Dear Friends, 

When considering assisted suicide, we must address the difficult topic of misplaced compassion. 

Disguising itself as a form of compassion, assisted suicide distorts the relationship between suffering and dying persons and their family and other loved ones. It is very common for disabled, elderly, and dying persons to feel as though they are only a burden to others and to society. This feeling of only being a burden can increase a person’s temptation to suicide.  

Perversely, the availability of assisted suicide sends the message to these persons: “Yes, you are a burden. Your suffering and neediness are dragging everyone down. We would be better off without you here.” When assisted suicide is offered as an option, a new pressure arises for people to end their lives when they reach a certain level of dependency.  

Some ethicists today have even begun proposing a so-called “duty to die.” Family and loved ones, knowing that the option of assisted suicide exists, are less likely to rise to the occasion and embrace a heroic form of love by accompanying their loved one to the end. When the faster, easier option of assisted suicide is available and promoted, those who choose to continue living in spite of suffering and limitations can start to seem selfish. 

But the Catholic Church does not suggest or require that a person must be allowed to suffer mercilessly or endlessly. Adequate palliative care is to be offered so that a person’s pain can be managed. Realizing the limits of human bodily life, the Church recognizes that there are times when further treatments are futile and/or disproportionately burdensome.  

At such times, no one is obligated to take on medical treatment to extend life as long as possible. Care in the form of pain management is to be provided to the extent needed to make a person comfortable, even when treatments are no longer helpful. This is the recognition of the limits of our earthly life. However, there is a clear moral difference between accepting death on the one hand and actively assisting in the killing of a suffering person on the other.  

For many suffering persons, their initial inquiries into assisted suicide have been reversed when their pain is managed and their emotional and spiritual needs addressed. Rather than simply cooperating with a person’s request for death, which comes from a place of fear and desperation, we need to listen to the underlying cry of their heart.  

As Pope St. John Paul II wrote in Evangelium Vitae: “The request which arises from the human heart in the supreme confrontation with suffering and death, especially when faced with the temptation to give up in utter desperation, is above all a request for companionship, sympathy and support in the time of trial” (EV, 67). 

With gratitude and joy for the days ahead! 

Fr. Seth 

Dear Friends,  

Patients have rights, and so do healthcare workers. 

First, the rights of the patient. Promoters of assisted suicide appeal especially to the autonomy and rights of the patient. However, while the right of a person to make his or her own healthcare decisions is real and important, it is not unlimited or absolute; it does not extend to actions or omissions that directly contradict his or her dignity as a person. 

Healthcare workers also have rights. The first rule of the Hippocratic Oath: “Do no harm.” 

This time-honored principle of health care is to treat each person with care and respect and to never intentionally harm a patient. By assisting in the suicide of a patient, no matter their condition or wishes, the vocation for healing and caring for the sick is completely inverted; instead of defending the inherent dignity of human life, one ignores or rejects this dignity and becomes complicit in wrongful death.  

Even when an illness, disease, or injury cannot be successfully overcome, suffering and dying persons must be accompanied and cared for. This is the purpose of palliative care and hospice. Even when we cannot cure people, we can always care for them and attend to their emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs. Healthcare workers also have the right to conscientious objection.  

Traditionally, the patient-doctor relationship was considered a sacred one, a kind of covenant, because it requires great vulnerability, trust, and compassion.  

Today, however, in many societies such as our own, a consumeristic mentality has taken root in healthcare. This mentality has reduced the patient-doctor relationship to more of a consumer-provider contract (this is clear in the now-popular term, “healthcare providers”).  

While this ultimately harms patients as well, this consumeristic perspective especially diminishes the sense of dignity and duty attributed to healthcare workers. The truth is that doctors, nurses, and others in the healthcare profession are entrusted with a sacred duty to respect and uphold the dignity of every patient in their care.  

This duty takes priority over the desires of the patient, which at times can contradict their own authentic good. Of course, doctors and nurses should respect the desires and treatment decisions of patients and their families or legal representatives as much as possible.  

However, this respect for the patient does not require or allow doctors and nurses to violate their own consciences or to cooperate in morally evil actions. After all, “The physician is never a mere executor of the will of patients or their legal representatives, but retains the right and obligation to withdraw at will from any course of action contrary to the moral good discerned by conscience” (Samaritanus Bonus, V, 2).  

Everyone is always obliged to follow his or her conscience, and one cannot ignore or override the judgement of conscience by appealing to the patient’s wishes or to the civil law. 

With gratitude and joy for the days ahead! 

Fr. Seth