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