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 

Dear Friends, 

Two priests in our diocese, Frs. Peter Harman and Christopher Trummer, have written an explanation of why the Catholic Church rejects assisted suicide. Over the next few weeks I will be including selections from their writing to help us better understand where we stand and why. Here’s the beginning:  

Christians have always been occupied with the task of healing and caring for the sick, suffering, and dying. Jesus Christ himself came into our midst, doing good, healing the sick, and preaching the arrival of the Kingdom of God. Thus God has inspired and enabled Christians to address the needs of the sick and suffering in our midst, to treat illness and bring healing.  

Throughout the whole world, the Church is committed to caring for the sick, regardless of their status, income, religion, or creed. This ministry has increased the health and quality of life of countless persons. But we are also aware of the limits of our earthly life, and that God has made us for eternal life heaven. Therefore, the Church’s ministry to the sick always upholds the inherent dignity of the human person in this bodily life, created as we are in God’s own image and likeness, while also preparing us for our ultimate destiny in the life to come. 

Recently, efforts have been undertaken to legitimize the intentional ending of human life by means of assisted suicide, which is also known as physician-assisted suicide (PAS) or, more euphemistically, “medical aid in dying” (MAiD). The Catholic Church strongly rejects such initiatives as contrary to the dignity of the human person and our vocation to care for the sick and suffering in our midst. The following are some of the most important reasons for the Church’s opposition to assisted suicide.  

Assisted suicide is simply a form of deliberately ending one’s own life that involves the cooperation of another person or persons. Currently, because assisted suicide is primarily being promoted in the context of healthcare, these other persons are usually doctors and nurses. This medical context does not make assisted suicide more morally acceptable (in fact, it makes it even more immoral, as we will explain below). Whether done actively through the administration of drugs or passively through the removal of basic and necessary care, assisted suicide is gravely immoral, both for the patient choosing it and anyone who cooperates with this action. 

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. Thus, in a recent document on end-of-life care, the Church states: 

There is no right to suicide nor to euthanasia: laws exist, not to cause death, but to protect life and to facilitate co-existence among human beings. It is therefore never morally lawful to collaborate with such immoral actions or to imply collusion in word, action or omission. The one authentic right is that the sick person be accompanied and cared for with genuine humanity. Only in this way can the patient’s dignity be preserved until the moment of natural death (CDF, Samaritanus Bonus, V, 9) 

With gratitude and joy for the days ahead! 

Fr. Seth 

Dear Friends, 

On September 12, less than a month away, Illinois’ medical aid-in-dying law (commonly referred to as assisted suicide) will be in force.  

While Governor JB Pritzker signed the “End of Life Options” Act into law on December 12, the delay until September was built-in to give the Illinois Department of Public Health and health care providers time to establish the required processes and safeguards. 

Just a few days ago, Bishop Paprocki, the Lutheran Care Center, and four Illinois physicians sued the State of Illinois over this unjust law. The Thomas More Society filed the complaint on their behalf, asking a federal court to block the law before it takes effect on September 12.  

As you you know, this law is frought with problems. Not only does the law violate the natural and moral law when it allows and promotes suicide, it also requires faithful medical professionals to help facilitate patient suicides in violation of the Hippocratic Oath, centuries of legal and medical tradition, and their deeply held religious convictions.   

Dr. Mary Keen, one of the four doctors in the suit, explains the impossible situation the State has put her and many other doctors in: “The State’s demand that physicians begin helping patients accomplish assisted suicide violates everything I know as a health care professional, as well as my deeply held Catholic convictions on the dignity of every human life. As a doctor, I have a responsibility to meet my patients’ existential pain with loving accompaniment, not with abandonment.” 

Not only does this travesty strike at the vocation of the physician, it attacks the foundation of Catholic and religiously based healthcare. 

“At the heart of the Catholic Church’s healthcare ministry is the healing work of Christ—to stand with the suffering, to comfort the dying, and to affirm the God-given dignity of every human life,” said Bishop Paprocki. “Illinois’s assisted suicide law undermines that mission by forcing Catholic hospitals and those who serve in them to push death onto their most vulnerable patients. We must be free to serve the sick and the dying according to our faith, not according to the state’s mandate.” 

While not a pleasant subject to discuss, in the coming weeks I will devote the pastor’s column to the topic of assisted suicide and why the Catholic Church opposes it. 

With gratitude and joy for the days ahead! 

Fr. Seth 

Dear Friends, 

This Saturday the Church celebrated the great Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary, meaning we believe God assumed Mary body and soul into heaven at the end of her earthly life. 

It might sound strange, but I think we can learn a little about the Assumption from St. Catherine of Siena’s experience of levitation. 

St. Catherine of Siena, a great Dominican mystic and Doctor of the Church, was widely reported by many different witnesses to have experienced levitation on multiple occasions.  

In her crowning spiritual work, The Dialogue, St. Catherine explains the inner spiritual realities that result in levitation. The explanation comes during the Heavenly Father’s concluding remarks to St. Catherine about the stages a soul must rise through to attain perfect love. 
 
God the Father, speaking of St. Catherine, says, “Though she is mortal she tastes the reward of the immortals, and weighed down still with the body she receives the lightness of the spirit. Often, therefore, the body is lifted up from the ground because of the perfect union of the soul with me, as if the heavy body had become light.”  

Thus, what draws her body up from the ground is the loving union of her soul with God. In short, the soul is drawn up in love so powerfully that the body can’t help but follow. 

Our Heavenly Father continues, “It is not because its heaviness has been taken away, but because the union of the soul with me is more perfect than the union between the soul and the body. And for this reason the strength of the spirit united with me lifts the body’s weight off the ground.”  

So perhaps we could say that Mary’s union with God was so perfect that it led to her Assumption. 
 
It will be a great marvel at the end of time when all our bodies are resurrected by the Love of God, and an even greater marvel to see the soul drawing the body towards God in the loving union, prefigured for us today in the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary who has joined in perfect loving union of body and soul her Resurrected Son in Heaven. 

With gratitude and joy for the days ahead! 

Fr. Seth 

Dear Friends, 

This past Thursday, August 6^th, we celebrated the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. 

In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up a high mountain. There, before their eyes, He is transfigured: His face shines like the sun, and His clothes become dazzling white. Many see this great mystery as a foretaste of the Resurrected Jesus, an illuminating display of his divinity to His inner circle of disciples.  

But it’s not only that. Moses and Elijah, representing the Law and the Prophets, appear and speak with the Lord to reveal that all Scripture finds its fulfillment in Him. Then a bright cloud overshadows them, and the voice of the Father is heard: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” 

That raises the question: listen to what? Jesus hadn’t said anything coming up the mount. Previously, the last thing He’d said was to predict His Passion after Peter had professed his faith that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. Then, after they’d made their way down the mount, Jesus must step in to heal a boy the disciples could not. Jesus then repeats the prediction of His passion. The glory revealed on the mountain does not remove the necessity of suffering; it makes the coming suffering meaningful. 

Taken together, the before-and-after framing shows that the Transfiguration is not an isolated moment of glory. It is a revelation given in the shadow of the Cross. 

• Before: the cost of discipleship is announced. 

• On the mountain: the glory that awaits is revealed. 

• After: the disciples are sent back into the ordinary struggles of faith and mission, carrying both the memory of glory and the call to follow the Lord. 

In Matthew’s Gospel, the Transfiguration stands as a hinge: it confirms who Jesus is, clarifies the path He must walk, and gives the disciples (and us) a reason to hope while walking that same path. 

Pope St. John Paul II helps us to better meditate on this great mystery when he made it the Fourth Luminous Mystery of the Rosary.   

With gratitude and joy for the days ahead! 

Fr. Seth 

Dear Friends, 

The saints remind of us our destiny—that we strive by the grace of God and their good prayers to be in the future where they now are. 

But the saints also remind us of our past. The saints we celebrate in August remind us of our local past, our diocesan history. 

August Fourth we remember St. John Vianney, a French priest of humble birth who, after ordination was sent to the little town of Ars. For the next 41 years he served as the parish priest: celebrating mass, hearing confessions, and teaching the Catholic Faith. He had the gift of reading hearts, of being able to tell penitents their sins before they could confess them. He would often spend 8-12 hours a day hearing confessions.  

Pope Pius XI named St. John Vianney the patron saint of parish priests, so this month please do pray for the Cathedral clergy, or your own parish priest. 

August 8^th is the Feast of St. Dominic, the founder of the Dominicans. We are fortunate in this diocese to have all three expressions of the Dominican life—the friars, the nuns, and the religious sisters. Some of you may have been taught by the Springfield Dominicans. The nuns pray for us in their monastery near Girard, and the friars are their chaplains. We thank God for the many years of blessings, preaching, and teaching the Dominicans have provided for our diocese. 

August 11^th is the Feast of St. Claire of Assisi, and the 14^th is St. Maximilian Kolbe, both Franciscans. We give thanks for the Franciscan Friars, Sisters, and Brothers who have served in our diocese in parishes, schools, homes for the disabled, and by providing excellent healthcare and care for the poor. May God continue to bless their ministries. 

With gratitude and joy for the days ahead! 

Fr. Seth 

PS—for those looking ahead: August 15^th is the Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary, and normally it is obligatory to attend Mass on that day. But as it falls on a Saturday this year, it is not obligatory to attend Mass for that Solemnity (though I certainly encourage you to do so!). 

Dear Friends, 

This weekend we welcome to the Cathedral Monsignor Peter Vaccari, President of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA), for our annual Mission Appeal. 

Pope Pius XI founded the CNEWA in 1926 as an instrument of love and a sign of hope for those in need scattered throughout the historic but unstable lands of the ancient Eastern churches — the Middle East, Northeast Africa, India, and Eastern Europe.  

They pray for and with those who suffer in these lands, and they relieve suffering by rushing emergency relief to places of crisis, responding to human need, and working to develop local leadership in difficult places and situations. 

Monsignor Vaccari became the president of CNEWA six years ago. But God had prepared him for such a responsibility by blessing him with varied ministries throughout his life. Ordained a priest of Brooklyn in 1977, he has served as a parish priest, seminary professor, chaplain with the Air Force Reserve, rector of the seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, Long Island, and as rector of St. Joseph Seminary in Dunwoodie, New York. 

Monsignor will preach each of the masses, and we will take up a collection for CNEWA this weekend. 

We thank Monsignor for being with us, and for his very important work. Please keep him and CNEWA in your good prayers. 

With gratitude and joy for the days ahead! 

Fr. Seth 

Dear Friends, 

Some things change; some things stay the same. 

As for change, I’m modifying slightly our OCIA process. OCIA (formerly RCIA) stands for Order of Christian Initiation of Adults. It’s the formation process the Church provides to prepare the unbaptized for baptism and to live the Catholic Faith after the Easter Vigil. 

Starting September 10^th, this year’s OCIA will meet weekly instead of biweekly. This means every Thursday evening from 6 to 7:30pm we will gather for a meal and then make a pilgrimage into the holy places of what Catholics believe, how we worship, how we live, and how we pray. The Bible and the Catechism will be our guides, and I will be inviting guests in to share their love for God and His Church as well as their expertise in certain areas.  

We will engage our minds, hearts, souls, and yes, have some fun along the way. Jesus wants us to enjoy loving Him and our neighbors! 

If you’re not baptized, or if you are a non-Catholic Christian, and interested in the Catholic Faith, I invite you to consider OCIA here at the Cathedral. There’s no obligation, just an invitation to learn more about Jesus, to consider becoming his disciple, and to encounter the ancient Tradition of the Catholic Church. 

If you are interested, please contact the Cathedral office. 

As for things staying the same, our Families of Faith program will forge ahead from where we left off. For those unfamiliar, Families of Faith is our formation program for families with school-aged children. It’s purpose is to help parents be the first and best teachers of the Faith to their children.  

While the children are being taught by our excellent catechists, the parents will continue with me or another presenter the topic we didn’t finish last year: the Catholic Church and Science.  

Topics will include Jesus’ self-offering, the purpose and benefit of the Church, the four kinds of happiness, and how we transform suffering through faith and prayer. If your family would like to join us for this, please call the Cathedral office. We meet the first and third Sundays after the 5pm Mass starting with a potluck on September 6^th. 

With gratitude and joy for the days ahead! 

Fr. Seth