Writing about religion automatically makes you dumber

It seems so, anyway, for most journalists, who don't realize that just because some Cardinal or other Vatican official says something, they don't automatically earn the right to include the phrase "Vatican Says" in the headline.

Jimmy Akin takes on one of the more egregious examples of this lately: the "Vatican Opposes Execution of Saddam" theme. All this really proves is that if you look hard enough, even at the Vatican, you'll eventually find someone who will say something stupid and uninformed.

Going deeper, we find that at the root of the problem, even many Catholic don't understand the Church's teaching on the death penalty. I would refer them to section 2267 of the Catechism:

Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

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." [quoting Evangelium Vitae]

This would mean that even if executing Saddam is not objectively the correct decision, it's not necessarily an immoral decision. Nor would this merely be a case of "the lesser of two evils." Killing in the defense of others, far from being murder, may in fact be the "good" option.

Aspiring journalists: if you're writing a headline, and you think that the phrase "Vatican Says" belongs in it, you're probably wrong.