Beccaria, la Chiesa cattolica e la pena di morte

[Autom. eng. transl.] The contribution is inspired by the volume by Mario Pisani "Cesare Beccaria and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum", Italian Scientific Editions, Naples, 2013, pp. 1-80, which reconstructs the story relating to the inclusion in the Index of prohibited books, by the ecclesiastical Congregation which was at the time in charge of the work "Dei delitti e delle pene" by Cesare Beccaria, also in relation to the recent identification of the related documents, and in particular of the votum, drawn up by the p. Lazeri SJ, on the basis of which the decision was taken on February 3, 1766. The three argumentative nuclei adduced by the p. Lazeri, referring not directly to the subject of the humanization of penalties or to the question of the death penalty itself, but to the use, attributed to Beccaria, of references attributable to the Protestant cultural horizon, to the discontinuity of its proposals with the practice accepted by the Church and to some observations although marginal present in the work, considered censurable. On this basis, the position expressed by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in the 1997 editio typica, on the death penalty is analyzed for comparison. It highlights how it deems in fact, today, the conditions that could in theory, according to the text of n. 2267, allow the use of the same in a context of legitimate defense. It is also shown that the death penalty itself has nothing to do with self-defense, which relates to the contrast of an offensive conduct in progress. The hope is given, also given various positions in favor of the abolition of the death penalty of the last pontiffs and of the episcopates, that the text of the Catechism may evolve in the sense of affirming an inadmissibility also of principle of the sentence capital. This in accordance with the same theological reflection of the last decades on the salvific meaning of justice in the biblical horizon.