Pope Leo condemns Trump's approval of firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan

Pope Leo has publicly condemned US President Donald Trump's decision to approve the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who murdered 13 people and wounded dozens more at the Fort Hood military base in Texas in 2009.

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Hasan was sentenced to death by a US military court in 2013 and has spent more than a decade on the military's tiny death row at Fort Leavenworth. Under US law, a military execution cannot take place without the president's personal approval, and Trump's sign-off moves Hasan closer to becoming the first member of the US armed forces to be executed in more than sixty years.

The Vatican's stance is rooted in Catholic teaching, which holds that the death penalty is inadmissible in every case, and recent popes have called for its abolition around the world. The condemnation sets up a rare and very public disagreement between the White House and the Holy See over the morality of state killing, at a moment when the case is already drawing intense attention in the United States.

The execution had already become a political flashpoint after the Pentagon said it would be livestreamed, a plan the president later called off. What happens next rests with the military courts and the appeals process, but the Pope's intervention ensures the debate will be about more than one man's crimes: it will also be about whether America should still put its own soldiers to death at all.

For the families of the thirteen people Hasan murdered, the Pope's words may be hard to hear; many have waited more than a decade for the sentence to be carried out. The clash between mercy and justice, between a president's signature and a pope's plea, is now set to play out in public as the legal process grinds forward.