How a mystery novel from the golden age of detective fiction helped me accept the Church’s teaching

I was raised in a devout Christian home in the conservative Evangelical tradition of the 90s and early 2000s. In my simple childish mind, all Christians voted for George W. Bush, listened to Rush Limbaugh, and put their hope in the Republican party to enshrine America as a Christian nation with Christian values. In my high school government homeschool curriculum, I was taught basic natural law theory as believed by the Founding Fathers. This included the truth that every person has the right to life. It also included the idea that if someone took away someone else’s right to life through the act of intentional murder, their own right to life was forfeit and they could justly be subjected to the death penalty.   

Converting to Catholicism nine Easter Vigils ago was a significant change in my life. Conversion is ongoing, as it is popular for converts to say. When Pope Francis updated the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 2018 to declare the death penalty “inadmissible,” I rejected this change. It went against what I had been taught about moral retribution my entire life. I read many angry online arguments against the Holy Father and even purchased Edward Feser’s book on the subject, though I confess it still sits on my shelf unread.  

In Dorothy Sayers’ 1927 novel Unnatural Death, amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey is faced with a moral dilemma. He suspects that terminally-ill cancer patient Agatha Dawson may have been helped into eternity a few months before she was given to go by her doctor’s diagnosis. Mary Whittaker, her grand-niece, is a professional nurse who both cared for her elderly relative and stood to inherit a sizable income upon Miss Dawson’s death. The great-aunt had a violent aversion to discussing anything regarding inheritance or wills. She simply wanted her wealth to go to her grand-niece and assumed the law would make it so upon her death.  

In the course of his investigation, Lord Peter learns that British law is not so simple. A new law would come into effect in January 1926 which would disinherit Mary Whittaker unless her great-aunt amended her will. Since Miss Dawson absolutely refused to discuss any aspect of these matters, Mary certainly had the motive and means to be the cause of her unnatural death in November 1925. Lord Peter strongly suspects Mary of willful murder but, not being a practicing Christian in any sense, he wonders if this is a significant problem: “I really can’t see that it’s very much of a crime to bump a poor old thing off a bit previously when she’s sufferin’ horribly, just to get the money she intends you to have.”  

He takes his question to a very conservative Anglican priest, Mr. Tredgold, asking him if this act would be really “so very dreadful.” The priest answers: “In those last weeks or hours of pain and unconsciousness, the soul may be undergoing some necessary part of its pilgrimage on earth. It isn’t our business to cut it short. Who are we to take life and death into our hands?”  

When I first read Lord Peter Wimsey’s conversation with the Anglo-catholic priest, my mind went immediately to my personal opinion justifying the death penalty. I was no judge in a courtroom, but did I believe that any human judge could take life and death into his hands? Of course, the possible murder of Miss Dawson in Unnatural Death is really a case resembling euthanasia, not mortal retribution for a crime she has committed. I knew that it would be wrong for Mary Whittaker to have killed Agatha Dawson, even if it would ensure that her great-aunt’s wishes would be fulfilled instead of thwarted by the government’s change of law. That was easy for me to accept. But, to accept Pope Francis on the death penalty? No discursive argument from logic and reason helped me. It took a whimsical English gentleman with too much time on his hands talking to a country vicar to learn that the timing of death belongs to God.