Choosing Love in the Corners of CST: George White and the Death Penalty
By Julia Greenwood
The student pro-life organization Right to Life recently held a campus event featuring George White, co-founder of Journey of Hope, an organization led by family members of murder victims that works to address alternatives to the death penalty and build a culture of hope and healing rather than vengeance.
A Vietnam veteran, George White settled in Alabama with his wife Charlene and two small children, where he was living in what he described as his own slice of the American dream—until one January night in 1983 when he and his wife were robbed at gunpoint. Charlene died in his arms that night, and soon after White was charged with murder. He was tried for the death penalty and convicted to life without parole; his conviction was later overturned, and he was exonerated. Now he fights the death penalty with words, speaking out against it and working for restorative justice, rejecting revenge.
George White’s story is a powerful reminder of the corners and peripheral issues of a consistent life ethic that holds up human life and dignity. Though it is an integral component of defending life in all its stages, the death penalty receives far less attention in Catholic social teaching and pro-life efforts than other issues, like abortion, for instance. Numerically speaking, the death penalty is a relatively minor issue when compared to abortion: in 2015, 25 Americans were killed as a result of the death penalty, whereas over one million American children lose their lives to abortion every year. The issue of the death penalty, then, is often relegated to the figurative corner of the conversation about the consistent life ethic. George White, however, in speaking about his own experience, reminds us that we are always talking about people. We can talk in numbers—and often we need to—but these numbers should lead back to the individual life. This, for me, was a reminder of the importance of not only the death penalty but other seemingly peripheral or ostensibly minor issues.
As powerful as his story itself, what left the deepest impression were the sentiments he offered. Choose love, he urged, not hate. Throughout the talk, he returned repeatedly to this manifesto. He never mentioned Catholic Social Thought directly, but the way he spoke about his work for justice altered the way that I think about CST. The Church has, of course, developed over centuries a rich and complex body of thought that informs us how we ought to act in the world. At the heart of all of the theories and stipulations, however, is ultimately love: God’s love for people, and the love that we are called to show our brothers and sisters. And so any work that is done in the vein of Catholic social teaching is necessarily grounded in love. Sometimes we may lose sight of this, but George White brought it back to the forefront when he spoke on the Hilltop.
Julia Greenwood (C'19) is an undergraduate studying American studies at Georgetown.