Giovanni Bugatti
Pope’s Executioner, 1796-1865
Carried out 516 Execution
The last execution by a Pope was by Blessed Pope Pius IX on July 9,1870. However the Vatican had a law permitting capital punishment until 1969. The Catholic Church today still holds that capital punishment is consistent with the teaching of Jesus. It is against capital punishment today, except in rare cases, because it believes it is not needed today.
The grotesque and blasphemous picture of the Blessed Mother above was published in the summer 2016 edition of the Notre Dame Magazine. The picture accompanies an article titled,For the Children I Would, by a woman working on a master’s degree in English at Notre Dame, while teaching at a Catholic school in South Bend, IN. The article is basically a first person narrative where the author asks herself and her class in an exercise in case book morality the question “what I would do if,” by presenting some short vignettes of scenarios of life threatening situations to herself and others and possible responses. She reaches this conclusion: “I would kill the guy or die trying. I would grab for the most damaging weapon within my reach, the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, fair skinned, blue-sashed, hands clasped in prayer, eyes turned to God, flowers at her feet, and twenty-four inches of heavy, club-shaped plaster, and I would beat his brains out with a statue of the Mother of God.”
“Later, with my class gone to PE and the room quiet,” the author writes, “I looked at Mary so serenely poised there on her limestone pedestal. I imagined that Mary could have had that fighting thing within her. How could a mother not allow that protective beast within her to act? Maybe she did try to fight [to save her Son], and the scribes didn’t write it down for us to read these thousands of years since. Mary has been a spiritual help to me throughout my life. If run and hide won’t work, she will give me more strength in the fight.”
With all the bright people at Notre Dame and all the subjects that could be written about, this is what is published! Why?
This same issue of the Notre Dame Magazine also contained information on this year’s Commencement Speaker, recently retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, and on two powerhouse Washington politicians who were given a medal for being “Outstanding Catholics.” Both, since 2003 have voted for every appropriations bill funding the human slaughter in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. One is even publicly pro-abortion.
Out of 65 million Catholic in the U.S this is the best that the richest and most well known Catholic University in the U.S. can do? Why?
Perhaps it is fortunate Bugatti is dead or he, upon retirement from his prestigious position, would have been given an “Outstanding Catholic” medal or invited to give the Commencement address. But maybe not, for he only participated in killing 516 human beings.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
