Abstract
For centuries, capital punishment served as a precedent within Catholic social thought for the justification of other sanctions, including punitive war and punitive mutilation. If the state could execute criminals, surely it had the right to impose other penalties that were not necessarily lethal? Ironically, support for these two punishments waned, either explicitly or implicitly, within Catholic social teaching well before the recent developments in papal teaching on the death penalty. Today, Catholic teaching on capital punishment reverses the earlier paradigm and provides an argument against the legitimacy of these sanctions. The comparative history of these developments provides a useful case study in the evolution of Catholic social thought, illustrating how change can come through the deliberate excision of or the failure to reiterate a long-standing ethical judgment—that is, through pruning or silence.