Tag: Assisted dying

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Archbishop Clarifies Remarks on Assisted Dying in Italy

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, is pictured in a file photo during a Vatican news conference Jan. 15, 2019.

By Cindy Wooden

The president of the Pontifical Academy for Life affirms his opposition to euthanasia and assisted dying but believes that to end confusion in the country, the Italian Parliament needs to make clear laws about withdrawing end-of-life care, his office said.

“Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, in full conformity with the church’s magisterium, reaffirms his ‘no’ to euthanasia and assisted dying,” his office said in a statement April 24.

The archbishop participated in a debate April 19 about end-of-life issues, and the complete text of his remarks was published April 21 by the Italian news site Il Riformista. Some websites, reporting on his remarks, claimed he defended euthanasia and medically assisted dying.

The experience of countries where medically “assisted death” is permitted by law, he had said, shows that “the pool of people admitted tends to expand; competent adult patients are joined by patients in whom decision-making capacity is impaired, sometimes severely,” for example, psychiatric patients, children, the elderly with cognitive impairment.

“Cases of involuntary euthanasia and deep palliative sedation without consent have thus grown,” the archbishop had said. “The overall result is that we are witnessing a contradictory outcome: in the name of self-determination, we are constricting the actual exercise of freedom, especially for those who are most vulnerable.”

The desire of terminally ill patients to spare themselves and their families further suffering — and sometimes, further expense — and the difficulty caregivers have in seeing their loved ones suffer have made questions about end-of-life care a pressing issue, he said.

Pain relief, palliative care and supportive accompaniment of the sick and their family members is essential, the archbishop had told his audience. With serious palliative therapy and accompaniment, he said, “in many cases the demand for euthanasia disappears, but not always.”

Euthanasia and physician-assisted dying are not legal in Italy. However, in 2019, the Constitutional Court ruled that those involved in an assisted dying are not punishable when the patient is “suffering from an irreversible pathology” causing “physical and psychological suffering that he or she considers intolerable” and is being kept alive by life-support treatments.

The court, which ruled only on the punishability of assisting or convincing someone to commit suicide, urged parliament to take up the matter with democratic debate and clear legislation to fill the legal void so the judiciary would not be left to regulate.

But Parliament has not succeeded in coming up with legislation, so requests for assistance in dying and suspected cases of assisting a suicide still are being handled by the courts. Right-to-die activists succeeded in gathering more than 1 million signatures for a referendum supporting the repeal of an article criminalizing active euthanasia, but the Constitutional Court blocked it in 2022, saying it would violate constitutional protections of human life.

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, chancellor of the Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for the Sciences of Marriage and Family, greets Pope Francis Oct. 24, 2022, during an audience with staff and students of the institute in the Vatican’s Clementine Hall.

In such a context, Archbishop Paglia had said, “it is not to be ruled out that a legal mediation is feasible in our society that would allow assisted dying under the conditions specified by Constitutional Court sentence 242/2019: the person must be being ‘kept alive by life-support treatment and suffering from an irreversible pathology, the source of physical or psychological suffering that he or she considers intolerable, but fully capable of making free and conscious decisions.’”

“Personally,” the archbishop told his audience, “I would not assist with a suicide, but I understand that legal mediation may be the greatest common good concretely possible under the conditions in which we find ourselves.”

The academy’s statement April 24 noted that the Italian Constitutional Court ruling referenced by the archbishop held that “assisting a suicide is a crime. It then enumerated four specific and particular conditions in which the crime carries no penalty.”

“In this precise and specific context, Archbishop Paglia explained that in his view a ‘legislative initiative’ — certainly not a moral one — could be possible which would be consistent with the decision, and which preserves both the criminality of the act and the conditions in which the crime carries no penalty, as the court requested Parliament to legislate.”

“For Archbishop Paglia, it is important that the decision holds that the criminality of the act remains and is not overruled,” his office said. “On the scientific and cultural level, Archbishop Paglia has always supported the need for accompaniment of the sick in the final phase of life, using palliative care and loving personal attention, to ensure that no one is left to face alone the illness and suffering, and difficult decisions, that the end of life brings.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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High stakes for Canada’s Bishops in euthanasia row

by Michael Higgins

assisted-dying

While having dinner recently with my former producer, Bernie Lucht, the Montreal Jewish intellectual and onetime head of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship intellectual affairs programme, Ideas, he looked across the table at me and asked plaintively why the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops was being so callous with the dying.

Bernie had confused the Catholic Bishops of Alberta and the Northwest Territories with the national episcopal conference. Easy enough to do. What bothered him was the seeming disjunction between Pope Francis’ call for mercy and non-judgmental attitudes toward the marginalised and the position taken by the bishops.

In their 34-page document, Guidelines for the Celebration of the Sacraments with Persons and Families Considering or Opting for Death by Assisted Suicide or Euthanasia, the Alberta and Northwest Territories bishops made it clear that their clergy should not engage in the “truly scandalous” behaviour of granting a request for funeral rites or the sacraments by people who have, for whatever reason, chosen to die by physician-assisted protocols.

Nervous public
Physician-assisted dying is now a legal right in Canada following the passage of Bill C-14 in June of this year. As I have outlined in an article in New York’s Commonweal magazine following Royal Assent for the Bill: “Although benign euphemisms were deployed regularly in an effort to make the legislation more palatable to a nervous public, Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, was refreshingly blunt in its editorial position when it observed prior to the bill’s convoluted passing through both chambers that ‘once the new law is adopted, we will be a country whose legislation allows the state to kill its citizens, pure and simple.

People often warn against slippery slopes, but this is no slope. This is a precipice from which there is no return.’”

To be clear, The Globe and Mail was not opposed to the legislation per se as it recognised that Parliament was responding to polls that indicated that the Canadian public was in favour of some form of doctor-induced death with rigorous constraints put in place.

But, not unreasonably and predictably, the Catholic bishops were opposed to the legislation as they considered it “an affront to human dignity, an erosion of human solidarity, and a danger to all vulnerable persons”.

But once the bill was passed and became the law of the land, the Canadian episcopate moved to ensure that Catholic health care facilities were protected from providing services that contradicted their mandate.

To date, they have been successful in achieving that but the Alberta bishops document may have ignited unnecessary controversy, prompting the considerable lobby opposed to exemptions for religiously-affiliated and publicly-funded health care institutions to move toward litigation seeking to revoke that exemption and could well end up in the Supreme Court.

Senior Quebec prelates, like the country’s Primate, Cardinal Gerald Lacroix of Quebec City, and Archbishop Christian Lepine of Montreal, have dissociated themselves from their Western brothers by insisting that their priests will provide funerals for those who choose the now legal medically-assisted dying option and will “accompany people in every step of their life”. By electing a pastoral over a canonical approach, the Quebec clerics have aligned more closely with the Franciscan papacy.

The last time the national episcopate was in very public disagreement was in the early 1980s when a social justice document highly critical of Canada’s fiscal policies and commitment to ‘trickle down economics’ was, in turn, repudiated by then Cardinal Archbishop of Toronto, Gerald Emmett Carter, a close friend of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and several of his Cabinet.

This time the stakes are higher.

Complete Article HERE!

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Struggle of compassion versus doctrine for Catholics who choose assisted death

by Geordon Omand

Cardinal Thomas Collins, the Archbishop of Toronto, delivers a statement on physician-assisted death while presiding over mass at St. Paul's Basilica in Toronto in a March 6, 2016, file photo. For the faithful questioning whether the final sacrament of a funeral is available to a loved one who has chosen a medically assisted death, the answer may depend on whom in the church they ask.
Cardinal Thomas Collins, the Archbishop of Toronto, delivers a statement on physician-assisted death while presiding over mass at St. Paul’s Basilica in Toronto in a March 6, 2016, file photo. For the faithful questioning whether the final sacrament of a funeral is available to a loved one who has chosen a medically assisted death, the answer may depend on whom in the church they ask.

VANCOUVER – A proper funeral is far more than an end-of-life celebration for practising Catholics, who believe last rites cleanse the soul of sin in preparation for eternal life in heaven.

But for the faithful questioning whether those final sacraments are available to a loved one who has chosen a medically assisted death, the answer may depend on whom in the church they ask.

Catholic doctrine is unequivocal in its opposition to any form of suicide, but Canadian bishops have taken different positions on whether churchgoers who choose an assisted death should be absolutely barred from having an official funeral.

Some religious experts say the schism is the product of Pope Francis’s arrival at the helm of the Catholic Church in 2013, and his emphasis on tolerance and compassion.

Wayne Sumner, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Toronto, said a more flexible approach to the granting of funeral rites is in line with Pope Francis’s similarly softened tone on homosexuality, divorce and the ordination of women.

“I think you’ve got some hardliners here who want to follow the doctrine and you’ve got some others who feel a compassion for people who have chosen this route and don’t want to punish them or their families any more or unnecessarily,” he said.

In the wake of assisted dying becoming legal in Canada earlier this year, six bishops in Alberta and Northwest Territories released guidelines last month instructing priests to refuse funerals for people who choose assisted dying. The document describes how physician-assisted death is a “grave sin” and contradicts the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Death by assisted suicide and euthanasia are grave violations of the law of God, the document says.

“These grievous affronts to the dignity of human life from beginning to natural end are never morally justified,” it says.

Other church leaders since then have said they would not encourage the absolute prohibition of funerals for everyone who chooses assisted dying.

Emma Anderson, a scholar of Canadian Catholicism at the University of Ottawa, said the division among Catholic bishops follows from Pope Francis’s move to empower lower levels of leadership to make decisions based on local circumstances.

The sometimes contradictory results of such delegation of authority risks confusing church members, Anderson said.

“It can be profoundly disturbing if you’re a devout Catholic to be getting really different messages in Quebec, in Ottawa, in Alberta, in the Northwest Territories,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be a national stance on this issue.”

Not everyone sees the bishops’ views as contradictory, said Michael Agnew, a post-doctoral fellow in the religious studies department at McMaster University in Hamilton.

“It’s not necessarily that there’s a schism over the church teaching, at least in the hierarchy or the leadership of the church,” Agnew said.

“The difference is probably in the tone that’s being used at times and individual bishops’ or priests’ flexibility around access to these services.”

Rev. Marc Pelchat, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Quebec, said the variation among bishops across Canada has less to do with church doctrine on assisted death and more to do with a difference in approach.

Pelchat said bishops in Quebec encourage a more case-by-case treatment for physician-assisted deaths and are reluctant to establish a hard-and-fast rule that ignores individual circumstances.

But the church ultimately opposes assisted death and prefers palliative care, he added.

Douglas Farrow, a professor of Christian thought at McGill University in Montreal, said the difference in direction between bishops is no great surprise.

“Some of them are more theologically astute than others and some of them are more faithful to the church’s teaching than others,” Farrow said.

Church law gives priests considerable leeway to exercise their judgment on a case-by-case basis, he said.

The difference in approach appears to follow some rough geographic patterns as well, noted Arthur Schafer, an ethics scholar at the University of Manitoba.

The strong opposition in Alberta follows the province’s traditional conservatism, whereas the more permissive attitudes in Quebec and British Columbia are in line with the provinces more progressive approaches, he said.

Complete Article HERE!

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Catholics who choose assisted death struggling with compassion vs. doctrine

Scholars say church laws do allow for some flexibility on final sacraments for assisted death

By Geordon Omand

The archbishop of Edmonton Richard Smith is shown in a handout photo. Smith has previously defended the church's decision to refuse funerals to some Albertans who have chosen assisted dying.
The archbishop of Edmonton Richard Smith is shown in a handout photo. Smith has previously defended the church’s decision to refuse funerals to some Albertans who have chosen assisted dying.

A proper funeral is far more than an end-of-life celebration for practising Catholics, who believe last rites cleanse the soul of sin in preparation for eternal life in heaven.

But for the faithful questioning whether those final sacraments are available to a loved one who has chosen a medically assisted death, the answer may depend on whom in the church they ask.

Catholic doctrine is unequivocal in its opposition to any form of suicide, but Canadian bishops have taken different positions on whether churchgoers who choose an assisted death should be absolutely barred from having an official funeral.

Some religious experts say the schism is the product of Pope Francis’s arrival at the helm of the Catholic Church in 2013, and his emphasis on tolerance and compassion.

Wayne Sumner, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Toronto, said a more flexible approach to the granting of funeral rites is in line with Pope Francis’s similarly softened tone on homosexuality, divorce and the ordination of women.

“I think you’ve got some hard-liners here who want to follow the doctrine, and you’ve got some others who feel a compassion for people who have chosen this route and don’t want to punish them or their families any more or unnecessarily,” he said.

A ‘grave sin’

In the wake of assisted dying becoming legal in Canada earlier this year, six bishops in Alberta and Northwest Territories released guidelines last month instructing priests to refuse funerals for people who choose assisted dying.

The document describes how physician-assisted death is a “grave sin” and contradicts the teachings of the Catholic church.

Death by assisted suicide and euthanasia are grave violations of the law of God, the document says.

“These grievous affronts to the dignity of human life from beginning to natural end are never morally justified,” it says.

Other church leaders since then have said they would not encourage the absolute prohibition of funerals for everyone who chooses assisted dying.

Emma Anderson, a scholar of Canadian Catholicism at the University of Ottawa, said the division among Catholic bishops follows from Pope Francis’s move to empower lower levels of leadership to make decisions based on local circumstances.

The sometimes contradictory results of such delegation of authority risks confusing church members, Anderson said.

“It can be profoundly disturbing if you’re a devout Catholic to be getting really different messages in Quebec, in Ottawa, in Alberta, in the Northwest Territories,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be a national stance on this issue.”

Some flexibility

Not everyone sees the bishops’ views as contradictory, said Michael Agnew, a post-doctoral fellow in the religious studies department at McMaster University in Hamilton.

“It’s not necessarily that there’s a schism over the church teaching, at least in the hierarchy or the leadership of the church,” Agnew said.

“The difference is probably in the tone that’s being used at times and individual bishops’ or priests’ flexibility around access to these services.”

Rev. Marc Pelchat, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Quebec, said the variation among bishops across Canada has less to do with church doctrine on assisted death and more to do with a difference in approach.

Pelchat said bishops in Quebec encourage a more case-by-case treatment for physician-assisted deaths and are reluctant to establish a hard-and-fast rule that ignores individual circumstances.

But the church ultimately opposes assisted death and prefers palliative care, he added.

Leeway in church law

Douglas Farrow, a professor of Christian thought at McGill University in Montreal, said the difference in direction between bishops is no great surprise.

“Some of them are more theologically astute than others and some of them are more faithful to the church’s teaching than others,” Farrow said.

Church law gives priests considerable leeway to exercise their judgment on a case-by-case basis, he said.

The difference in approach appears to follow some rough geographic patterns as well, noted Arthur Schafer, an ethics scholar at the University of Manitoba.

The strong opposition in Alberta follows the province’s traditional conservatism, whereas the more permissive attitudes in Quebec and British Columbia are in line with the provinces more progressive approaches, he said.

Complete Article HERE!

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B.C. bishops open to funeral services for assisted deaths, despite new guidelines

Physician-assisted death called a ‘grave sin’ that contradicts the teachings of the Catholic church

By Jon Hernandez

assisted-dying-palliative-care

Catholic priests in B.C. can still offer funeral services in physician-assisted deaths, despite new controversial guidelines that prohibit the act for bishops in Alberta and the N.W.T.

Guidelines issued by the Catholic Bishops of Alberta and the Northwest Territories suggest that priests should refuse funeral rites in physician-assisted deaths, which are declared a “grave sin” in the documents. But John Corriveau, the bishop for the Diocese of Nelson and the Okanagan, says providing funeral rites will be at the pastor’s discretion.

“We will not refuse funerals for people to everybody who has had assisted suicide,” he said on CBC’s Daybreak South, adding that priests do have compassion for instances where patients are undergoing extreme and unmanageable pain.

“If it’s a case that somebody in a moment of extreme pain made a choice — I’m sure, in many of these cases, we will be able to celebrate a funeral,” he said.

The bishop’s statements directly contradict the orders given by the Alberta/N.W.T. group, which clearly states “such a request for funeral rites must be gently but firmly denied” and refers to assisted-death as both “evil” and “morally unjustified”.

Physician-assisted death has been hotly contested by the Catholic Church, which instead calls on palliative care and pain management as effective tools for treating people with serious illnesses.

But in June 2016, the Canadian government approved physician-assisted death across the country under several conditions and limiting it to adults facing ‘foreseeable’ death and undergoing a “grievous and irremediable” illness.

According to Corriveau, under the federal conditions, it is likely that at least some pastors in B.C. will provide funeral services.

Complete Article HERE!