What exactly is the mess that Pope Francis has made? I would like to focus on what I believe to be the most serious doctrinal error of this pontificate, which is the change that the pope made to the Catechism of the Catholic Church regarding the death penalty. I call this the most serious error both because of its official nature—this was not an off-the-cuff remark—and because of the precedent it set. In order to understand the significance of the pope’s actions, though, we need to place the Church’s teaching on the death penalty in context.
