The U.S. government will “make sure that people are able to watch” the Dec. 3 execution of Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, according to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

Condemnations of Mr. Hegseth’s plan for a public execution were swift and widespread. Lawmakers from both parties rushed to denounce his plan, and Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, described it as “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death.” 

The military’s proposal—which Mr. Hegseth endorsed with a social media post—to livestream the execution is so far outside the moral norm that it almost becomes difficult to articulate why the idea of a public execution is so morally awful. The issue is not only that the execution itself is violent, but also that putting it on public display threatens to reshape our conscience to celebrate the state’s capacity for violence. Yet sadly, that seems to be exactly what Mr. Hegseth is asking us to do.

In Archbishop Coakley’s words, this act by our government “will only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people.”

You do not have to heed the archbishop in order to reach that conclusion. You only need to listen carefully to Mr. Hegseth’s own words as he announced the plan.

Seemingly, the interviewer had been tipped off that he should ask a question about this even though the rest of the interview, conducted on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, had been about the aircraft carrier’s long deployment and return to port. The interviewer tacked on “one last question,” saying, “I don’t believe anyone’s asked you on air about this yet,” and asked about the process leading to scheduling the execution. 

Here’s how Mr. Hegseth responded:

No brainer. Execution by firing squad. Army major, betrays his country, radical Islamist, kills a bunch of Americans at Fort Hood. Of course we’re going to do it at Fort Hood. We’re going to do it on a Thursday. We’re going to do it at one o’clock, which is when he did it. It’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing—the firing squad. It hasn’t been since World War II that we’ve done that. 

Well, I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II.… When the enemy attacks you, you stand your ground.

According to Mr. Hegseth, the execution has been designed to mirror the crime for which it is being imposed, down to the day and time at which it will be carried out. His argument is that by carrying out the execution in this pattern, we are “standing our ground” against an enemy, refusing to be cowed by an attack. But the attack in question happened in 2009, and when the man who shot and killed 13 people during that attack is himself shot and killed on Dec. 3, he will be hooded and bound to a chair. No one will need to stand any ground against him then.

Further, Mr. Hegseth’s reference to World War II misappropriates the honor of soldiers willing to sacrifice their lives for a just cause and in defense of freedom. Whatever he may like about the “mentality” we had at that time, their willingness to stand their ground in the face of danger had nothing to do with firing squads.

The plan for the execution is not a plan for justice, but for displaying power through lethal means, treating the person who will be killed as a mere vehicle for doing so. In that respect, it embodies perfectly the glorification of violence and warmaking that has characterized Mr. Hegseth’s leadership of what is still, at least in law, the Department of Defense. He treats the capacity for violence as a proxy for righteousness.

According to contemporary Catholic teaching, the death penalty must be rejected even when it is framed as part of a system of well-ordered justice. But even before Pope Francis revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church to call the death penalty “inadmissible,” even before Pope St. John Paul II had taught that it should only be used “in cases of absolute necessity, in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society” and said that those cases were “practically nonexistent,” it was utterly clear in Catholic teaching that the imposition of the death penalty had to be directed toward redressing injustice and securing the common good, not to the glorification of the state’s power to use violence itself.

There is no justification in terms of the common good now, nor was there ever, for livestreaming an execution. It emphasizes violence rather than justice, and treats the execution not as a necessity for safety but as an accomplishment to be celebrated.

Mr. Hegseth’s own justification is that people need to be able to watch the execution in order to “understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things.” Immediately after saying that, he was asked if the man to be executed had made any final request, reached out to the president or anything similar. He responded: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on December 3.”

Mr. Hasan, the condemned murderer, has never expressed remorse for his acts of violence. He treated the 13 people he killed as a means to his end of opposing what he saw as America’s “war on Islam,” using their deaths as a symbol for his allegiance to a greater power.

Just as he has arranged the execution as a mirror image of the crime, Mr. Hegseth is also operating with a moral logic that echoes Mr. Hasan’s, using his death as a symbol for the power and resolve of the United States. (Publicly executing someone would also mirror Afghanistan and Iran, the only two countries to do so last year.) By livestreaming his execution, Mr. Hegseth is inviting the rest of us, at profound peril to our own consciences and souls, to join him in treating Mr. Hasan as nothing more than a symbol, and to answer, “Don’t care” when asked to think about him as anything more. 

That may demonstrate allegiance to some idea of a greater power. Whatever that power might be, it is not the God of Jesus Christ. 

Sam Sawyer, S.J., is the editor in chief of America Media.