10/12/2026
From our fellow Nonviolent City, NonViolent Owensboro.
Christ Was Present at America’s Last Public Ex*****on in Owensboro, Kentucky in 1936.
The last person executed in public in the United States was a young Black Catholic man. The sheriff in charge was a widowed Catholic woman who could not carry out her task.
Before dawn on August 14, 1936, a crowd of as many as twenty thousand people filled a vacant lot near the Ohio River in Owensboro, Kentucky, to watch a man hang. Three of the people at the center of the morning were Catholics.
The man on the gallows was Rainey Bethea, a young Black laborer convicted of r**e, baptized sixteen days earlier in a Louisville jail. Beside him stood Father Herman Lammers, the priest who had baptized him and heard his confession on the platform. As Bethea was about to die, a priest on the scaffold raised his hand, and the crowd went quiet.
Fifty yards away, Florence Thompson, the white sheriff of Daviess County and a devout Catholic, sat in a parked car. She had asked her priest whether she could carry out the hanging and remain in good standing with the Church. He told her she could. She hired a substitute in secret and drove away after the trap fell. “I suppose I will spend the rest of my life forgetting -- or trying to forget,” she told reporters.
No American government has executed a prisoner before a public audience since. On December 3 the Army plans to shoot Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who murdered thirteen people at Fort Hood in 2009, and to stream the ex*****on live. Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has called the plan “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death,” a statement I wrote about the day he issued it.
The reporters who came to Owensboro in 1936 wrote about the woman sheriff and the crowd. The priest turns up in their stories as scenery, and few of them mention that the condemned man had become a Catholic. With the federal government now proposing an ex*****on for an audience of millions, those three people are worth remembering, beginning with the condemned man.
Bethea confessed to climbing into the room of Lischia Edwards, a seventy-year-old widow, on June 7, 1936, and to ra**ng and strangling her. He confessed more than once and pleaded guilty at trial. The prosecutor charged him only with r**e, and an all-white jury took four and a half minutes to sentence him to hang. Kentucky sent murderers to the electric chair at the state penitentiary in Eddyville and hanged rapists in public in the county where the crime occurred, so the r**e charge gave Owensboro its gallows.
While he waited in the Jefferson County Jail in Louisville, Bethea took instruction from Lammers, assistant pastor of the Cathedral of the Assumption. On July 29, 1936, according to Perry T. Ryan, a Kentucky assistant attorney general who wrote the standard history of the hanging, Bethea asked to be baptized and said he wished to receive Holy Communion. Fr. Lammers baptized him in the jail. He let Bethea choose a name from a book of saints, and Bethea chose Joseph. Fr. Lammers entered him in the register as “Joseph Rainey Bethea.”
The Church honors St. Joseph as the patron of a happy death. Bethea had sixteen days to live when he chose the name.
He wrote to his sister in South Carolina asking to be buried beside their father. His note closed: “So good by and paray that we will meet agin.”
Lammers came with him to the end. A little before half past five on the morning of August 14, Bethea took off his shoes at the foot of the steps and climbed the scaffold with the priest. The two men prayed together on the platform, and Bethea made his final confession. Officers pulled a black hood over his head and strapped his arms and legs.
The Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer, defending the town against the national press two days later, recorded what happened next in an editorial. Standing next to condemned man on scaffold, Fr. Lammers scaffold held up his hand for silence and the noise of the crowd died away “till the fall of the proverbial pin could have been heard.” We can hope that the gesture of the priest brought to the crowd a belated awareness of the sacredness of human life and perhaps even repentence for treating anyone’s death as a spectacle.
Arthur Hash, the former Louisville policeman Thompson had hired to spring the trap, arrived drunk and missed his signal. A deputy leaned on the lever. Bethea fell eight feet and broke his neck.
Lammers still had a sacrament to give. Minutes after the drop, Ryan writes, the professional hangman Phil Hanna climbed down to the base of the scaffold and cut a small slit in the hood so the priest could anoint him for the Last Sacraments. Two doctors pronounced Bethea dead about fourteen minutes after the trap fell. The Messenger-Inquirer gave the act one sentence: in administering the last sacrament, Lammers “made an opening in the hood.”
The woman in the car had come to her office by a death. Florence Thompson became sheriff of Daviess County in 1936, when her husband, Sheriff Everett Thompson, died in office. The death warrant came with the badge. Kentucky law made the sheriff responsible for the hanging.
She took the question to her friend and confidant, Father Albert J. Thompson, a priest in Owensboro. He assured her that she could carry out every duty of her office, the ex*****on included, and remain in good standing with the Church. He gave the answer the Church gave in 1936: the state could lawfully put the guilty to death, and the officials who carried out a just sentence committed no sin.
Thompson accepted the answer but could not act on it. She asked each of her deputies to spring the trap, and each refused. She hired Hash on condition that his name stay secret. On the morning of the hanging an FBI agent drove her to the lot, and she watched from his car. She served out her husband’s term, worked for years afterward as a deputy, and died in Owensboro in 1961. Her funeral was held at St. Stephen Cathedral.
Eighty-one years after the hanging, the Church gave the sheriff’s question a different answer. On October 11, 2017, Pope Francis told a Vatican gathering that the death penalty is contrary to the Gospel and that the Church’s past acceptance of it had been dictated by “a mentality more legalistic than Christian.”
In 2018 the Church revised paragraph 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Church now teaches that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” and it works for abolition worldwide. On April 24, 2026, Pope Leo XIV told a conference at DePaul University in Chicago that “the dignity of the person is not lost even after very serious crimes are committed.”
Leo had said the same thing before he was pope. On October 14, 2023, as Cardinal Robert Prevost, he told the Catholic university in Chiclayo, Peru, where he had been bishop: “A Catholic cannot truly claim to be ‘pro-life’ by maintaining a stance against abortion while simultaneously advocating in favor of the death penalty.” He repeated it as pope on September 30, 2025: someone who opposes abortion and favors the death penalty “is not really pro-life.”
Fr. Thompson assured the sheriff in 1936 that the Church permitted the ex*****on. She accepted his answer but could not bring herself carry it out. Eighty-two years later the Church taught that the death penalty is inadmissible.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith explained the revision in a letter to the bishops dated August 1, 2018. The letter calls the new text “an authentic development of doctrine that is not in contradiction with the prior teachings of the Magisterium,” and it grounds the development in “the increasing understanding that the dignity of a person is not lost even after committing the most serious crimes” and in modern systems of detention.
The Church’s understanding of what that dignity required of the state took eighty years to develop. The Church recognized the dignity itself in Rainey Bethea in 1936, when Lammers baptized him, absolved him, and anointed him through the hood.
Ninety years after Owensboro, the federal government wants an audience again. The Army has scheduled Hasan’s ex*****on for 1 p.m. on Thursday, December 3, in the first week of Advent, at Fort Hood, Texas. President Trump approved the sentence on October 2. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the cable outlet Real America’s Voice. Asked whether Hasan had made any final requests, he said, “Don’t care. We’ll see him on December 3rd.” The Pentagon said the next day that it plans to stream the ex*****on. Asked about the plan at the White House on October 9, Trump said, “They’re making a determination about that.” Hasan can still seek review in the federal courts.
On October 9 a reporter asked Vice President JD Vance, who has publically announced and written about his adult conversion to Catholicism, whether as a Catholic he approved of the public ex*****on. “If it’s ultimately livestreamed, I’m not gonna be watching it,” Vance said. He asked the country to remember that Hasan “brutally murdered a lot of innocent people.” He said nothing about the Church’s teaching. On that same day Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, told reporters: “It is certainly unacceptable to turn death into a spectacle. However guilty the person may be, there are other ways.” On October 10, the World Day Against the Death Penalty, Pope Leo XIV posted the Catechism’s words on X and closed with .
Hasan killed twelve soldiers and a civilian and wounded dozens more. He is a Muslim who told psychiatrists in 2010 that he would die a martyr. Catechism 2267 applies to him as fully as to any prisoner. In 2013, after the court-martial sentenced Hasan to death, Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services said he opposed the death penalty for him.
Owensboro packed as many as twenty thousand people into a vacant lot to watch a man die Hegseth’s stream would reach a far larger audience — on phones in kitchens and laptops in offices across the country. There can be no Father Lamers to hold up hand to remind the viewers of the sacredness of all human life. No one watching on a screen can be asked for silence or repentence.
Daviess County buried Bethea in a pauper’s grave within hours of the hanging. In 2011 an archivist at the county library told the Associated Press that no one knows where he lies. Kentucky abolished public hanging in 1938. The name Bethea chose survives in a Louisville parish register, and so does the claim the Church makes about what happened to him.
The Church teaches that Christ himself acts in every sacrament. Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the liturgy, states that “when a man baptizes it is really Christ himself who baptizes.” By that teaching Christ baptized Bethea in the Louisville jail on July 29, absolved him on the platform, and anointed him through the slit in the hood. The Church taught Christ’s presence in the sacraments in 1936 as it teaches it now. What changed in 2018 was its judgment of what the state may do to the man who receives them.
The Church teaches as well that Christ identifies himself with the prisoner. “I was in prison and you came to me,” he says in Matthew 25, and “as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” Sister Helen Prejean, whom I profiled in this series, has walked with six condemned men to their ex*****ons. John Paul II applied the teaching to the murderer in Evangelium Vitae, citing the mark God set on Cain. Twenty thousand people came to Owensboro to watch Rainey Bethea die. By Christ’s own words, what they did to the condemned man they did to him.
Florence Thompson sat fifty yards away in a parked car. Her priest had told her the Church permitted the hanging. She would not spring the trap herself. On December 3 the Pentagon plans to put the sight on every screen in America, and Vance has said he will not look.
Catholics should not join the audience. At 1 p.m. Central they can pray for Nidal Hasan for the thirteen people he killed, as Fr. Lammers prayed with Joseph Raney Bethea on the platform at Owensboro. They can pray as well for Lischia Edwards, and for the man the Church received into into the Body of Christ sixteen days before Kentucky hanged him.
This post is also available on Substack: https://mikefoxcatechist.substack.com/p/christ-was-present-at-americas-last
