ROME — Pope Francis warned against the twin temptations of euthanasia and assisted suicide Wednesday, insisting no one has a “right” to die.
“The so-called ‘feel-good’ culture tries to remove the reality of death, but the coronavirus pandemic has brought it back into focus in a dramatic way,” the pope said during his weekly general audience in the Vatican. “It was terrible: death was everywhere, and so many brothers and sisters lost loved ones without being able to be near them, and this made death even harder to accept and process.”
“Nevertheless, we try in every way to banish the thought of our finite existence, deluding ourselves into believing we can remove the power of death and dispel fear,” he continued. “But the Christian faith is not a way of exorcising the fear of death; rather, it helps us to face it.”
“Sooner or later, we will all pass through that door,” he said.
In his reflection on Saint Joseph as the patron saint of the “good death,” Francis declared that faith in resurrection helps Christians to “face the abyss of death without being overwhelmed by fear.”
“Not only that: we can restore a positive role to death,” he added. “Indeed, thinking about death, enlightened by the mystery of Christ, helps us to look at all of life through fresh eyes.”
Since you can’t take it with you, the pope declared, what we must accumulate in life is not riches but “love and the ability to share, the ability not to remain indifferent when faced with the needs of others.”
“It is good to die reconciled, without grudges and without regrets! I would like to say one truth: we are all on our way towards that door, all of us,” he stated.
Two considerations stand for us Christians, Francis said. “The first: we cannot avoid death, and precisely for this reason, after having done everything that is humanly possible to cure the sick, it is immoral to engage in futile treatment.”
Secondly, we must be careful not to confuse “palliative care” to alleviate suffering with “unacceptable drifts towards killing,” he said. “We must accompany people towards death, but not provoke death or facilitate any form of suicide.”
“I would point out that the right to care and treatment for all must always be prioritised, so that the weakest, particularly the elderly and the sick, are never discarded,” he declared.
“Life is a right, not death, which must be welcomed, not administered,” he asserted. “And this ethical principle applies to concerns everyone, not just Christians or believers.”
The pope went on to caution against “accelerating the death of the elderly.”
“Very often we see in a certain social class that the elderly, since they do not have means, are given fewer medicines than they need, and this is inhuman; this is not helping them, it is driving them towards death earlier,” he stated. “This is neither human nor Christian.”
“Please, do not isolate the elderly, do not accelerate the death of the elderly,” he urged. “To caress an elderly person has the same hope as caressing a child, because the beginning of life and the end are always a mystery, a mystery that should be respected, accompanied, cared for, loved.”
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