The Vatican’s doctrinal chief has told Canadian Catholics that “we shall prevail” in opposing legalised euthanasia.
Cardinal Gerhard Müller addressed an audience of bioethicists, theologians, doctors and nurses at Toronto’s St Michael’s Cathedral Basilica last week.
The prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said Canada’s turn to legalised euthanasia was “tragic”.
“Euthanasia not only constitutes a grave wrong in itself, but its legalisation creates toxic and deadly social pathologies that disproportionately afflict the weakest members of society,” he said.
The cardinal was in Toronto to deliver the keynote address at a Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute conference dedicated to the conscience rights of healthcare professionals.
He urged members of the institute “to persuade Canadian citizens to take the necessary steps to reverse the dangerous legal error of your Supreme Court and Parliament and, in the meantime, to protect the rights of conscience of healthcare providers who refuse to take the lives of those that they have sworn to treat and comfort.”
Fr Leo Walsh, who leads the institute’s branch at Assumption University in Windsor, Ontario, said the address was “dramatically important”.
While it is true that those who oppose physician-assisted death have lost the debate up to this point and the law is unlikely to change soon, that does not mean that the debate is over, Fr Walsh said. “We don’t give up,” he said. “We have to keep pushing it.”
The next step for Canadians who oppose medicalised killing must be to legally protect the conscience rights of doctors who refuse to refer their patients on to Medical Aid in Dying assessments, Cardinal Müller said.
“No one who trains and takes an oath to care for the sick should be pressed into ending the lives of the very people that they have promised to serve,” the cardinal said. “Refusal to engage in euthanasia represents basic fidelity to the very medical art that the physician professes.
“To compel a doctor to participate in any manner in euthanasia is to force him to cease being a doctor and to betray the very profession to which he has given his life.
“Any law that forces a physician to act against what he knows to be the most basic good of the patient – the preservation of his very life – either directly or indirectly, is unjust.”
Media treat Cardinal Pell unfairly, says archbishop
Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney has said that Australian legal and media institutions have been unfair to Cardinal Pell, after new abuse allegations were made against the cardinal.
“Everyone supports just investigation of complaints, but the relentless character attacks on Cardinal Pell by some stand the principle of innocent-until-proven-guilty on its head,” Archbishop Fisher said. “Australians have a right to expect better from their legal systems and the media. Even churchmen have a right to ‘a fair go’.”
Last July, allegations surfaced in a report by ABC featuring several people who accused Cardinal Pell of sexual assault. At least one of the accusations had been found to be unsubstantiated by an Australian court in 2002. Some accusations dated to the late 1970s, when Cardinal Pell was a priest in Ballarat, Victoria.
At the time the allegations surfaced, Cardinal Pell dismissed them as “nothing more than a scandalous smear campaign”.
A statement issued by his office said that “claims that he has sexually abused anyone, in any place, at any time in his life are totally untrue and completely wrong.”
Trump visits Holy Sepulchre
US President Donald Trump began his two-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories with a private visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
He and First Lady Melania Trump met clerics including Greek Orthodox Patriarch Archbishop Theophilos III and Franciscan Fr Francesco Patton, custos of the Holy Land.
The church is thought to be at the site of Jesus’s burial and Resurrection.
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