by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Tsarnaev Sentence: A Last Spasm for the Death Penalty in America
“The last time a convicted criminal was executed in Massachusetts — 1947 … the high wall in left field at Fenway Park had just been painted green.” But now they want to undo the gains of two-thirds of a century in Massachusetts by putting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death.
The death sentence for him is a giant step backwards for us, because the strong evidence is that in the United States the death penalty will soon be a thing of the past.
Mario Marazziti is sure of it. Long the “portavoce” of the Community of Sant'Egidio in Rome, lately a member of the lower house of Italy’s parliament and chair of its human rights committee, Mario – friend to many of us – was a founder of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty late in the last century. Since then much has changed in the United States, as he spells out in a powerful opinion piece in today’s Los Angeles Times:
The number of executions and new death sentences is at a 20-year low, and just a few states are responsible for the vast majority of executions … A bill to reintroduce the death penalty in Massachusetts was defeated. Bills to outlaw the death penalty are in process in Delaware, Kansas and Colorado. Even in Nebraska, a conservative state, a bill to abolish the death penalty has such strong support that legislators could override an expected veto by the governor.
Much has changed – and much is changing. In the weeks since the publication of Mario’s book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty (I wrote the afterword), the Supreme Court has heard arguments against lethal injection in Oklahoma and two death-row prisoners have been exonerated.
In the hours since he wrapped up the LA Times opinion piece, the Atlantic dropped a new issue with a cover story on lethal injection and Nebraska legislators did indeed vote to abolish the death penalty (and they do have the numbers to overide a veto from the governor).
It
seems possible and even likely that Tsarnaev will still be alive when
the death penalty is declared dead in this country.
Mario Marazziti: From Texas to ISIS
Mario Marazziti was a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show on Friday, speaking about 13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty. Lopate introduced several points that were news to me – showing that the death penalty is constantly in the news just now. He pointed out that a man was executed in Texas earlier this week with a new form of lethal injection. He mentioned the state of Oklahoma just re-approved the use of firing squads in executions. He remarked on the sentencing of the surviving Boston Marathon bomber – for whom the state is expected to seek the death penalty. And he asked about ISIS, which led to this exchange:
“How does ISIS fit in?”
“ISIS is the culture of death. They use the death penalty as a show, to scare people. They use it to get Muslim people to join, saying, if you do not do what they tell them to do, they will be killed. At the same time, they exhibit death to create automatic reactions in the West. They would like retaliation, because retaliation would allow many other Muslim groups to feel that they are under attack. So ISIS is the culture of death used as a political tool.”
“We’re horrified by the beheadings, but we also execute people.”
“I don’t think there is so much different between a beheading and the gas chamber.”
My afterword to 13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty is up on Commonweal’s website. It’s essentially a portrait of Mario and his gifts of friendship:
If Trastevere embodies the paradox of Europe—emphatically old but with pockets of exceptional vitality—Mario Marazziti embodies the paradox of Sant’Egidio. He is no stranger to high society: through an old friend at the prominent wine journal Gambero Rosso, he and his friends put together Vino per Vita, an initiative where Italian wineries run by Mario’s contacts give the proceeds from certain bottlings to Sant’Egidio’s campaign for AIDS relief in Africa. He can be irreverent, relishing the story of a cleric friend whose poor Italian led him to open the church’s millennial ceremonies in 1999 with a crude profanity. Yet he is selfless and tireless on behalf of Sant’Egidio—on behalf, he says, of “the Gospel and friendship.” I had learned of him through a Sant’Egidio group at St. Malachy’s Church near Times Square led by the author Thomas Cahill. The group was small, but Mario sustained us with calls and e-mails. I later asked him how he kept up contact with his countless friends worldwide. “Friendship is not proportionate,” he said matter-of-factly.
Mario Marazziti: The Death Penalty, Seen in the Rearview Mirror
Two points especially stood out in Mario Marazziti’s presentation of 13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penaltyat Greenlight Bookstore the other night – two points that arereally two more ways of looking at the death penalty.
The book is frankly what the Wallace Stevens-echoing title promises: the death penalty seen thirteen different ways – the way of history, the way of religion, the way of the families of murder victims, of exonerated death-row prisoners, and the way of men who, condemned to death, went all the way to death, killed for the sake of retributive justice by the state.
And it’s the death penalty seen from Mario Marazziti’s strong point of view. Mario is a force of nature: human rights activist, Italian parliamentarian, longtime spokesman for the Community of Sant'Egidio, lover of life, and friend to countless people around the world. A few years back he took a key role in founding the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, which has helped establish moratoria against the death penalty worldwide. He has written a regular column for Corriere della Sera. And now he is the author of this book, his first in English, just out from Seven Stories Press. (I contributed an afterword, excerpted in Commonweal.)
On Wednesday he and I will be in conversation in Riggs Library at Georgetown, through the university’s Faith & Culture conversation series.
At the bookstore event Mario told how, country by country, Europe turned against the death penalty. In the first half of the twentieth century Europe saw tens of millions of dead people: two world wars, six million Jewish people killed in the Shoah, five hundred thousand gypsies, gay people … Europe, as Mario told it, was “disgusted with death and so chose life” – chose life by abolishing the death penalty or suspending its use through moratoria.
That’s the first striking point: a profound social change that took place over a few decades. The second point is like it. Today the change that took place in Europe is taking place all over the world. In 1975 25 countries had renounced the death penalty. Today 150 countries do. The U.S. and its counterparts in capital punishment – China, Saudi Arabia, Iran – are distinctly in the minority.
When it comes to state execution, at least, the world, disgusted by death, is choosing life.
The Spirit of Cities: The Human Scale
Europe’s contribution to world civilization is the human scale, as seen in the streets of the old quarters of its great cities.
So said Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of Sant'Egidio, at a conference on the future of Europe a few years back. In so saying, in a sentence he made clear how the movement he founded in Rome in 1968 works, and why it works. Based in cities – cities in sixty countries – they work on a human scale, out of the conviction that religious beliefs are credible only when expressed on a human scale, and that, in our time, what is most needed is a witness to the human scale in a global society where the goal is often to “scale up” every enterprise as much as possible.
Philip Sheldrake has devoted a career to developing the idea of the human dimension of cities and what it means for religion and spirituality. He spoke at Georgetown last week, and the event couldn’t have been timed better, because the idea of “the spiritual city” – set in opposition to Harvey Cox’s sixties formulation “the secular city” – is an idea full of implications just now, when the majority of the human population lives in cities but many of them in cities (such as the “instant cities” going up in China) that hardly resemble the human-scaled cities of early modern Europe.
As a writer rather than an urban planner, I can’t help but notice that the city as rich an extended metaphor as any we have right now. This passage about four vital aspects of cities, for example, could just as well apply by analogy to four vital aspects of literature, or of religious practice:
Cities represent and create a climate of values that implicitly defines how we understand ourselves and gather together. There are four aspects of cities that urban planning must take seriously. First, the two Latin concepts of the city as urbs (a physical place, the buildings) and as civitas (people and their life together) are interdependent. Second, urban issues are never purely practical. For example, transport obviously involves management, investment and strategy. However, the balance of private and public transport also highlights how we relate individual choice to the ‘common good’. Third, cities have always been complex realities. We cannot separate planning technology from people, the local from the global, or a sense of place from increasingly mobile lives. Finally, while there is no way back to the relatively compact city of pre-modern Europe, cities and their development must nevertheless critically embrace their past if human desires for the future are to be effectively grounded.
Reading the passage, I realize that the attachment that many of us have for our cities is something like religious. Lucky for us, we have Philip Sheldrake to help us to understand what that means.
On Poverty: Just Sitting There Talking
“The United Nations of Trastevere.” That’s the tag (probably fashioned by a giornalista over a cappuccino) that has attached itself to the Community of Sant'Egidio.
This week it seems especially apt. As the leaders of the world’s nations traveled to the United Nations to meet and talk at the General Assembly, friends of the Community of Sant'Egidio assembled at Princeton University for a conference on the subject of “Poverty and Peacemaking.”
Assembled is too formal a word: these people were friends, collaborators, people from diverse communities known and admired at second- or third-hand, now all together in the same place, the way we were in Washington in 2006 when the Community brought its annual Prayer for Peace to Georgetown.
Conference is too formal a word, too: it was several dozen running conversations that spilled into one another – in seminar rooms, in the basement eatery, on walks through the Princeton campus, and in a candlelight procession (modeled on a Buddhist ceremony devised in Japan after U.S. atomic bombs struck Hiroshima) – that concluded Friday’s program.
And so is subject too formal a word. For the people in the Community of Sant'Egidio – Italian Catholics and the friends they’ve made in sixty countries worldwide – poverty and peacemaking are lifelong preoccupations that inform just about everything they do.
In the panel discussion I joined, the question was whether it is really useful to talk about poverty. The answer was yes – as long as the limits of talk, and the end or goal of the talking, are kept in view. Georgetown’s Anthony Moore explained how Ignatius of Loyola, with his “Two Standards,” urged the person who is engaged with Ignatian spirituality to see poverty always through the standard of the gospel. Ida Beth Malloy from the Rescue Mission of Trenton pointed out that the first step for a person of means to help a poor person is for the one to recognize the other as a person by hearing his or her story.
My own contribution involved little more than quoting Dorothy Day, whose memoir The Long Loneliness – one of the truly great books about poverty – was conceived during a visit to her old friends Malcolm Cowley and Caroline Gordon at Princeton in 1950. In the postscript, Day explained that the Catholic Worker movement began in talk, nothing more. It’s worth quoting at length, as an account – the best one I know – of the generative power of conversation when friends come together.
We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in.
We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form, saying, “We need bread.” We could not say, “Go, be thou filled.” If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread.
We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls expanded.
We were just sitting there talking and someone said, “Let’s all go live on a farm.”
It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened …
It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.
It still is going on –
Ted Cruz, Heal Thyself
In the latest of a string of strong Times columns Ross Douthat gives three reasons why “The Middle East’s Friendless Christians” are friendless.
One, American liberals think of Christianity as a tool of white male hegemony, not as a persecuted religion. (One-point-five: Islam-vs.-Christianity is generally overshadowed by Islam-vs.-Israel.) Two, Christians in the Middle East are scattered geographically, and there is no strategic imperative for their survival. Three, the Christian right in the U.S., when forced to choose between support for Israel and support for Christians who often differ with Israel, invariably chooses Israel.
I think there is a fourth reason, just as important – and pertinent for our understanding of religion in America, too.
It’s this: As many of the people who consider themselves the arbiters of authentic Christianity in America reckon such things, many of the Christians of the Middle East aren’t authentic Christians.
It’s always hazardous to generalize, but in Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere, to be a Christian is to belong to a social group with a culture that has endured for nearly two thousand years. Christian affiliation is akin to family or clan affiliation; it involves property, where one lives, what languages one speaks, whom one considers for marriage, and how one has been distinguished historically from people of other social groups. And being a Christian in the Middle East means making political accommodation with people (the Assads in Syria, for example) whose sense of the world doesn’t make anything like a neat match with yours.
It takes nothing away from the heroically steadfast Christians of the Middle East to say that in many respects their Christianity is what conservative Protestants and theocon Catholics have long disdained as “cultural Christianity.” And it shouldn’t surprise us that culture warriors who hammer home the point that Christian belief must finally be understood as nothing more or less than a personal decision for Christ made afresh by each individual in every generation, and that a person whose belief is largely cultural is no believer at all – it shouldn’t be any surprise that those culture warriors won’t go to war for people that wouldn’t pass muster in their own salvation armies.
Georgetown’s Tom Farr and Tim Shah – colleagues of mine at the Berkley Center – are among those who are tirelessly making the case for those people without losing sight of the subtleties on both sides. Here are Tom’s notes toward “a wise and effective U.S. International Religious Freedom policy,” delivered before Sub-Committees of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs last week.
So are the friends of the Community of Sant'Egidio, who have been active in Syria of late.
And so was Pope Francis, in his way, when he witnessed the marriages of twenty couples in Rome yesterday. In marrying at least one couple who had lived together and raised a child “out of wedlock” (as the culture warriors still put it), he recognized that Italy’s much-derided cultural Christianity is still real and worth engaging with.
The photograph shows a church in Aleppo after the bombs hit.
Lethal Injection: Beheading by Another Name
In his column for First Things, the late Rev. Richard John Neuhaus used to relish pointing out articles that contradicted each other in the same day’s New York Times – evidence, in his highly rhetorical presentation, that the Gray Lady’s left hand didn’t know what her right hand was doing.
Myself, I relish finding pieces in the Times that inadvertently echo and amplify each other. And so it is with a couple of current pieces. In a wise and trenchant column, David Brooks works through the reasons why we as a society find the act of beheading so awfully repulsive. He stresses the Western idea, rooted in religion, that “the human body is sacred”:
Most of us understand, even if we don’t think about it, or have a vocabulary to talk about it these days, that the human body is not just a piece of meat or a bunch of neurons and cells. The human body has a different moral status than a cow’s body or a piece of broccoli.
We’re repulsed by a beheading because the body has a spiritual essence. The human head and body don’t just live and pass along genes. They paint, make ethical judgments, savor the beauty of a sunset and experience the transcendent. The body is material but surpasses the material. It’s spiritualized matter.
Brooks, it seems to me, gets it absolutely right. And his insight seemed even more right when, in the same day’s paper, I spotted a story about the botched execution in Oklahoma earlier this year. The piece begins:
An official report released Thursday about the bungled execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma in April says that an improperly placed intravenous line in the prisoner’s groin allowed the drugs to perfuse surrounding tissue rather than to flow directly into his bloodstream.
It goes on to explain that
Because the groin area was covered with a sheet as the injections began — first a sedative intended to render Mr. Lockett unconscious, and then paralyzing and heart-stopping agents — the doctor and paramedic on the scene did not see the bulge, larger than a golf ball, indicating a procedure gone awry …
Now, why was there a sheet over Lockett’s groin area? Because we as a society understand that the body is “spiritualized matter,” and the sheet over the body is meant, first of all, to confer a measure of dignity to the execution.
But in the end it doesn’t work – not in Oklahoma, not ever – because the current mode of execution, by means of lethal injection, is elaborately contrived to evade or deny our sense of the body as “spiritualized matter.” In that sense, the sheet over the body is a cover-up, literally.
The Community of Sant'Egidio’s Mario Marazziti, a founder of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, helped me to understand this. Execution by lethal injection enables the state to kill people more or less in secret. It enables the state to claim that the person killed didn’t suffer – because that person’s body supposedly felt no pain, and this because the body showed no visible evidence of pain. And in so doing, it enables the state to maintain the pretense that execution by lethal injection is something other than killing.
But it isn’t. It’s killing, no less than execution by beheading is – and the obvious pain and suffering seen in the botched execution in Oklahoma ought to make this clear to everyone.
It was clear to the doctor who was engaged by the state of Oklahoma to declare Lockett dead:
The report confirms for the first time that a doctor, whose assigned task was to declare the prisoner unconscious and later dead, joined in the frantic effort to insert a line into Mr. Lockett’s veins once the paramedic ran into problems.
In the end, the doctor was a doctor. And in the end Clayton Lockett, even if not an innocent victim like James Foley and Steven Sotloff, was a victim nonetheless.
Moral Revulsion Alert: Execution Described in Grisly Detail Here
“The curtains opened,” reports Mauricio Martin, who was there.
It was not a play, or a concert, or a magic show. It was an execution: the execution of convicted murder Joseph Wood in Arizona.
“The medical staff checked the man’s veins. He said his last words – `God forgive you all’ – and the lethal drugs began to flow, at 1.52pm. James Wood appeared to fall asleep, albeit strapped down to a table, and he looked straight ahead at the wall. The first 10 minutes went according to plan.
“Then, a hard gulp. I looked over to my left: the priest praying the rosary. To my right: the family watching on. Then dead ahead: the side of Wood’s stomach appeared to move, even after the Arizona state prison’s medical staff had announced he was sedated.
“I saw a man who was supposed to be dead, coughing – or choking, possibly even gasping for air. I knew this because Wood’s stomach moved at the same time, just like it would if you were lying down and trying to breathe. Then another of those gulps – those gasps for air, movements just from the throat area and sometimes from the stomach, too.
“I started looking at the priest’s watch to keep track of time. Five, 10, 20 minutes … an hour had passed. I started to wonder: Will this get called off? Will this ever stop?
“I continued to scribble on my state-issued notepad, counting the gulps and gasps of the man on the gurney. I counted 660. This went on for over an hour and a half.
“During that time, medical staff checked Wood six times in total, looking at his eyes, feeling for a pulse on his neck, informing us over the loud speaker that he was still sedated. His eyes were still closed.
“My eyes turned to Wood’s attorney, Dale Baich, as he handed a lady a note and she left the witness chamber. I wondered what the lawyer had written, and as the door opened, it let in a bright light, for just a quick moment.
“What seemed like an eternity passed – 20, 30, 45 minutes more, looking straight ahead – and finally the gulps and gasps started to slow, from about every five seconds or so, to about one per minute. Finally, the gulps and gasps stopped. A few minutes more went by. At last, the killing had stopped, too. A medical staff member checked Wood again one last time. Another few minutes still, and the warden pronounced the killer dead, at 3.49 pm, one hour and 57 minutes after the execution had began.”
The full story – as if it could be any fuller than that – is on the Guardian’s website. The AP’s story includes this remark by the brother-in-law of one of the murder victims: “`This man conducted a horrifying murder and you guys are going, "let’s worry about the drugs,”’ said Richard Brown. `Why didn’t they give him a bullet? Why didn’t we give him Drano?’“
Why not? Because that would be cruel and unusual, and the distinction between cruel and unusual acts as crimes and cruel and unusual acts as a form of putative state justice is a distinction worth making.
Mario Marazziti can explain this better than I can. With the Community of Sant'Egidio, he has led the challenge to government acquisition of the lethal drugs used in executions. His book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty will be published soon.
Meanwhile, there are 2347 comments on the Guardian site. Things are changing with the death penalty in the U.S. It will be history soon enough.
The Prodigal Pope: Francis Visits the Community of Sant’Egidio
“Who is Pope Francis supporting in the World Cup – Italy, or Argentina?” one of our children asked me.
A good question, and one I don’t think Francis has answered yet. But Sunday afternoon in Rome, it didn’t matter. Italy had defeated England; Argentina was ready to play Bosnia; and in steady rain – a rarity in Rome in June – Pope Francis was a few hundred yards from the Vatican guesthouse where he lives, paying a visit to the people of the Community of Sant'Egidio at the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere and in the piazzas nearby.
The visit was a rarity. Not in that it was cheerful, spontaneous, and ardent: Francis’s public events usually are. Not in that it was a Sunday visit to a particular parish: these outings have been part of the pastoral work of bishops for centuries, and in the years before electronic media it was principally through such visits that bishops were seen by their people.
And not even in that it put the pope in encounters with ordinary people – several elderly women, people with intellectual and physical disabilities, Romany people made to feel unwelcome in Rome, and poor people for whom Rome is a city of last refuge. After all, these are people Francis has long since made part of his pontificate from the beginning.
No, it was a rarity because as far as I could tell (from the streaming video) it had the air of a homecoming. Francis is an Argentine, a Jesuit, a longtime prince of the church, and as far as I know he has no formal affiliation with the Community of Sant'Egidio, a progressive Catholic NGO founded in Rome in 1968 and devoted to working worldwide for peace and for the poor and against war and diseases such as AIDS that ravage poor people especially.
But Francis’s qualities of spontaneity, ardor, simplicity on the far side of sophistication, and unfeigned friendship with the poor are so akin to the qualities of the Community of Sant'Egidio that his visit seemed like that of an elder brother rather than a father, much less a Holy Father.
Watching, I felt that the story of the prodigal son was being echoed and upended in some dreamy way. Here was the older brother coming home after worldly adventures – home to where the younger sons have dutifully kept on doing good works. But this particular older brother – as pope – has been prodigal with his father’s faith, hope, and love, not with his father’s money. Having spent these heedlessly in one event after another in the past fifteen months, he was welcomed home; and faith, hope, and love were lavished on him. Why should they celebrate him, and not the other way around? Because he has come home.
Seeing Pope Francis in Trastevere put in mind that Francis of Assisi – who stayed in Trastevere when in Rome – was himself a prodigal.
From his homecoming in Trastevere, Francis went home to the guesthouse the next neighborhood over; and Argentina won its match.
Come September, Let’s Get Climate and Peace Together
“This is an invitation, an invitation to come to New York City. An invitation to anyone who’d like to prove to themselves, and to their children, that they give a damn about the biggest crisis our civilization has ever faced.
“My guess is people will come by the tens of thousands, and … you’ll tell your grandchildren, assuming we win. So circle September 20th and 21st on your calendar, and then I’ll explain.”
That’s Bill McKibben, in Rolling Stone, issuing an invitation to a two-day rally in New York where tens of thousands of people will urge the world’s leaders to take dramatic action on climate change. The online version of the piece has generated more than 2100 comments, through commentary-inducing writing like this:
You can watch the endgame of the fossil-fuel era with a certain amount of hope. The pieces are in place for real, swift, sudden change, not just slow and grinding linear shifts: If Germany on a sunny day can generate half its power from solar panels, and Texas makes a third of its electricity from wind, then you know technology isn’t an impossible obstacle anymore. The pieces are in place, but the pieces won’t move themselves. That’s where movements come in. They’re not subtle; they can’t manage all the details of this transition. But they can build up pressure on the system, enough, with luck, to blow out those bags of money that are blocking progress with the force of Typhoon Haiyan on a Filipino hut. Because if our resistance fails, there will be ever-stronger typhoons. The moment to salvage something of the Holocene is passing fast. But it hasn’t passed yet, which is why September is so important.
Turns out September 20 and 21 are circled already on my calendar. (Yes, a printed-and-bound calendar.) The Community of Sant'Egidio is sponsoring an adjunct to its annual Prayer for Peace (to be held this year in Antwerp in early September) at Princeton, under the rubric “Poverty and Peacemaking.” We already know all too well how fossil fuels have led countries to war. McKibben offers the related insight that climate change is felt first by poor people:
In this country they’re survivors of Sandy and Katrina and the BP spill; they’re the people whose kids troop off to kindergarten clutching asthma inhalers because they live next to oil refineries, and the people whose reservations become resource colonies. Overseas, they’re the ones whose countries are simply disappearing.
McKibben envisions religious people at the rallies – “clergy and laypeople from synagogues and churches and mosques, now rising in record numbers to say, `If the Bible means anything, it means that we need to care for the world God gave us.’“ To that group, add lay people from NGOs such as Sant'Egidio and McKibben’s own 350.org.
A year ago President Obama first spelled out the nature of his climate change plan on the steps of Georgetown’s Old North. Now the plan is public, and Obama’s push for it has been seen (by Jeff Goodell, also in Rolling Stone) as “establishing American leadership on climate issues and giving him one last change to lead the world to a cooler future before he leaves the Oval Office.”
Here’s hoping that we can get together a (large) contingent of friends of the Community of Sant'Egidio from Georgetown and go first to the Prayer for Peace at Princeton and then to the rally for climate change in New York – and that peace and climate change will be encircled together on our calendars forever after.