VATICAN CITY. ANTI-DEATH PENALTY COURSE LIKELY TO PERSIST WITH NEW POPE

Catholic leaders and scholars said that they expected new Pope Benedict XVI to continue his predecessor's strong opposition to the death penalty. Noting that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was one of Pope John Paul II's key policy people, they said he was clearly supportive of the former pontiff's condemnation of a "culture of death" that included capital punishment.
"I can't see Ratzinger making any changes," said Cathleen Kaveny, a Notre Dame University professor of law and theology. "I don't know of anything he wrote on the death penalty specifically, but my sense is he's going to follow John Paul's approach."
That view was echoed by Monsignor Frank Rossi, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, and Terrence O'Rourke, a professor of international law at Houston's St. Thomas University.
"Pope John Paul II clarified the teaching on the death penalty, making it clear there should be few reasons to justify the execution of a person convicted of criminal offenses," Rossi said. Catholic scholars said Ratzinger was one of the former pope's point men in that regard. In 1997, for instance, Ratzinger, then the Vatican's authority on doctrine, presented the revised catechism which hardened the church's opposition to the death penalty.