Help! Would you say that most Catholics are anti-war and

anti-violence.

And where does the Church stand on the death penalty?

This is not a trick. I am in an ongoing argument with a very rightwing guy who says he is strict Catholic (from NY).

I go to the Catholic Church but was not raised in the Church and have never joined so I need help here.

It would seem strange to me that a Catholic would simply choose the things he agrees with to believe in and simply not believe those things he doesn't believe in - he is very pro Iraq war and thinks that Israel should completely destroy Hezbollah.

I am kind of confused here. Of course, I live in the Midwest where people are pretty conservative - and most Catholics here are also conservative.

When they were saecular rulers as well, Popes had their own executioners.

In the modern age, most Catholic moral theologians seem to oppose the death penalty. John Paul II thought that it was part of a general undervaluing of human life which he called "the culture of death". The Church itself has no formal stance on it though.

but that doesn't necessarily make them opposed to a particular war. The notion that fighting a war may be a just thing finds its roots in the work of St. Augustine, as the mediaeval era developed so did this idea with various categorisations of how it should be applied - thus what wars can be deemed just and which unjust.

Considering the case of Iraq, Pope John Paul II spoke out against it before the invasion - there was no suggestion at the time that the then Cardinal Ratzinger disagreed, and Pope Benedict has certainly given the impression of being opposed to it as well. But individual Catholics can (and indeed should) consult their own consciences.

There is no formal position taken on the death penalty - so again different Catholics believe different things. In the past support for it was pretty universal, now I'd say (certainly here in England) that opposition to it has a large majority of those who seriously consider their views in the light of the church's moral standards (including strong opposition to it from John Paul II - very strong opposition).

The reality is that Catholicism is, and always has been, much broader and open than people imagine - there have always been Catholics on both sides of most major debates. A conservative who wants to find theologians and theological ideas which agree with him won't find it hard; so too a liberal can very easily find them as well.

You can't define Catholicism as left or right because our faith has some conservative stances and some that would be called liberal. I agree too that we should have our conscience. our own choice so to speak. That said I always appreciated John Paul II's concistency against abortion, the death penalty, the war, among other things.

He may go to one of those conservative, crazy churches that doesn't recognize Vatican 2.
Duckie

CCC 2267:

After acknowledging the state’s right to impose the death penalty against “unjust aggressors,” the CCC goes on to note:
“If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person.
“Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm – without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself – the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity ‘are very rare, if not practically non-existent.’” (Quote from John Paul II, Evangelium vitae.)

To me this is quite clear, and why many Catholics choose to overlook it is beyond me: While the Church recognizes a state’s right to impose the death penalty because it cannot dictate how a state conducts its affairs, the Church also says that there are other means to control "unjust aggressors."

As for war, there is a Just War theory, the points of which I don't have time to track down at the moment. Basically, it asks questions such as whether the country waging war is is imminent danger from its enemy, and if there is no other way to peaceably solve the conflict. (VERY loose interpretation here, from memory.) For Catholics there is much more of a gray area when it comes to war, I think, than in other areas that involve life and its protection, but generally speaking the Church is also anti-war. Seems like I'm stating the obvious, but there it is.