ROME — Pope Francis condemned France’s proposed end-of-life legislation Saturday, asserting human life “is not to be played with.”
Asked on his return flight from Marseille what he has said to French President Emmanuel Macron on the subject, the pontiff replied he already made his position clear to Macron on an earlier occasion: “Life is not to be played with, neither at the beginning nor at the end. We cannot play around.”
Life is to be protected, Francis continued, because otherwise we wind up with an unacceptable policy of “humanistic” euthanasia.
Citing the 1907 dystopian novel Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson, the pope said the author had already foreseen the errors of our age, including euthanasia — a sweet death — and “selection before birth.”
Euthanasia and abortion are examples of “ideological colonization” that ruins human life, a mentality that spills over into our treatment of the elderly, he said.
“Life is not something to be played with,” the pope repeated. “Whether it’s the law of not letting the baby grow in the mother’s womb or the law of euthanasia in disease or old age.”
“This is not a matter of faith. It’s a human issue, a human issue,” he added, an “ugly compassion.”
On numerous occasions Pope Francis has denounced what he calls the modern “throwaway culture” that discards unwanted human beings through abortion and euthanasia.
“It is a life. A human life. Some say, ‘It’s not a person.’ It is a human life!” the pontiff has said of the unborn child killed in abortion.
“So, faced with a human life I ask myself two questions: Is it licit to eliminate a human life to solve a problem, is it fair to eliminate a human life to solve a problem?” he said. “Second question: Is it right to hire a paid assassin to solve a problem?”
“We are living in a throwaway culture. What is useless is discarded,” he said. In the “collective unconscious” of the throwaway culture, “the old… and the terminally ill; and the unwanted children, they are returned to sender before they are born.”
The pope has also tied abortion to Europe’s demographic winter.
“This throwaway culture has marked us. And it marks the young and the old,” he said. “It has a strong influence on one of the dramas of today’s European culture.”
“In Italy, the average age is 47 years old. In Spain, I think it is older,” he noted. “That is to say, the pyramid has been inverted. It is the demographic winter of births, in which there are more cases of abortion.”
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