Pope Benedict XVI put it perfectly

Pope Benedict XVI put it perfectly: “Only my readiness to encounter my neighbor and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well.”

Okay, almost perfectly. The part left out is what I am supposed to do if I live in rural Tweed, Ontario or on a gracious street in Canada’s capital, and my neighbor in either place happens to be Russ Williams.

Given the horrendous crimes committed by the former colonel who commanded the country’s largest air force base, am I not entitled to want to jerk him to Jesus rather than showing him love?

Surely, sensitivity to any concept of god demands that I not love pure evil in the form of a fetish-maddened, underwear stealing, cross-dressing, raping, murdering sociopath.

Williams, after all, only loved his neighbors for having houses that he could break into, for having privacy and dignity that he could violate, for having children he could sexually assault and kill.

As National Post columnist Barbara Kay asked angrily this week: isn’t it only the weakest form of liberal sentimentalism to repay Williams’ particular perversion of “love” with life in prison rather than the death penalty?

Kay was among the first out of the gate to call for the Williams’ case to re-ignite Canada’s capital punishment debate and, this time, end it with the triumph of good, solid, conservative, common sense justice.

“Williams lives in comfort at our expense because kitsch triumphs justice in liberal minds,” she wrote.

To be historically accurate, of course, Williams will live behind bars for at least the next 25 years because Brian Mulroney’s Conservative majority government of the mid-1980s defeated Parliament’s last attempt to revive state-sanctioned killing.

Anyone who has ever spent time inside a maximum-security prison filled with lifers will know, as well, that none are places of comfort. Williams will spend a good part of the next quarter century in one of the most dangerous, fear-ridden, psychologically toxic environments imaginable. It will give him a long taste of what his victims suffered, and that would certainly be justice after a fashion.

The issue for supporters of capital punishment is that it is not justice enough, or not justice that is rough enough. To refuse to kill cold-blooded killers such as Williams is to fall prey to misguided mercy or, God forbid, charity.

The emotional appeal of this argument is understandable. Its logical appeal, however, requires accepting the premise that we can—must? —sever justice from mercy and charity. In his great encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI demonstrates why separating justice from mercy only separates us from our full humanity.

“There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love,” His Holiness writes. “Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such.”

Not just the individual bad man who has perpetrated monstrous crimes. No. Rather, “man as such”—that is, humanity as a whole.

The protection of that whole must be paramount over the gratification that comes from eradicating perceived evil in our midst. Justice, giving what is strictly due, must be rendered proportional through temperance by mercy (giving more than is due) and charity (love that expects no due).

Such proportionality is the necessary and sufficient ground for conservatives, indeed anyone of any political inclination, to fully and finally reject capital punishment.

It is true that any society has the prerogative to protect itself from internal as well as external harm. The prerogative is strictly limited by a response in which justice, mercy, and charity are proportional to the threat.

Soldiers defending their country cannot simply slaughter their disarmed enemies even, as we were reminded by a recent case, when the enemy combatant lies mortally wounded. It is only just to shoot back at someone firing a machine gun at your head. Mercy requires the return fire stop when the machine gunner is taken as a prisoner of war. Charity and full humanity demand giving the POW food and freedom from mistreatment.

This is what it means to love our neighbors even when they are our enemies. The same principle applies internally.

Russ Williams was a neighbor who became an enemy, but we have disarmed him. He can no longer cause us harm. Even if it could be shown that killing him would be his strict due—justice—it would be disproportionate for its elimination of love. It would “eliminate man” as such.

Here’s one way that elimination works. Years ago, I covered an execution in Texas. I was outside the prison walls when the family of the murder victim emerged after having witnessed the lethal injection of the monster they had waited almost 20 years to see killed by the state. I walked over to them and asked simply whether the day had been worth the wait.

The son, a generation older than he’d been when his mother was murdered, turned and said simply: “No.”

Nothing, that day, had changed. His eyes were dead. His body language was that of a man who has suffered the crushing defeat of a lifetime’s hope left unrealized.

By contrast, I had interviewed the previous day a convict who’d long shared a cell with the condemned man. I asked how it was possible to live on death row for two decades.

“It beats the hell out of the alternative,” he said.

“That sounds remarkably like hope,” I said.

“If I didn’t have hope, there wouldn’t be any point in taking a (first) breath in the morning,” he said.

The man who was waiting to be jerked to Jesus, so to speak, was able to hold on to hope. The other? What happened to him was not at all what he was ready for.