The Italian archbishop in charge of the Pontifical Academy of Life has said that assisted suicide is “feasible” under certain conditions.
Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the president of the academy founded by Pope St John Paul II to promote and defend human life, suggested that the practice could not be ruled out if certain safeguards are met.
Such conditions, he said, quoting from a 2019 Italian constitutional court ruling on the withdrawal of life support – and not assisted suicide – might include that “the person must be ‘kept alive by life-support treatment and suffering from an irreversible pathology, a source of physical or psychological suffering that he or she considers intolerable, but fully capable of making free and conscious decisions’”.
Archbishop Paglia said: “Personally, I would not practice suicide assistance, but I understand that legal mediation may be the greatest common good concretely possible under the conditions we find ourselves in.”
He told his audience that the Catholic Church is not a “dispenser of truth pills” when it comes to engaging with a pluralistic society on the most challenging moral issues of the day.
“Theological thought evolves in history, in dialogue with the Magisterium and the experience of the people of God, in a dynamic of mutual enrichment,” Archbishop Paglia said, in comments reported by Catholic News Agency.
His remarks appeared to put him squarely at odds with 2,000 years of Church teaching on the moral impermissibility of suicide and euthanasia.
Pope St John Paul II, writing in Evangelium Vitae, an encyclical published the year after the foundation of the Pontifical Academy for Life, declared that “suicide is always objectionable as murder” and that the “Church’s tradition has always rejected it as a gravely evil choice”.
“To concur with the intention of another person to commit suicide and to help in carrying it out through so-called assisted suicide means to cooperate in, and tat times be the actual perpetrator of, an injustice which can never be excused,” he wrote.
But indicating that he thought Church teaching was changeable, Archbishop Paglia pointed to Pope Francis’ decision in 2018 to revise the Catechism of the Catholic Church to state that the death penalty is “inadmissible”.
“The contribution of Christians is made within the different cultures, neither above — as if they possessed an a priori given truth — nor below — as if believers were the bearers of a respectable opinion, but disengaged from history,” Archbishop Paglia said.
“Between believers and non-believers there is a relationship of mutual learning,” he continued.
“As believers, therefore, we ask the same questions that concern everyone, in the knowledge that we are in a pluralistic democratic society.
“In this case, about the end of life, we find ourselves all facing a common question: how can we reach the best way to articulate the good and the just for each person and for society?”
Archbishop Paglia’s remarks were criticised in the UK by Lord Alton of Liverpool, a prominent pro-life peer and a Catholic.
He said: “Someone should buy the Vatican Academy a copy of Evangelium Vitae which emphatically rejects support for euthanasia.”
He added: “Perhaps the Academy could also be given tickets and sent to Holland and Canada to see what happens when personal autonomy trumps wider societal considerations such as protection of disabled people and the vulnerable.”
Lord Alton said that the “Trojan Horse” comments of Archbishop Paglia “will be seized upon by those who are seeking to legalise euthanasia”.
The archbishop was among speakers at a presentation that included a documentary about an Italian man who went to Switzerland to die.
Previously, Archbishop Paglia said it was willing to be present with a patient when assisted suicide was administered on the grounds that “the Lord never abandons anyone”.
“In this sense, to accompany, to hold the hand of someone who is dying, is, I think a great duty every believer should promote,” he said in 2019.
In August 2022, the archbishop was also criticised by pro-life Catholics when he said in an Italian television interview that legal abortion was a “pillar of society”.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “intentional euthanasia, whatever its forms or motives, is murder” and “gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and the respect due to the living God, his Creator”.
More recently, in 2020, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said in the letter Samaritanus bonus, “on the care of persons in the critical and terminal phases of life”, which was approved by Pope Francis, that “the uninfringeable value of life is a fundamental principle of the natural moral law and an essential foundation of the legal order”.
It said: “We cannot directly choose to take the life of another, even if they request it.”
In a general audience of February, Pope Francis said the dying needed palliative care, not euthanasia or assisted suicide.
The Holy Father said: “We must accompany people towards death, but not provoke death or facilitate assisted suicide.”
Opponents of assisted suicide consistently maintain that safeguards are futile and that in every jurisdiction where the practice has been legalised it is soon broadened to accommodate more and wider categories of people.
(Photo of Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia courtesy of CNA)
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