The manner of his death speaks eloquently to us more eloquently even than some of the fragments of his verbal teachings which the evangelists recorded for us in the Gospels. The death of Jesus must serve to illuminate our minds as we examine the relationship between Christians and civil law, especially law which imposes the death penalty. Our time is filled with paradoxes. We were long the most affluent society on earth, yet there is great poverty in our midst. We are a peace-loving nation on the international scene, yet at home violence is almost a way of life for many of us.
Violence abounds in our cities and towns, on our streets and in our homes.
Good people are filled with anxiety, and in their search for relief they increasingly look to the state for solutions, solutions of law. But law has been sometimes misused also in some instances, with disastrous results. The force of law has been most frequently misused, it would seem, when, in an effort to protect the rights of one group of our society, the rights of another group are seriously curtailed or violated. Such a situation is bad enough when it involves property rights, but is intolerable when it directly affects persons physically and especially when it affects the very life of a person. In his book We Hold These Truths , Father John Courtney Murray has written of our American tendency to solve all problems with laws.