Last month, I attended a symposium on palliative care and assisted suicide, sponsored by the Canadian bishops, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Serving on the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committees on Pro-Life and Health Care, I represented our bishops at this extremely informative and inspiring gathering.
Called Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID), assisted suicide became legal in Canada in 2016, and since then, 45,000 persons chose to end their lives with government approval and assistance.
This distressing situation of evil demands a response from the Church, and I was greatly encouraged to learn what so many bishops, priests, doctors, professors, and healthcare workers are heroically doing to combat this culture of death to the north of us.
Assisted suicide is on the rise
The increase of assisted suicide — its legalization, cultural support, and acceptance by many within the medical community — is another disturbing example of a fundamentally flawed anthropology disconnected from God, inherent human dignity, and qualitative relationships.
When individual autonomy reigns as the superlative value within a society, then abortion, euthanasia, gender fluidity, and sexual preference all are legitimate options, as long as everyone can choose what they want in the moment. This amoral license has become the driving force of our culture.
In an environment that supports assisted suicide, what begins as an option quickly becomes the normative expectation.
A nurse at the conference detailed how one of her terminally ill patients who adamantly did not want to be killed, was approached six different times by teams of health professionals encouraging her to end her life.
Another speaker shared how her daughter’s medical school required her to be present at several assisted suicide deaths as part of her training, but no interactions with patients who had chosen life-affirming palliative care were required.
In such a context, elderly and disabled people can easily feel that they have become a burden to their loved ones or to the healthcare system and that suicide is the better option for them.
Palliative care saves lives
Quality palliative care, which assists a dying person with their physical, psychological, social, emotional, and spiritual needs, transforms health care, improves outcomes, and reduces costs, especially when it happens at the beginning of the dying process.
Far fewer patients acquiesce to being killed when they find support, relationship, and love in their final days.
The World Health Organization declared palliative care as an ethical mandate in 2002, yet sadly, it remains inaccessible for the vast majority of the world, especially the poor and isolated.
Through her health care ministry, the Church has always offered palliative care. Think of the saints, like Mother Teresa, who opened homes for the dying around the world, and picked up thousands of people off of the streets where they had been abandoned.
The Ars moriendi, the art of dying well, has always been part of Catholic spirituality, but such a vision requires that we understand the redemptive meaning of suffering and the Christian understanding of death. Because of Jesus’ victory in the resurrection, we can embrace pain as an offering of love, uniting ourselves with the Lord for the salvation of the world. Death is not the end of our existence; it is, rather, the most creative act of our Earthly lives, as we surrender ourselves to the love and mercy of God in the hope of Heaven.
Much of the conference in Toronto focused on hope! As Christians, we build relationships of love and trust, leading others to recognize their human dignity as made in the image and likeness of God. Fragility, vulnerability, illness, and even death become gifts that invite us into a stance of trust, compassion, and love, whereby Christ is present even in the darkest and most painful places.
Much like abortion, assisted suicide is a sad symptom of a fundamental crisis of relationship when a society only values individuals to the extent that they are productive, healthy, happy, and independent. In her self-understanding as the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church holds up a holy interdependence, in which all of the members love and support each other, especially the weakest and the most vulnerable.
In His Agony in the Garden, the Lord asked His disciples to stay awake and keep watch with Him. To keep vigil with a dying person, to walk with them in their journey to the Lord, to offer comfort and care in those moments of pain and difficulty, is to fulfill Jesus’ request.
The word “palliative” comes from the Latin root “to cover.” As disciples, we cover the sick, suffering, and dying with the love of the Lord, so that they know themselves as beloved children of God.
I came away from the conference, saddened but hopeful, and also determined. Here in the U.S., we must get out ahead of the assisted suicide movement and help build a culture of palliative care, articulate our hopeful spirituality of suffering and death, and resist the culture of death, which is ultimately a crisis of faith, hope, and relationship.
St. Joseph, patron of the dying, pray for us!