Gary Bishop: Death Penalty Attacks Human Dignity
Following Indiana’s Nov. 5 lethal injection, Bishop McClory cites the Catechism’s teaching that capital punishment is inadmissible and prays for every life.
Jeffrey Weisheit, 50, was executed by lethal injection of pentobarbital at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, within the Diocese of Gary. The process began shortly after midnight; death was pronounced at 12:45 a.m. CST on Nov. 5, 2026.
Weisheit had been convicted in 2013 of murdering his girlfriend’s two young children in a 2010 house fire. Before the execution, Bishop Robert J. McClory of Gary released a video calling for repeal of the death sentence. In a conversation with Daniel B. Gallagher, a lecturer at Ralston College, the bishop said his ministry “compels” him to lead people “to a deeper appreciation of the value of every human life, including those who have committed horrible crimes.”
Pastoral witness and the Catechism
Bishop McClory said he had prayed outside the prison four times since becoming bishop. He pointed to a botched execution in Tennessee in which the condemned woman survived and was admitted to a hospital, and to a proposed livestream of a military execution that was later canceled. He noted that two Indiana state representatives had written to the governor, quoting St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans and drawing inspiration from St. John Paul II. He credited John Paul II and Leo XIV with renewed attention to the issue.
Gallagher recalled that the 2018 revision of paragraph 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that the death penalty is “inadmissible” because it attacks the inviolability and dignity of the person. He said the father of one of the victims had begged for clemency and that Weisheit claimed a conversion. Bishop McClory agreed that the focus should remain on paragraph 2267 and said it is now difficult to conceive of a circumstance in which capital punishment could be permitted.
Penalty, mercy, and the Gospel of life
Gallagher and the bishop distinguished capital punishment from a true “bonum,” drawing a parallel with St. Thomas Aquinas’s question whether waging war is always a sin—the framework of just war. A civil and canon lawyer, Bishop McClory recalled the Church’s three purposes of penalty: reform of the offender, removal of scandal, and restoration of justice. In pastoral visits he has met inmates who take part in the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults, serve as sacristans, and seek baptism.
The bishop’s public appeal places the Indiana execution under the light of the Church’s settled teaching: every human life, even after grave crime, retains inviolable dignity that the state may not extinguish.