UPDATE: Just found this video. I think it’s worth your time.

It’s interesting to me how much traffic on X, in my timeline at least, the conversation over capital punishment has gone in the last day since the Pope (you know, that Catholic dude in Rome) made an explicit statement condemning the act. What I found surprising is the number of people commenting on the tweet by the Pope that fervently disagreed and some( okay, 2 that I saw) actually included verses from various New Testament books that confirmed their opinion.

That’s right, their opinion, because nowhere in any of the verses used as evidence in favor of executions, are the words capital punishment, or even something simple, that everyone in that time or today would understand: execution. It‘s just not there ad the best example comes from Romans 13, but even that could be interpreted otherwise, depending on if a person was looking for proof of their pro death penalty position or not.

In fact, we find a lot of the Bible open to interpretation. Look at just the number of Protestant denominations there are in the U.S. According to the 2020 U.S. Religion Census, 354 separate protestant denominations were identified. This does not include many, many small independent congregations which could add a considerable number to that total. I’m not attempting to indicate that there are at least 354 different interpretations of Biblical scripture, but there’s enough of a difference in how the Bible is taught that has, since the Reformation, that Protestantism has splintered into many factions.

The Pope, however, supposedly speaks for the 70 million or so Catholics in America and the 1.4 billion Roman Catholics around the world. But hey, in today‘s world, people are just not ready to accept the leadership anymore as they used to (well, mainly). Maybe it’s time to return to the mystery of the Latin Mass.4