A religious order that serves people with mental health problems has announced that it will allow euthanasia in its hospitals in Belgium.
The Brothers of Charity was founded in Belgium in 1807 by Canon Peter Joseph Triest, known as the St Vincent de Paul of Belgium, and is now present in 30 countries.
The decision was taken by the board which controls institutions run by the order. They announced the decision on the website of the order’s Belgian branch; it was reported by the Australian-based website bioedge.org, which covers bioethical issues.
“We take seriously unbearable and hopeless suffering and patients’ request for euthanasia. On the other hand, we do want to protect lives and ensure that euthanasia is performed only if there is no more possibility to provide a reasonable perspective to treat the patient,” the statement said.
The Catholic charity is responsible for about 5,000 beds for psychiatric patients in Belgium, where euthanasia has been legal since 2002.
The statement said: “In our facilities we respect the freedom of doctors to decide whether or not to perform euthanasia and the freedom of other care-givers to choose whether or not to work on. This freedom is guaranteed by law.”
The order’s superior general, Brother Dr René Stockman, took the unusual step of criticising the board members who run the order’s institutions.
He said he “deplored” their decision, and told De Morgen newspaper: “I am confident that we have the right to refuse euthanasia. We want to take seriously the needs of the patients, but the inviolability of life is for us an absolute. We cannot accept that euthanasia be carried out within the walls of our institutions.”
Raf De Rycke, an economist who has worked with the Brothers of Charity for years, denied that the ethos of their hospitals had changed.
“We have not made a 180 degree turn,” he told De Morgen. “ We are making both possible routes for our patients: both a pro-life perspective and euthanasia.”
Pope: libertarians are invading
Pope Francis has warned social scientists about an “invasion” of libertarian ideas.
Speaking to delegates at a conference held by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, the Pope said that “libertarian individualism” was acquiring influence “at high levels of culture and education in both universities and in schools”.
This ideology, the Pope said, “minimises the common good” and “preaches that to establish freedom and individual responsibility, it is necessary to resort to the idea of ‘self-causation’.”
It is, he continued, an “anti-social” belief system which “leads to the conclusion that everyone has the ‘right’ to expand as far as his power allows, even at the expense of the exclusion and marginalisation of the most vulnerable majority.”
The blogger Publius, of thelibertarianrepublic.com, said the Pope had a point. “A very sizable minority of libertarians”, he admitted, “does not care about the freedom and wellbeing of all people.” But most libertarians believe that by “letting people interact freely, we will have a more prosperous and more pro-social society”.
In his address, the Pope also called for a “new humanism”.
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