OTTAWA – Ontario's bishops are putting their weight behind doctors who are going to court to defend their religious and conscience rights to refuse to refer patients for assisted suicide.

There is a dangerous misconception that because the courts and Parliament have decided people can obtain an assisted suicide, health care institutions therefore have a legal obligation to assess candidates and perform these killings.

Bishops in Alberta and the Northwest Territories issued what has been prosaically called a series of guidelines to deal with so-called medical aid in dying. In truth, the Vademecum for Priests and Parishes beautifully illuminates, and reminds readers, what it means to live a Catholic life.

After wading into the social and legal morass of assisted suicide Canadian Catholics are now confronting its spiritual implications — and receiving no clear answers.

Reading through the obituary recently of iconic Canadian author and baseball lover W.P. Kinsella, one paragraph jumped off the pages of the Globe and Mail; dripping with irony.

The great Canadian author William Kinsella died Sept. 16 at the age of 81. He wrote terrific stories and was brilliant at merging baseball and fiction. His novel Shoeless Joe was turned into the hit movie Field of Dreams. He left behind a great literary legacy and a gaping hole in the hearts of baseball fans with a literary bent.

OTTAWA – Canada’s Catholic bishops are unlikely to issue national pastoral guidelines on how to accompany Catholics considering euthanasia, the bishops’ conference president said.

OTTAWA – The archbishop of Vancouver has written to a local health authority to oppose a threat to make compliance with assisted suicide requests mandatory at all its health institutions, including Catholic hospitals and palliative care centres.

QUEBEC CITY – Cardinal Gerald Lacroix of Quebec said he has no intention to follow in the steps of his fellow Canadian bishops of Alberta and the Northwest Territories in refusing funerals for those who asked to be euthanized.

CORNWALL, Ont. – The Archbishop of Utrecht advised Canadian bishops to continue to decry euthanasia and assisted suicide so that Canada never emulates the Netherlands, where assisted killing can now be administered to psychiatric patients and the handicapped.

One would think, as a teenage girl, suicide should be the very last thing on my mind. But in a recent conversation with my grandfather, I’ve had reason to reflect on just how much Canadians have changed their perspective on assisted suicide and what a contrast it is to his generation.

Promoters of assisted suicide and euthanasia have effectively used heart-wrenching stories from those experiencing great pain as they deal with illness. By putting a human face to a discussion, they have been successful in getting the courts and politicians to come aboard the right-to-die bandwagon.

Priests should withhold the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick to people who have requested assisted suicide or euthanasia, according to pastoral guidelines issued by the bishops of Alberta and the Northwest Territories.

When Canada legalized assisted suicide earlier this year, the National Post’s coolly analytical Andrew Coyne wondered in a column whether we haven’t lost our way as a country. Barely two months after the legislation’s passage, a marker of how lost we are shows up in our insistence on going both ways at once.

OTTAWA – The Canadian Bar Association (CBA) is calling on the government to expand access to euthanasia in a way that, according to opponents, would make it “wide open.”