When we speak of the culture of death, it’s imperative to understand that this is not mere hyperbole, not some easy and even misleading rhetoric. True, we no longer face black-uniformed thugs killing with relish, but we do face caring, supposedly loving progressives in white, killing out of concern. This is a major challenge even now and will be a keynote of the battles to be fought by the future Church.
Along with abortion, euthanasia is a central ingredient of this murderous recipe. Pope Francis certainly has no doubts as to the severity of it all. “In Argentina there is clandestine euthanasia,” he has said. “Social services pay up to a certain point; if you pass it, ‘die, you are very old’. Today elderly people are discarded when, in reality, they are the seat of wisdom of the society. The right to life means allowing people to live and not killing, allowing them to grow, to eat, to be educated, to be healed, and to be permitted to die with dignity. In this consumerist, hedonist and narcissistic society, we are accustomed to the idea that there are people that are disposable.”
He gave tangible, physical proof of that belief when he suddenly appeared at Rome’s March for Life, or Marcia per la Vita, in 2013, attended by more than 40,000 people. Because of the large crowds, a sudden papal appearance is a logistical nightmare for security personnel, but Pope Francis insisted on the highly unusual step of meeting many of the marchers personally. It’s genuinely difficult to explain just how empowering and meaningful this was for those men, women and children on the demonstration who are more used to indifference or downright hostility.
As the 21st century progresses, we see more organized pressure groups seeking to introduce euthanasia beyond the Netherlands and Belgium, where it is legal, and Albania and Luxembourg, where assisted suicide is legal, and the U.S. states of Oregon, Washington and Montana, where euthanasia exists in all but name. In Belgium there is even a move to legalize euthanasia for children. It will not happen now, but each time it is discussed and brought before parliament it gains more credibility and support. Remember, Belgium was created in the first half of the 19th century as a Catholic state. Future Church, please take note.
Pride hides beneath most that is wrong, from the thinnest of failings to the fattest of crime. The pride that leads us to believe that we, rather than God, are always in control and that our bodies are ours to do with what we want, whenever we want. Sometimes this attitude is invincibly malicious, sometimes almost understandable. When it comes to the subject of euthanasia, we see both aspects of the dilemma. For those promoting what amounts to a cult of death it is horror, pure and simple. For those who are suffering or see their loved ones suffering, the subject is far more complex and delicate.
The arguments for euthanasia are perhaps better known than those against it because we hear them publicly articulated on a fairly regular basis. Implicit but perhaps not consciously so in this approach is the notion that disability is somehow a curse, that we have the right and wisdom to make our own decisions about when to die and that so-called mercy killing is administered only after layers of consideration. None of that is true of course, and some of it is positively repugnant. Of course we should strive for a state of affairs where nobody approaching death should experience pain, and experts in the field now know that nobody need do so. All physical pain can be controlled, but insufficient time and money is spent training doctors and nurses in how to deal with end-of-life challenges.
The proposition that a person who feels that they want to die or is making an objective, informed decision about whether to live or die is fatuous. In reality, they are the least qualified people because they are, yes, so terrified and agonized that they want to die. Any of us who has experienced any sort of pain or nausea knows that it is difficult to see beyond the immediate need to be free of distress. Beyond the physical pressures are the emotional ones. The feeling that one doesn’t fit in any longer, the attitude that “I’ve had a good life, the children could do so much with the inheritance I’ll leave behind, it costs them so much money to keep me in the home, and I know the grandchildren don’t like coming all this way to visit me all the time.” The media tell them that only the young and sexy matter, they are made to feel by television and radio that life is over by the age of 17, there are anti-aging stores opening on the main street and then we wonder why elderly people feel rejected.
A culture that once revered the aged as temples of wisdom now looks on them as slums of irrelevance. The answer is not to help someone die but help them to live.
So the future Church has to try to take back control of the debate, and in so doing take back control of the language and the frame of vocabulary. We have to be extremely careful, for example, when we use terms like “quality of life” because they are entirely subjective and, anyway, largely without meaning. I see people who are physically and mentally able all the time who have no obvious quality of life. They seem to do no good to or for others; they are selfish, lazy, foolish, rude and arrogant. Such a life does not seem to be one of any genuine quality. Equally there are millions of people, often living in slum conditions and working in mundane, empty jobs, whose quality of life may be questioned. Or wealthy, privileged but spiritually bankrupt, vacuous men and women who contribute little but take so much. They appear to have no quality of life and thus have no need to be alive. It depends who has the power, does it not, and who is able to make the decisions.
In the 1890s and early 20th century, social engineers and eugenicists advocated an entire systematic program to eliminate those whom they considered to be lacking in quality of life. The anti- Catholic zealot and internationally renowned novelist H.G. Wells wrote of the elimination not only of the mentally and physically ill but of the sexually perverse, the black, brown and yellow, and anybody who did not “fit in” with the new world of which he dreamed. He was joined in these ambitions by Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and darling then and now of feminism and abortion rights.
The future Church will face enormous pressure to bend on this issue, and there are already some Catholics who argue that a “more enlightened” approach is more suitable to the new, scientific age. That new, scientific age is more accurately described as a new, media age, where emotional dramas and manipulative documentaries explain that authentic compassion would allow people the right to end their lives, with the help of experts and professionals. The future Church will once again be condemned as an enemy of progress and enlightenment. But it won’t be the first time, and certainly not the last. It was wrong in the past, it is wrong now, wrong in the future. Rather like euthanasia.
(Excerpted from The Future of Catholicism by Michael Coren. Copyright © 2013 by Michael Coren. Excerpted by permission of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Ltd. All rights reserved.)