By BRIAN CLOWES
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of chapter 23 of The Facts of Life, “Euthanasia,” e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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Conclusion
“They are dictating how medicine should be practiced. You know the [Supreme] Court is dominated by religion . . . ‘life is sanctity, this and that’. . . . The problem with medicine today is that it’s under the Dark-Age mentality of mystical religion, which has permeated medicine to the core since Christianity took over” — Jack Kevorkian, “Doctor Death,” in 1988.
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Dissenters Again. As we have seen, the Christian Church has always been monolithic in its condemnation of suicide, assisted suicide, and euthanasia, all of which it sees as forms of murder. As with all moral issues, the teachings of the Catholic Church lead the way. The Church is as solid as rock, and will always remain that way. This is because the Catholic Church follows Christ, not man, and Jesus is the same “yesterday, today and tomorrow” (Heb. 13:8).
Of course, this plain fact does not stop the Devil from trying. One of the most powerful weapons used by the pro-abortion media cartel in the United States was and still is the exploitation of self-described “Catholics” who publicly repudiate and undermine the pro-life teachings of the Catholic Church, especially those who use the cowardly dodge “I’m personally opposed to abortion, but. . . .” They have used this strategy in the past to disarm and confuse the most powerful potential foes of abortion, and it is beginning to work for the euthanasia pushers.
Predictably, just as happened with contraception and abortion, heavily publicized dissenters have “boldly and courageously” stepped forth to combat the “hierarchical church’s rigidity in matters of personal choice.” These include the now-deceased Fr. Kevin O’Rourke of the Center for Health Care Ethics, who filed a friend of the court brief urging the starvation death of Nancy Cruzan.
Mary E. Hunt of the “New Age” group Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) says:
“We need to internalize the obligation to do justice to society as well as to individuals. This will take some getting used to in the United States, although countries like Sweden, the Netherlands, and others are far more developed in this way, as evidenced by their medical care and policies about the termination of life. We have much to learn from them.”
We certainly have learned much from them, thank God! We have learned that the euthanasia industry, just like its parent abortion industry, is rife with abuse and lies, where “death tourism” makes unscrupulous leaders a pile of money, where people are rushed through the death procedure without adequate (or any) informed consent, where “personal choice” rapidly becomes a sad myth, and where people have literally become disposable if they are considered a burden to others. . . .
Does this sound familiar? First, parents killed their children through abortion, and now surviving children see no reason not to get rid of their “pro-choice” parents when they become burdensome. What will these parents be able to say in their own defense?
The Constant Teaching of the Church. From the very beginning, all true Christians have looked upon both suicide and murder as grave sins. In his great work The City of God, St. Augustine wrote:
“Christians have no authority to commit suicide in any circumstance. It is significant that in the sacred canonical books there can nowhere be found any injunction or permission to commit suicide either to ensure immortality or to avoid or escape any evil. In fact, we must understand it to be forbidden by the law ‘You shall not kill’ (Exodus 20:13), particularly as there is no addition of ‘your neighbor’ as in the prohibition of false witness, ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor’ (Exodus 20:16).”
Pope Pius XII declared, “Therefore, medical law can never permit either the physician or the patient to practice direct euthanasia, and the physician can never practice it either on himself or on others. This is equally true for the direct suppression of the fetus and for medical actions which go counter to the law of God clearly manifested. In all this, medical law has no authority and the doctor is not obliged to obey it. On the contrary, he is obliged not to take it into consideration; all formal assistance is forbidden him, while material assistance falls under the general norms of cooperatio materialis.”
The clearest and most definitive statement on euthanasia recently issued by the Catholic Church is the 1980 Declaration on Euthanasia, which says:
“No one is permitted to ask for this act of killing, either for himself or herself or for another person entrusted to his or her care; nor can he or she consent to it, either explicitly or implicitly. Nor can any authority legitimately recommend or permit such an action. For it is a question of the violation of the divine law, an offense against the dignity of the human person, a crime against life, and an attack on humanity….It is necessary to state firmly once more that nothing and no one can in any way permit the killing of an innocent human being, whether a fetus or an embryo, an infant or an adult, an old person, or one suffering from an incurable disease, or a person who is dying.”
Additionally, in their joint pastoral letter “Human Life is Sacred,” the bishops of Ireland show that the Church recognizes that euthanasia is intrinsically evil, which means that no mitigating or extenuating circumstances can ever justify it:
“What must always be remembered is that certain actions are good or evil in themselves already, apart from the motive or intention for which they are done. Deliberately to take one’s own life is suicide and is gravely wrong in all circumstances. To cooperate with another in taking his own life is to share in the guilt of suicide. Deliberately to terminate the innocent life of another is murder, no matter how merciful the motives, no matter how seemingly desirable the result.”
Suicide, whether committed alone or in the presence of others, constitutes a grave loss of faith in God. It is the ultimate statement of despair — a loss of belief in the goodness of the world and of the self. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (nn. 2281, 2325) eloquently explains:
“Suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life. It is gravely contrary to the just love of self. It likewise offends love of neighbor because it unjustly breaks the ties of solidarity with family, nation, and other human societies to which we continue to have obligations. Suicide is contrary to love for the living God. . . . Suicide is seriously contrary to justice, hope, and charity. It is forbidden by the Fifth Commandment.”
The Role Of Suffering
Finally, Evangelium Vitae (n. 66) summarizes the reasons that suicide and “assisted suicide” are intrinsically evil:
“Suicide is always as morally objectionable as murder. The Church’s tradition has always rejected it as a gravely evil choice. Even though a certain psychological, cultural, and social conditioning may induce a person to carry out an action which so radically contradicts the innate inclination to life, thus lessening or removing subjective responsibility, suicide, when viewed objectively, is a gravely immoral act. . . . In its deepest reality, suicide represents a rejection of God’s absolute sovereignty over life and death. . . .
“To concur with the intention of another person to commit suicide and to help in carrying it out through so-called ‘assisted suicide’ means to cooperate in, and at times to be the actual perpetrator of, an injustice which can never be excused, even if it is requested.”
The concept of voluntarily undergoing suffering is entirely alien to the Culture of Death. Once we eliminate God from the equation of life, we feel no obligations to Him and have no patience for the burdens He may lay upon us from time to time. We become just an appliance, another item to be disposed of, in what Pope Francis has referred to as a “throwaway culture.”
As we have seen, pro-euthanasia activists often claim that they act in the name of a false compassion — by treating human beings as animals to be put down. Pope Francis has described authentic compassion as something that “does not marginalize anyone, nor does it humiliate and exclude — much less considers the disappearance of a person as a good thing.”
There are times in our lives when we must suffer, and there are times when we must surrender control of certain aspects of our lives to others. Christians realize that their sufferings are only a pale shadow of what Christ Himself endured for our redemption.
To reject the life that God gave us is, in a larger sense, to reject Christ Himself.
In summary, God has a plan for all of us, which He formulated long before we were conceived and proceeds to a point far beyond our time on this Earth. Just as abortion thwarts His will for our lives at their beginnings, euthanasia obstructs His will for our lives at their ends.
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