I understand people being Catholic and I understand people being in favor of the Death Penalty. I am neither (though I was once the latter) and I respect those choices and do not think anyone is a bad person for having made them.
What I don't get is folks who claim to be devout Catholics but who think that the Catholic church's opposition to the Death Penalty is just for show and not meant to be taken seriously. For years, I have watched Pat Buchanan make this case and it never does not stink of hypocrisy. Abortion is bad, he says, because his church says it is and The Pope is, after all, infallible on such matters. But when the same church and the same Pope say the same thing about the Death Penalty they (a) really don't mean it and (b) especially don't mean it because the person receiving the Death Penalty has taken an innocent life and no one is ever wrongly convicted of that.
So The Pope is infallible except when we aren't supposed to listen to what he says…or something like that. And the courts do not sentence someone to Death Row unless that person deserves to die and pay no attention to those DNA-testing exonerations because, well, just don't pay attention to them.
I really don't get this. Here's an article about this but mainly about how race seems to impact which Catholics do the Pat Buchanan Dance on this topic.