Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the Catholic Church’s senior pastoral leader for U.S. service members, has urged any Catholic troops assigned to execute former Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to request exemption from the firing squad. Broglio also called on the Pentagon to reconsider plans to livestream Hasan’s Dec. 3 execution at Fort Hood, Texas.
“As I would in the case of a procured abortion, I oblige any Catholics assigned to the firing squad to request to be excused from this action contrary to the teaching of the Church,” Broglio wrote in an Oct. 12 statement posted by the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA. He cited Catholic opposition to the death penalty and raised concerns about the potential moral injury to members of the firing squad and the effect of showing the execution to young viewers.
“Do we really want to imitate the terrorists of this world and make a public spectacle of barbarically killing our adversaries?” Broglio wrote. He questioned whether broadcasting the execution of Hasan, who uses a wheelchair, would damage the military’s reputation by placing it “in the same boat with terrorists.”
The Pentagon announced the livestream after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the public would be able to watch the execution. According to NBC News, the execution is scheduled for 1 p.m. local time on Dec. 3, the same weekday and time of day as Hasan’s 2009 attack. A Defense Department official said the execution would be livestreamed, although the platform had not been identified.
Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, was convicted of killing 13 service members and wounding 32 others during the Nov. 5, 2009, shooting at Fort Hood. He was sentenced to death by a military jury in 2013. The execution would be the first military execution since 1961 and the first U.S. firing-squad execution since 2010, according to ABC News.
Broglio’s statement followed criticism from other Christian leaders. Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the livestream plan “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death” in a statement highlighted by the USCCB newsroom. The National Association of Evangelicals and the Council of Bishops of The United Methodist Church also objected to making the execution a public broadcast, while the Pentagon has not announced further details about how the livestream would be carried out.