Some things, progressive things, should be a no-brainer for Catholics. No abortion. No assisted suicide. Okay, there are a whole bunch of other things like sodomy, gay marriage, and we could go deep on the topic, but I’d like to try to stay on topic, and not just because I’m Catholic.
Non-practicing.
I bailed on them for the Baptists almost 50 years ago, but technically I am a confirmed Catholic, and you don’t get to go until they say so. Rules are rules.
Anyway, Pope Leo is in France doing the Pope thing, and he made a point of observing that assisted suicide isn’t compassionate.
After holding Mass with an estimated 800,000 in Paris on Saturday, Pope Leo made his way to the Pyrenees town of Lourdes in southwestern France, which has become one of the world’s top pilgrimage sites following a series of recorded apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Saint Bernadette in 1858.
Millions of people head to the town every year, including many sick pilgrims who seek spiritual and physical healing at the Grotto of Lourdes. In response to the large number of ill pilgrims, many ‘hospitalités’ volunteers also descend upon the site to help those in need on their journey to the Sanctuary.
On the third day of his Apostolic Journey to France, Pope Leo XIV condemned the practices of assisted suicide and euthanasia in an address at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes delivered just weeks after the French ‘aid in dying’ law came into effect.
Speaking to a group of sick pilgrims on Sunday, Pope Leo declared that the ill are not a “burden” but the “beating heart of our humanity and a precious treasure for the Church.”
Life is precious, and Catholics are not only not supposed to commit suicide; they are to do whatever they can to prevent anyone else from doing it, even in Canada, where coming up with reasons to kill people has become a political obsession.
The progressive culture in the increasingly not-so-great white north has devalued life so thoroughly in so short a time that the institutions of government tasked with public health are increasingly little more than grim reapers looking to expedite medically assisted dying.
The people are concerned for people’s worth, human worth, the value of life until natural death. I’m concerned with the political motivations for fast-tracking terminations, especially in countries like Canada. It’s an economic shit show and was long before Trump tried to make trade with them fair.
The government-run health system was a shit show before Parliament approved medically assisted dying, but it has become clear that the latter is viewed as at least a partial solution to the former.
Anyone who seems like a burden on the budget is probably going to get the MAiD talk. Have you considered medically assisted suicide? You don’t want to be a burden on your family. You will drift off peacefully into eternity, which isn’t true either.
There are examples of people suffering for days before dying and sometimes not dying.
We’ve seen a rising incidence of families who don’t view their sick loved one as a burden, discovering that the people responsible for their care killed them anyway, claiming they had consent. Including people who were not legally able to provide it.
The list of things under consideration includes the homeless, the poor, even children, and now they are open to legalizing the chemical execution of anyone who feels sad and doesn’t want to go on living at that moment.
That’s the government looking for ways to solve problems that, in most cases, government policy created.
That’s the slippery slope. And the Pope is well aware, and his message applies there, too. All human life has Potential. Value. And the moment you look for reasons to devalue it, especially at times of weakness, you’ve devolved into the living equivalent of evil. You are the devil.
There is nothing compassionate about convincing people in pain or facing hardship, medical or any other, that they’d be better off dead.
As for the headline, and the fact that I am a Catholic confirmed in the faith, I left New York State thirty-six years ago because I didn’t like all the tax increases on beer and cigarettes. I moved to New Hampshire. Smart choice. And as for the Catholics, they would have left me if I hadn’t left them. Too woke.
But on this, we agree.
