New Delhi, India, Aug 22, 2024 / 16:00 pm (CNA).
Catholic leaders in India have lauded the country’s high court for rejecting a plea for “passive euthanasia” from the parents of a 30-year-old man who has been in a vegetative state for 11 years.
Commenting on the August 20 verdict issued by a three-judge bench led by Chief Justice Dhananjaya Chandrachud, Archbishop Raphy Manjaly of the Archdiocese of Agra, the chairman of the doctrinal commission of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, said: “We would like to congratulate the Court for its unambiguous verdict while calling for support for the family facing a serious crisis.”
“We are extremely happy that the sacredness of life has been upheld by the court,” the prelate told CNA on Aug 22.
In 2021 the Delhi High Court rejected a plea of the parents for euthanasia for their son. “The facts indicate that the petitioner is not being kept alive mechanically and is able to sustain himself without any external aid,” the court said.
When the lawyer for the distressed parents of the 30-year old man — who fell from a hostel balcony in 2013 while studying for engineering and had been comatose since then — told the Supreme Court that the family had sold their house to pay for their son’s treatment, the chief justice admitted the court was “moved by the plight of the parents.”
“Can some alternative be introduced?” Chandrachud asked. “Both parents are aging. Is there any facility where [the patient] can be lodged, and the expenses covered? He is suffering from bed sores.”
Yet the court “cannot permit passive euthanasia as he is not on a life support system,” the justice said. The patient is fed through a nasal tube.
In 2018 the Supreme Court said Indian law “prohibits anyone, including a physician, from causing the death of another person by administering any lethal drug, even if the objective is to relieve the patient from pain and suffering.”
“Passive” euthanasia, meanwhile, is allowed in cases where doctors remove patients from mechanical life support. The removal of nasal feeding tubes is not allowed under that rule.
Archbishop Manjaly noted that “while taking a clear pro-life stance, the judgment acknowledges that there is definitely a crisis.”
“The suffering family cannot be pushed into a corner. We are happy that the court insists on community support for the distraught family,” he pointed out.
The prelate of the Taj Mahal city of Agra also recounted how Aruna Shanbaug, a nurse brutalized by a janitor while on hospital duty in 1973, remained in vegetative condition for 41 years with the nursing community in the Mumbai hospital taking care of her until her death in 2015.
“Society needs such compassion to care for the needy. The Church stands for that,” Manjaly said.
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Remember that, in addition to the Church’s moral arguments against euthanasia, there is a practical one: The life you save could be your own. 1.7% of deaths in Belgium and the Netherlands are attributed to “involuntary euthanasia” where doctors euthanize the patient against their will. A doctor in the Netherlands was acquitted of murder after instructing his “patient’s” family to hold her down to prevent her from resisting so he could euthanize her. In Canada, the National Health Service refused to pay for upgrades to a disabled military veteran’s home to make her life easier, but did offer to pay for her euthanasia.
Voluntary euthanasia opens the door to involuntary euthanasia, and eventually compulsory euthanasia.
In Fides et Ratio (Faith & Reason: on the Relationship between Faith and Reason, 1998), where he explores the fit between distinct human philosophizing and unique divine revelation, St. John Paul II develops the case that “cultures” aspire together to the meaning of things, and even that Christian culture can discern philosophical support from other cultures.
A point, a quote, and some questions:
FIRST, fortunately for today’s readers, St. John Paul II did not speak/misspeak (?) of a “pluralism” of apparently equivalent religions as being willed, rather than only permitted by the creating and self-disclosing Triune God.
(So, incarnational, not re-incarnational; philosophical, not Pachamama in St. Peter’s Basilica; Christ, not an accepted Marxian cross in Peru; at the 1998 World Youth Day, not exchanging the papal crozier for a Wiccan Stang; and not a Fiducia Supplicans blessing that is also said to be not a blessing, and for irregular “couples” that are also said to be not couples.)
SECOND, as St. John Paul II reflects, still at the beginning:
“Although times change and knowledge increases, it is possible to discern a core of philosophical insight [!] within the history of thought as a whole. Consider, for example, the principles of non-contradiction [!], finality and causality, as well as the concept of the person as a free and intelligent subject, with the capacity to know God, truth and goodness. Consider as well certain fundamental moral norms [!] which are shared by all” (n. 4).
THIRD, what, then about the clear contradiction of euthanasia and abortion, now widespread within post-Christian culture?
Or about the synodal “principle” or fluid notion or whatever, that “time is greater than space”?
Or the philosophically-undiscerning relator general Hollerich for the Synod on Synodality who philosophizes the contradiction that a thing can be both black and white at the same time? “In Japan, I got to know a different way of thinking [?]. The Japanese don’t think in terms of the [only] European logic [?] of opposites. We say: It is black, therefore it is not white. The Japanese say: It is white, but maybe it is also black. You can combine opposites [Hegelianism in the West?] in Japan without changing your [decapitated?] point of view.” https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/who-is-cardinal-hollerich.
From womb to tomb life is sacred and a precious gift. Long live life.