Pro-LGBT Jesuit priest Fr. James Martin has called for conservative Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is Catholic, to be denied Communion because he supports the death penalty.

Last week, the Republican governor signed the death warrant for a convict on charges of a second murder committed after the man escaped from a life sentence imposed for his first murder.

In response to the execution of Donald Dillbeck, Martin used the issue to imply that DeSantis was dissenting from Catholic teaching on the death penalty and should therefore be refused Communion in what appears to be a tit-for-tat with Catholic bishops who insist that pro-abortion politicians and those who engage in sexual acts outside of marriage, such as those living a homosexual lifestyle — and whom Martin continually defends — may not receive Holy Communion.

Taking to Twitter, his preferred pulpit, Martin wrote, “Many US bishops have said that Catholic politicians who don’t follow church teachings, especially on life issues, should be denied Communion. Will they call for @GovRonDeSantis to be denied Communion? Church teaching is that the death penalty is ‘inadmissible.’”

Dillbeck was executed on Feb. 23 after DeSantis signed the death warrant in January. The day before the execution, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a petition for a stay on the death penalty issued by lawyers arguing that the convict suffered from “developmental disabilities as a result of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, as well as effects of childhood abuse,” Our Sunday Visitor News reported last week.

Dillbeck, 59, had been convicted of murdering Faye Lamb Vann in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1990. He had stabbed her to death in an attempt to steal her car. According to reports, the murder was committed after the convict had escaped from a work-release job while serving a life sentence for a previous murder committed 11 years earlier. In 1979, when Dillbeck was 15 years old, he had killed Lee County Deputy Dwight Lynn Hall.

In an effort to reverse Dillbeck’s sentence, the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops asked DeSantis in a Feb. 6 letter to stay his execution and commute the sentence to life without parole even though they acknowledged that Dillbeck’s “heinous and violent crimes have caused tremendous grief and suffering to the victims’ loved ones and communities.”

The bishops wrote, “We hold that the death penalty should be inadmissible due to modern systems of incarceration whereby society can be kept safe and prisoners punished,” not heeding the fact that the second murder was committed after the man escaped from a life sentence for a first murder….

Original story on LifeSiteNews.