Rome, Italy, Apr 24, 2023 / 08:06 am (CNA).
The Pontifical Academy for Life said Monday its president is against assisted suicide but thinks it is possible to have a “legal initiative” that would allow it to be decriminalized in Italy under “specific and particular conditions.”
The April 24 statement was issued following an outcry over a speech in which Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia defended legalizing medically assisted suicide in Italy. The archbishop called it a “feasible” approach to the issue in Italian society, despite the Catholic Church’s clear teachings against it.
“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,” Paglia said in a speech on April 19 during the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.
The Italian news outlet Il Riformista published the text of Paglia’s speech on April 22.
Monday’s statement by the Vatican academy said Paglia “reiterates his ‘no’ towards euthanasia and assisted suicide, in full adherence to the magisterium.”
The academy added that the president’s comments were about a ruling in the Italian Constitutional Court and “the specific Italian situation.”
The archbishop gave his opinion, the statement said, that a “legal mediation” but “certainly not a moral one” is possible in order to keep assisted suicide a crime in some cases, while decriminalizing it under certain conditions.
Both assisted suicide and euthanasia are currently illegal in Italy, where the criminal law says that “anyone who causes the death of a man, with his consent, is punished with imprisonment from six to 15 years.” Assisted suicide is the providing of lethal drugs so patients can take their own lives, while euthanasia is the direct killing of patients by doctors.
A bill to decriminalize assisted suicide, known in Italian legislation as “homicide of the consenting,” passed the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Italy’s Parliament, last year. It has not yet been passed by Italy’s Senate.
The proposed law, which follows a 2019 ruling from Italy’s Constitutional Court, stipulates that medically assisted suicide would be decriminalized only in cases that meet the following conditions: “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.’”
According to Monday’s statement from the Pontifical Academy for Life, “for Archbishop Paglia, it is important that the [court’s] ruling states that the crime [of assisted suicide] remains as such and is not abolished. Any further consideration is misleading.”
“On a scientific and cultural level, Archbishop Paglia has always advocated the need for accompaniment towards the sick in the terminal phase of life, based on Palliative Care and proximity, so that no one is left alone in the face of illness and suffering, in the difficult decisions they entail,” the statement said.
Italy’s constitutional court last year blocked a referendum to decriminalize physician-assisted suicide in the country, stating that a repeal of the existing criminal law would leave the country without “the constitutionally necessary minimum protection of human life, in general, and with particular reference to weak and vulnerable persons.”
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Fine, and while we’re at it, maybe the Vatican can acknowledge, the earlier and already “clarification” from St. John Paul II, explicitly made part of the Magisterium–clearly in anticipation of our present moment–applying inborn and universal natural law to even “specific and particular” cases…
The clarification of moral theology developed in Veritatis Splendor (1993)–that is, moral absolutes…
…which are not to be eclipsed by, say, strategic footnotes edited into post-synodal exhortations, message signaling through photo-ops and audiences granted (e.g., James Martin) or withheld, unrecorded and uncorrected media interviews conducted by an atheist journalist, off-the-cuff media zingers, symbolic ambiguities involving a Pachamama garden incantation and then a niche in St. Peter’s Basilica, a Marxist crucifix, and a Wiccan stang (at the synod on Youth), removal of key clerics and appointments of the likes of the homoerotic-mural-guy Paglia, orchestrated or “welcomed” penetrations into widespread and ongoing pseudo-synodal compendiums, and further stage-setting interviews and pronouncements by red-hat/red-faced McElroy, Hollerich & Co.
Critics do get it about the critical need for engagement and prayerful waiting for a few divine “surprises,” but where are consistent apostolic steadfastness and the needed precision? Why does it take a public outcry to set things straight?
It’s not even about theology. As G.K. Chesterton put it: “Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.”
Let’s get F1 on a plane at 30k feet to “explain” this one! It takes a alot of hot air to get this mess straightened out,again!
To the so-called “Pontifical Academy for Life:” get out, and stay away from my family.