Catholic teaching on both torture and capital punishment looks at the morality of these measures as penalties imposed by a legitimate state authority. Roman law allowed both torture and capital punishment and the Church had to deal with the question of how Christians who were state officials should behave. In the early Church these two issues formed apart of a larger group of moral problems concerning war, gladiators and the military. The traditional maxim dealing with this group of issues was Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine (the Church abhors the shedding of blood).

Some early theologians like Tertullian (De Idolototria 17) and Lactantius (Divinae Institutiones VI,20) held an extreme position, admitting of no exceptions to God’s law against taking human life. These theologians were also very strongly against any form of torture. Tertullian (De Corona 11) calls torture a form of wickedness that Christian soldiers must avoid administering. Lactantius (Divinae Institutiones V,20; VI 10) considers it as contrary to every good.

St Augustine adopts a more nuanced position. In the De Civitate Dei (19,6) he does not directly condemn the practice of torture since it is an aspect of Roman law but he was very critical of the way the law was applied since it often punished the innocent whilst the guilty often chose to go through it rather than confess. Augustine’s (De Libero Arbitrio) position on capital punishment accepts the State’s right to take life based on the teaching of Romans 13,4 but notes that Christian morality demands moderation and mercy.

By the 12^th century there was increasing theological consensus affirming the State’s right to take life and to allow the torture of an enemy to elicit information. This was the position of St Thomas Aquinas who defended both the death penalty (Summa Theologica, II-II, 64, art.2) and torture (Expositio super Job X,1-5) when these were used to safeguard the common good by protecting a society under threat by the actions of others. This theological view was to prevail for some time and was subsequently incorporated into the practices for dealing with heretics during the inquisition. An important aspect of this teaching was that the Church and its officials had no right to take life and those found guilty by Church courts were handed over to State authorities for the execution of sentence.

However the view which opposed both torture and the death penalty was not absent during these years. Pope Nicholas I writing in the ninth century taught that torture is not permitted neither by human nor divine law (DS 648) and that both the innocent and criminals should be saved from the death penalty (Ep 97 chap xxv). A similar view is also presented in the twelfth century Decretium Gratiani (II, 15, 6; II, 15,15). From the 15^th to the 17^th centuries, the horrors of the European religious wars resulted in an increasing number of theologians both Catholic and Protestant affirming the incompatibility of torture with Christianity so that "[f]rom the nineteenth century onwards no manual of moral theology would continue to refer to torture" (Compagnoni, F 1978. ‘Capital Punishment and Torture in the Tradition of the Roman Catholic Church’ Concilium 1978/10:44). Opposition to the death penalty was more muted, though a number of theologians were to condemn the rights of states to put people to death. Their arguments included the assertion that the New Testament revoked the Old Testament position on capital punishment and the fact that no person or group had the right to take life except in the case of extreme self defence. These positions point to a growing recognition of the unassailable dignity of the human person and marked a return to the position of earlier Latin Fathers such as Leo I and Gregory the Great (Copagnoni, Capital Punishment... p. 46).