Do no harm
It’s distressing to know that doctors from Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children have published an article on how best to extend voluntary euthanasia to children. This is sad but not surprising, as Canada both at home and abroad pushes to extend the culture of death.
The state decides what is good “care” for the patient, and what is not, including the appropriate time to intentionally kill. That a sick child or person is most often not capable of making a responsible decision is of no concern. Society says we must respect the patient’s “right” to end his life. This is similar to the insane idea that students have the “right” to transgender without the parents being informed. What the self wants, not family and God, is paramount.
The medical goal should be to save lives and do no harm. Instead, the authors corrupt the aim by suggesting efficient ways to kill. To give patients the autonomy to be killed and then pay doctors to find economical ways do so is not medical care. It’s reducing life to a product, one more thing to use and abuse and then discard at will.
Canada is in terrible need of architects of the culture of life and true care.
Lou Iacobelli,
Toronto
Vote wisely
A recent news report mentioned that the Halton Catholic District School Board trustees had cancelled a motion disallowing various charities from benefiting from school-run fund-raising because of connections to causes whose agendas contained elements contrary to Catholic teaching. This move followed protests from students and parents. The majority of trustees bowed to the will of the protesters.
On Oct. 22 parents and taxpayers will have the task of electing not only city mayors and councillors, but also their representative on the school board. In the case of the latter group, the trustees will be answerable not only for the financial and material welfare of the students, but also for their spiritual welfare. It is a heavy responsibility.
Let us hope Catholics in Ontario take care to elect trustees whose values are not in conflict with Catholic teachings and who make sure to eschew the secular attitudes often promoted by some candidates. These are the people we entrust with our most precious resource, our children.
C. Daffern,
Scarborough, Ont.
Anger and sadness
Let us be brutally frank here. You can be sure that the crisis we are seeing in dioceses and seminaries all over the U.S., Chile and elsewhere is a worldwide epidemic of an active homosexual network that has infested the Catholic Church. It fills me with anger and sadness when I see you denying the credibility of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s letter.
Christine Oskirko,
Barry’s Bay, Ont.
Identifying writers
There is a clear division in the Catholic Church today. On one side are those emphasizing the traditional focus of the Church on life and the family according to St. John Paul II and past popes. On the other side are those emphasizing the altered focus of the Church on the environment and immigration according to Pope Francis.
As an avid Catholic Register reader, I would find it most helpful if your writers, including your columnists, would share their ecclesiastical orientation by identifying themselves with a simple TC for Traditional Church or AC for Altered Church. This would be a big help in positioning the writer in the reader’s mind and in helping the reader overcome a longstanding problem of determining where the writer is coming from.
John J.F. Killackey,
Mississauga, Ont.
