength by the Most High, who will examine your works, and search out your thoughts… For a most severe judgment shall be for them that bear rule… For God will not except any man's person, neither will he stand in awe of any man's greatness, for he hath made the little and the great; and he hath equally care of all. But a greater punishment is ready for the more mighty.”
And if at any time it happen that the power of the State is rashly and tyrannically wielded by princes, the teaching of the Catholic church does not allow an insurrection on private authority against them, lest public order be only the more disturbed, and lest society take greater hurt therefrom. And when affairs come to such a pass that there is no other hope of safety, she teaches that relief may be hastened by the merits of Christian patience and by earnest prayers to God.
But, if the will of legislators and princes shall have sanctioned or commanded anything repugnant to the divine or natural law, the dignity and duty of the Christian name, as well as the judgment of the Apostle, urge that “God is to be obeyed rather than man.”

It is precisely this sort of exercise of authority that Leo XIV has been disclaiming since his election, casting it as “autocracy.”

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