Portsmouth, England, Mar 26, 2018 / 06:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Legalizing assisted suicide is a false solution to the sufferings of the terminally ill, an English bishop has said in a Palm Sunday letter addressed to the faithful of the Channel Island of Guernsey.
“Someone near the end of life needs emotional support, comfort and care, good pain control, respect and loving communication – not suicide on prescription,” said Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth. “Let us redouble our efforts to offer this support, not least to anyone tempted to suicide or a hurried death.”
“I appeal to Catholics to mobilize,” he added in his Palm Sunday letter to the Parish of Our Lady and the Saints of Guernsey. “Speak out against this proposal. It is never permissible to do good by an evil means.” He asked everyone in Guernsey to overturn this “grim proposal” and to “redouble the compassionate care of those who are frail and terminally ill.”
Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy, is a Crown dependency for which the U.K. is responsible. It is part of the Diocese of Portsmouth.
Its chief minister, Gavin St. Pier, has proposed allowing terminally ill patients to commit suicide in a state-funded program with what he says are strict guidelines, the U.K. newspaper The Sunday Express reports. Those eligible under the proposal would include those who are mentally competent, diagnosed with a terminal illness, and given less than six months to live.
St. Pier cited his father’s death at age 77 after heart disease left him bedridden and unable to move, speak, eat, or drink. The minister said his father would have wanted an assisted suicide two to three weeks before his death.
The proposed change aims to give people choice and a sense of control over their death, St. Pier said. The Suicide Act 1961 bars euthanasia, with a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>As we prepare for the Palm Sunday Mass, let’s pray for the people of Guernsey that, along with their doctors and other civilised people, they will robustly reject the push from secularists and liberals for assisted suicide and death-clinics.</p>— Bishop Philip Egan (@BishopEgan) <a href=”https://twitter.com/BishopEgan/status/977819241712939008?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>March 25, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Bishop Egan wrote that assisted suicide is “fundamentally incompatible with a doctor’s role as healer.”
“It would be difficult or impossible to control and it would pose serious societal risks,” he said. “Let there be no death-clinics in Guernsey.”
Bishop Egan said the proposal to legalize assisted suicide is “fundamentally subversive, horrific and dangerous, however well-intentioned.” Invoking the expansion of Belgium’s legal assisted suicide to include children, he said “the right to die would soon become the duty to die.”
“It would be an intolerable and utterly immoral demand to ask medical staff, doctors and nurses dedicated to preserving life, to extinguish the life of another human person,” the bishop added. “However carefully crafted the laws might be, assisted suicide would place medics in an impossible dilemma.”
Dr. Brian Parkin, a Guernsey representative of the British Medical Society, told The Sunday Express he was concerned about the proposal.
“Safeguarding the vulnerable is paramount in such a debate,” Parkin said. “The continued investment and development of the high-quality palliative care services in Guernsey involves all health care professionals – and their focus on end of life care plans should be prioritized.”
The local branch of the British Medical Society said that support for aid in dying could have an impact on recruiting and retaining doctors to the island, home to about 63,000 people.
The national organization has opposed assisted suicide since 2006 and supports the current law. The U.K.’s General Medical Council is also clear that encouraging or assisting in a suicide is illegal.
Because the council registers doctors to practice medicine, it is unclear how legal assisted suicide in Guernsey could be carried out by registered doctors, the Jersey Evening Post said.
For Bishop Egan, the proposal was an opportunity to reflect on the hardships at the end of life and what Christians believe about suffering and death.
“Frailty, pain and infirmity are a difficult trial for anyone,” he said. “Those who are mentally ill may experience despair and gloom at the problems they face. Others, the terminally ill, become anguished at the loss of function and mobility, feeling keenly a sense of burden on family and even a financial burden on society.”
“Yet let us thank God for the amazing advances that medical science has made and the level of true loving care that can now be given,” Egan added, noting advances in palliative care and pain management.
Further, the bishop said Christians believe in “assisted living, not assisted dying.”
“Death is not pain relief but the beginning of a new, resurrected life with God our Father and Creator,” he said. “This future depends on the state of our soul when we die and this perspective rightly affects our decisions on end of life care and how best to uphold a patient’s personal dignity.”
To help someone to commit suicide or to die prematurely, even when they request it, “can never ever be a compassionate action,” he emphasized. “It is a grave sin.”
Egan’s Holy Week letter stressed the importance of uniting one’s suffering with Christ and finding in him “all the strength, patience and energy we need to sustain our suffering – to ‘carry the cross’ and to turn it to a positive good for others. That is the meaning of Holy Week, when Jesus Christ willingly underwent death at the hands of those who had decided it was better for society for Him to be extinguished.”
“We must not yield to the temptation to apply rapid or drastic solutions, moved by a false compassion or by criteria of efficiency and cost-effectiveness,” he said.
The seriously ill deserve respect, understanding and tenderness “so that the sacred value of their life can shine forth with splendor in their suffering.”
[…]
The Vatican’s Response: “A day late and a dollar short.”
My advice to the Vatican: Don’t bother; the People of God are already on it.
The dollar short being: this was primarily an offence aimed against God; it was a Luciferian anti-liturgy.
In 2024 and of Paris we read: “…there should not be allusions ridiculing the religious convictions of many people.”
In 1938 and in Munich Chamberlain said it was ‘Peace for our time’ and Hitler said he had ‘No more territorial demands to make in Europe.”
At all levels civilization is up for grabs, and we delineate the limits to “freedom of expression.”
Yes, and “many” people is actually several billion people, which is not a small thing.
Kudos to Bishop Barron for getting on this without waiting for everybody else to go first.
True that!
I’m not sure how this letter can be characterized as coming “from the Vatican” — i.e., from the pope’s administration.
The story says that the signatories were “led by Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke,” who was expelled from his Vatican apartment and denied his Vatican paycheck by Bergoglio just this past November.
If the letter originated from the Vatican hierarchy, I hardly think that Cardinal Burke, who is viewed with such contempt by Bergoglio, would be among the signers.
brineyman, please take note that this piece emanated from CNA. For me, that explains all. If you peruse so many of the “news stories” of CNA, they pretty much all make reference in one fashion or another to “the Vatican” – as if the Catholic Church was synonymous with the Vatican.
Not the same letter, but TWO totally different letters (the first was an “open letter” on July 30, and the more recent was an email(!) from “the Holy See” as the home base of the Church but also a sovereign state like the nation-states participating in the Olympics.
About the possibility of the second communication from, say, the pope, yours truly made this earlier comment:
“Or, maybe NOT a direct response from Pope Francis or from any pope? Would such an action be twisted to confer a kind of equivalence and legitimacy to a tribe of lunatics floating through Paris or wherever?
“Another proposition is that the Holy Spirit already works in subtle but concrete ways…
“The demand for an apology [the first letter] comes from bishops from around the world (just as the Olympic Games include nations from around the world). And the demand was possibly fostered by Cardinal Burke who, by incoherent circumstance, no longer lives in the Vatican. And, therefore, now is more free to say what must be said without engaging in an historic pissing contest between the perennial Catholic Church and moral mutants feeding on what’s left of the West.
“The brief letter also evangelizes clearly and concisely, in only a few sentences, rather than in thousands of unread words on Vatican letterhead. The only fly in the ointment (fly, so to speak), is the earlier Vatican blessing of irregular “couples” under Fiducia Supplicans… butt surely pairs of drag queens are not to be excluded.
“Better that oblique harmonizers of “polarities” stay out of this.”
Paolo below references a release from the Vatican Press Office. NO ONE apparently signed the release. No office of the Vatican is identified. Not only that. It does not mention Francis. NO names are mentioned. In its entirety (Italian followed by English translation)
olympiques de Paris 2024
Created: 03 August 2024
Hits: 19
Holy See Press Office Bulletin
Le Saint-Siège a été attristé par certaines scènes de la cérémonie d’ouverture des Jeux Olympiques de Paris et ne peut que se joindre aux voix qui se sont élevées ces derniers jours pour déplorer l’offense faite à de nombreux chrétiens et croyants d’autres religions.
Dans un événement prestigieux où le monde entier se réunit autour de valeurs communes ne devraient pas se trouver des allusions ridiculisant les convictions religieuses de nombreuses personnes.
La liberté d’expression, qui, évidemment, n’est pas remise en cause, trouve sa limite dans le respect des autres.
© http://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino.html – August 3, 2024
The Holy See was saddened by some scenes of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris and can only join the voices that have been raised in recent days to deplore the offense caused to many Christians and believers of other religions.
At a prestigious event where the whole world unites around common values, there should be no allusions that ridicule the religious beliefs of many people.
Freedom of expression, which is obviously not in question, finds its limit in respect for others.
This CNA piece is confounding as it appears to be reporting on more the press release. This CNA news piece appears to conflate the earlier open letter with Burke, Barron, etc.
I would like to see the whole document. If anyone has a link to it share it please.
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/Gioacchino-Genovese.pdf
I apologize, the provided web address is not relevant. Here is the correct one I could access:(https://www.ilcattolico.it/catechesi/documenti-catechesi/communique-du-saint-siege-pour-les-jeux-olympiques-de-paris-2024.html)
Thank you!
A perfectly secular statement which could be done by any bureaucrat. (The objective reality i.e. blasphemy is swapped with “hurt feelings” which “nice people” should not cause.)
“Saddened”? Why not outraged? Among the episcopal signatories, I trust that the name Jorge Mario Bergoglio stood out as prominently as John Hancock’s on the Declaration of Independence. Then again . . .
Yes. If Francis put his John Hancock there, it’s in invisible ink. Perhaps the magician will come out from under the white cloak and call the ‘nothingness’ into objectively sensible, visible being. We dream.
It took 10 days, this statement is really nothing, and we still have yet to hear from the Pope himself.
…who is he to judge?
Curious….first al Azhar university in Cairo condemns then President Erdoğan of Turkey and finally The Holy See….curiouser and curiouser Your Holiness.
Or maybe not in the Vatican Wonderland.
The plot thickens…
About Al-Azhar, it was the grand imam Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb of Al-Azhar who co-signed with Pope Francis the Abu Dhabi Declaration (2019), which affirmed: “The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.”
Two points:
FIRST, the Sheikh was reported in 2019 as having a following of 150 million Muslims, but not the full 1.5 billion members of sectarian Islam as reported or implied now (but only ten percent).
SECOND, while the Declaration has been questioned on its ambiguity about a “pluralism” of (equivalent?) religions as “willed” rather than only permitted by God, it could also be questioned what, exactly, is meant by a pluralism of sexes? Only a ghostwriter editing oversight, or more like a “wardrobe malfunction” at an infamous Superbowl halftime?
About this fluidly inclusive term (plurality of sexes, as in gender theory?), was it this insane sin seen sailing the Seine scene?
Glad the Vatican was so prompt in responding to the Parisian disgrace. Guess they had to fit in the “Querido Jimmy” letter from “Francesco” first.
I don’t know and have no time to investigate. It seems, in this article, CNA confuses two different things. Imagine a cross of MSNBC with Fox, reporting truth.
CNA website seems to suggest that EWTN sponsors, operates or supports CNA in some manner. Can we trust CNA as a reliable news source? I wonder. Do they receive any funds from the Vatican? What editorial process is used to verify stories which writers at CNA put forth? Anyone?
Meiron, I do not understand the assumptions behind the questions. Catholic News Agency is owned by EWTN; the home page identifies them as a “service of EWTN News.” So that relationship has always been clear to me but maybe not to others? As far as I know, EWTN does not get funding from the Vatican, although they do seem to have a broadcasting agreement regarding Vatican events.
I have not seen a serious reason to doubt the basic integrity of CNA’s reporting. Some stories are better than others, and they may occasionally get something wrong but not at an especially high rate. Have you seen something suggesting that EWTN or CNA has an agends in the way they are reporting Vatican-related news? It is possible that I am misunderstanding your post so I wanted to ask.
Having read this 3x, I conclude:
The beginning of the article says “the Vatican… issued a statement.” The second paragraph states the statement was “e-mailed. Many folks may reasonably consider a statement transmitted by e-mail to equivocally refer to an “e-mail letter,’ an “e-mail,” or a “letter”. In fact, the Vatican Press Office released its statement and classified it as a Press Office Release.
The final three paragraphs refer to the distinct letter signed by Burke and other bishops. The ‘signatories’ to that letter are not signatories to the Press Release. NO signatories whatsoever occur on the Press Release.
The name of Francis? Notable by absence…like Biden at the debate….
I would boycott this olympics. But if you need an olympics “fix” watch the movie “The Boys in the Boat”. Based on a true story about a US Olympic Crew team from the 1930’s. Excellent and worth the time.
“Vatican deplores Olympic offense”. Could that mean the costuming and choreography weren’t done well?
Perhaps it’s time for Rome to reaffirm the complementary roles of apologetics and dialogue in spreading the Gospel.
Meiron above – That’s French, not Italian.
Just sayin’.
Thanks, Cleo. Next time, can you help spot my error before I make it? Très reconnaissant!
As a side note, I went looking for the entire text of the press release Sunday morning after catching up with the news because the reports seemed too fragmentary to understand. “Surely there must be more to it, at least more context,” I thought. (I was wrong.). Reuters reported that a statement in French (which is an unusual choice) had been emailed on Saturday night. That made me chuckle because it reminded me of the infamous Friday afternoon information dump practiced by many presidential administrations when they had to deliver bad news and wanted to attract as little attention as possible.
The statement was hard to find, perhaps because it was only in French at that point and I wasn’t looking on French-language sites. A quich search of the Vatican site came up empty. I finally found it later that day on the Italian site Messainlatino. Any confusion caused by this Vatican statement seems (to me) to come from the Vatican itself, not the news agencies reporting on it. There just isn’t much substance there.
John Allen credits the President of Turkey for the Vatican statement, as their prez announced ahead of time, publically to his cabinet, that he was calling Francis, and then did a release confirming the call and its contents, leaving the Vatican on hook to not leave the prez in the public breeze as a possible liar if him ignored, and the Vatican wanting good diplomatic relations with real a real power in the Muslim world…so, we get a note from the diplomats, Francis saying,”handleithandleithandleit.” And a note bemoaning only our poor precious widdle hurt feelings.