_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

THE FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
February 4, 2007

Dear Parishioners,
      
            To Live or Let Die

            In late December an Italian poet, and quadriplegic suffering from muscular dystrophy, Piergiorgio Welby was granted his explicit request when a doctor turned off the ventilator that has been keeping him alive.  The Diocese of Rome proceeded to deny him a Christian burial.  In my humble but fairly well informed opinion, that was a serious violation of pastoral care and ministry and a clear contradiction of traditional and official Catholic teaching that there is no obligation to use extraordinary or disproportionate means to prolong life.
            Welby had penned an eloquent letter to the president of Italy pleading to be allowed to die.  “I love life, Mr. President,” he wrote.  But after 40 years of battling muscular dystrophy and nine years attached to a ventilator and now losing the capacity to speak or to eat he wrote, “What is left to me is no longer a life.  It is an unbearable torture.”  He then asked to have the ventilator removed.  That request, honored on a regular basis in hospitals across the world was denied, caused an uproar in Italy, was denounced as a demand for suicide and was refused by the Italian courts.   After a doctor turned off the ventilator, Welby said “thank you” three times to his wife and friends and his doctor.  After forty-five minutes he was dead.  At least one legislator has called for the physician to be charged with homicide and Cardinal Ruini of Rome forbade a Catholic funeral; since then Cardinal Martini, former Archbishop of Milan and once leading papal candidate, criticized the decision claiming that because of new technology much greater wisdom is needed in order “not to prolong life when it is no long to a person’s benefit.”
            In its 1980 Declaration on Euthanasia, The Vatican officially states, “One cannot impose on anyone the obligation to have recourse to a technique which is already in use but which carries a risk or is burdensome. Such a refusal is not the equivalent of suicide; on the contrary it should be considered as an acceptance of the human condition, or a wish to avoid the application of a medical procedure disproportionate to the results that can be accepted.”
            Back in 1950 Fr. Gerald Kelly, the foremost moral theologian in the U.S. taught “no remedy is obligatory unless it offers a reasonable hope of checking or curing a disease . . .  no one is obligated to use any means - natural or artificial - if it does not offer a reasonable hope of success in overcoming the patient’s condition”.
            The fact that Welby had also been a public advocate of Euthanasia should in no way change Church teaching or pastoral practice on the subject; the request and action taken was precisely the kind of decision that has been explicitly allowed by Catholic moral theologians since at least 1587!
            At the end of his long journey towards death, Pope John Paul II declined the option of returning to the hospital where a respirator had assisted his failing breathing and nutrition was supplied through a tube.  He said, “Let me go to the house of the Father.”  No one confused the Pope’s action with suicide; nor should they, with Welby’s refusal to endure what he described as “the unbearable torture” of being attached to a respirator.  Fortunately the Pope was not refused Christian burial too!!
           
            Your Pastor,
            Brian T. Joyce