VATICAN CITY (CNS): No one should be put to death, not even former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, said Cardinal Paul Poupard, who is president of the pontifical councils for Interreligious Dialogue and for Culture.
“The Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Church itself and the Pope reaffirm that every person is a creature of God and that no one but the creator can claim to be the lord of the life and death of another,” the cardinal said on June 21 in an interview with the Italian news agency ANSA.
“Every creature, even the most wretched, was created in the image and likeness of God,” the French cardinal said. “God is the master of life and death.”
The cardinal made his comments after Avvenire, the Italian bishops’ daily newspaper, published an editorial on June 20 calling for the life imprisonment and not the execution of Saddam and his co-defendants, who are on trial in Iraq.
In his final arguments in Saddam’s trial on June 19, the chief prosecutor called for the death penalty for Saddam and his co-defendants “because they spread corruption on earth, they showed no mercy even for the old, for women or for children, and even the trees were not safe from their oppression”.
