Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio’s objection to the livestreaming of Nidal Malik Hasan’s scheduled Dec. 3 execution is a serious moral argument, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a rhetorical one. It is also wrong — wrong in a way that matters to specific people: the thirteen Hasan killed at Fort Hood’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center on Nov. 5, 2009, twelve of them service members; the thirty-two he wounded; and the families who have waited seventeen years for a process the military justice system has now lawfully completed.
Let me name what has actually happened, because the entire argument turns on it. Hasan was convicted by court-martial of thirteen counts of premeditated murder and thirty-two counts of attempted murder. The death sentence was reviewed through the appellate chain the Uniform Code of Military Justice requires — the Army Court of Criminal Appeals, then the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces — and was confirmed by the President under Article 71(d), which provides that no death sentence may be carried out without that confirmation. The execution date was set under the execution protocol in the Manual for Courts-Martial. What is scheduled for Dec. 3 is not an act of killing. It is the final step of a legal process that has run its full course over seventeen years. That distinction is the argument, and it is the one the archbishop’s statement does not engage.
Broglio’s strongest point — the part of his statement worth taking seriously — is the moral injury the members of the firing squad may experience. He asks whether that potential injury has been considered. It should be. The clinical literature on moral injury, developed by Brett Litz and colleagues in a 2009 paper in Clinical Psychology Review, describes the psychological damage that comes from participating in acts that transgress a person’s own moral beliefs. It is distinct from post-traumatic stress in its mechanism: post-traumatic stress grows from threat to the self, moral injury from a rupture in what the self believed was right. A service member ordered to shoot a man at close range — however lawful the order, however grave the crime — is at real risk of that injury.
Here is where the archbishop’s argument breaks. He raises the firing squad’s moral injury as a reason to conduct the execution privately, away from view, with the state’s act concealed. But consider what that concealment does to the people he says he is worried about. Under a private execution, the squad bears the entire moral weight of what it has been ordered to do, alone, with no public witness, carrying it home to families who will never see the public reckon with it. Under a public execution, that weight is distributed: the public whose government imposed the sentence sees what its government does, and the squad does not carry it in isolation. Broglio’s own concern, followed to its conclusion, argues for transparency rather than against it. If the act causes moral injury — and it may — then the community that ordered the act through its courts should not be permitted to look away from it while a handful of service members absorb the whole of it invisibly.
This is also the answer to his claim that broadcasting the execution will damage the U.S. military’s reputation abroad. The military’s reputation rests on a specific institutional fact: it is a lawful armed force of a constitutional republic that convenes courts-martial, convicts on evidence, affirms sentences through appellate review, and carries them out under a published protocol rather than in the dark. To execute a convicted mass murderer of American service members, on American soil, after seventeen years of review, in the open, is the most credibly lawful exercise of state coercive power the United States can demonstrate. The comparison the archbishop invites — between this and the acts of what he calls “the terrorists of this world” — fails on the very facts that distinguish them. Terrorists kill without adjudication. This is adjudication, completed. Hasan’s paralysis, which he sustained from the law-enforcement response to his own attack, does not change that; the appellate courts considered his condition and affirmed the sentence regardless. What the world sees on Dec. 3, if it is permitted to see it, is a state that tried its enemy under law and told the truth about the result.
On the question of children: Broglio asks whether exposure to the execution of “the young and impressionable during the 250th anniversary year of our independence” could be repaired. That is a real question with a real answer, and the answer is parental mediation and platform controls — not state concealment of a lawful public act. A family’s obligation to shield a child from a specific image and a government’s obligation to be transparent about what it does in the public’s name are different obligations, and they do not conflict. One is the work of the kitchen table. The other is the work of the republic.
Now the harder question, which Broglio raises and which his colleague Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, sharpened into the phrase “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death.” That phrase deserves engagement on its own terms, because it is a specific term of art with a specific source: John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae. And the encyclical does not say what the bishops’ deployment of it implies. John Paul II coined the “culture of death” language to name a civilization that treats human life as disposable — abortion, euthanasia, and a death penalty applied without justification. He narrowed the justification for capital punishment; he did not eliminate it. It was Pope Francis who amended the Catechism in 2018 to declare capital punishment “inadmissible” in all cases — a genuine development of doctrine, and a recent one. For most of its history the Catholic Church did not hold this position. The bishops are entitled to their tradition’s current teaching, and I respect that they hold it. They are not entitled to present a 2018 magisterial development as though it were the plain sense of the text, or to deploy its vocabulary in a way that closes an argument it does not, on examination, settle.
Which brings me to the text I actually read, because this column is written from a different tradition than the archbishop’s, and I want to be plain about that. Romans 13:4 says the governing authority “does not bear the sword in vain” — the sword, the machaira, was the Roman instrument of capital punishment, and Paul’s claim is that the state’s coercive power is delegated and purposeful rather than arbitrary. And Romans 12:19, one chapter earlier in the same argument Paul was making, tells the believer: “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath.” Read together — and Paul wrote them together — the authority to execute belongs to the state under law, and does not belong to private vengeance. A court-martial conviction, appellate review, presidential confirmation, and a published execution protocol is that authority functioning as Paul described it. A spectacle organized for deterrence-by-fear would be a different thing; it would drift toward the register of revenge, which Romans 12:19 withholds from everyone, including the state’s own officers, in favor of the due process that Romans 13:4 assumes.
I grew up inside a tradition that treated support for capital punishment as a marker of political identity rather than a question to be worked out in the text. Reading Romans 12 and 13 as the single argument Paul wrote — the state’s sword in one chapter, the believer’s refusal of revenge in the one before it — changed how I hold this. It did not make me an opponent of the death penalty. It made me precise about what the state is doing when it executes, and about what it is not doing.
So let me say plainly what I think the Secretary of Defense got right and what he got wrong. He got the transparency right. He got the rationale wrong. Deterrence, his stated reason, is the weakest ground available. Hasan is not going to be deterred, and prospective attackers of the kind he represents are not persuadable by the spectacle of his punishment; that is not how the ideology functions, and the record of it is not ambiguous. The ground that holds is accountability: the public’s right to watch its own government complete, in the open, the process its courts began seventeen years ago. If the livestream stands on deterrence rhetoric, it will not last. If it stands on transparency, it should.
None of this requires anyone to approve of the death penalty, and the Catholic bishops do not approve of it. Their conscientious objection is real, and Broglio’s instruction to Catholic service members who may be assigned to the firing squad that they may seek exemption is the correct exercise of a bishop’s authority over his own people’s conscience. He is right about that, and he is right to raise it clearly rather than quietly. He is wrong about the rest — wrong that transparency imitates terrorism, which it distinguishes; wrong that concealment protects the firing squad, which isolates it; and wrong that the state’s lawful completion of a seventeen-year capital process is the same moral event as the murder of thirteen people in a readiness processing center on a November morning.
The families of the twelve service members Hasan killed have waited seventeen years. They are owed a process they can see. That is not spectacle. That is the difference between a republic that executes under law and one that kills in the dark — and on that point, respectfully, the archbishop has the argument backwards.