He will not answer you, colleagues infallibly warned.

Cardinal Josep Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had just delivered his lecture on the new catechism of the Catholic Church from the stage of a small theater in San Lorenzo de El Escorial as part of the summer courses from the Complutense University. In the first rows of the stalls, a small group of journalists. Behind them, the faithful who had come to listen to the cardinal. The new catechism of 1992, whose drafting had been coordinated by Ratzinger, continued to justify capital punishment in extremely serious cases, disappointing the expectations placed on its disappearance by the progressive sector of the Catholic Church.

It was July 9, 1993. Standing in the stalls, the journalist identified himself with his name and medium for which he worked before the cardinal and his faithful. And he asked:

-Cardinal Ratzinger, are you personally in favor or against the death penalty?

-I, personally, consider the abolition of the death penalty desirable.

He answered this question for the first time in public and gave the headline of the meeting.

Immediately afterwards, he indicated that he did not dare to say that capital punishment is "always and in any case rejectable." And he set an example. Otto Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi officer and one of those most responsible for the extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers, deserved the maximum punishment, as it happened. Eichmann was convicted of crimes committed against the Jewish people and hanged in 1962. In this case, added Cardinal Ratzinger, "one might think that it would not be totally unfair for the state to think of a response such as the death penalty."

It is the traditional doctrine of the use of legitimate defense and whether the good to be achieved is greater than the evil to be generated. For this reason, Ratzinger indicated that from his "personal conviction" one cannot extract the "theological consequence of principle that always and everywhere the death penalty must be excluded as incompatible with the Christian faith." It is compatible, as reflected in the new catechism of 1992, even though the Philippine episcopate fought practically to exhaustion during those same days to prevent the Government of their country from restoring the maximum penalty. The Cardinal Archbishop of Manila, Jaime Sin, did not make it. He ran into the government of his country, and his own Church.

Ratzinger, guardian of the orthodoxy of the faith since November 24, 1981, who said he had gotten used to being the bad guy in the movie, did not evade the dialogue or any question. The tolerance regarding the death penalty or the just war was justified by the cardinal, by opposition to the interruption of pregnancy. “In the case of abortion, it is about eliminating the life of an innocent person, putting one's own interest first. In the case of the death penalty, it is a situation in which there are elements of guilt and danger to society, ”he sentenced.

The journalists left the theater through the central aisle while the faithful remained standing in front of their seats. Many reproached the journalist for his question. They would have shunned the interpellation that the then cardinal and later Pope accepted.