The State - News from Sept. 20, 1985

Considering it likely that executions will resume in the San Quentin gas chamber later this year, California’s 26 Roman Catholic bishops have unanimously issued a statement opposing the death penalty, saying it is “not the best response we can make as a society to violent or even heinous crime.” The bishops, echoing a statement made by the national Catholic hierarchy in 1980, said they took the position because of “commitment to a consistent ethic of life by which we wish to give unambiguous witness to the sacredness of every human life from conception through natural death.” Bishop John Cummin of Oakland, president of the state’s bishops, said the statement, released in Sacramento, was worked out over a six-month period. Not all Christians agree on the morality of capital punishment, Wood said, “but the bishops are saying that people aren’t free to believe what they want without thinking about it.”