Month: March 2005

A reader writes:

Did you see Fr. McBride on O’Rielley tonight?  Bill quoted to Fr. MrBride from the Pope’s speech on the dying (given March 20, 2004) and Fr. McBride compared it with the Pope’s “opinion” on the war in Iraq.  He stated it didn’t carry any weight.  I searched the internet and found the Pope’s speech about person’s in a "persistent vegetative state" (PVS).  But I did not find any written document.

So is Fr. McBride correct? Does the Pope’s speech carry only the weight of his opinion or is it a clarification of long held Catholic teaching.

Okay, let’s take the questions in order:

1) I did not see Darth McBride on O’Reilly. UPDATE: Caught it on the repeat. What a %^#*&$*(@&!

2) The text of the pope’s adress on PVS is ONLINE HERE.

3) The level of authority that the text carries is somewhat difficult to assess, however, the teaching contained in the document on this point cannot simply be dismissed as the pope’s opinion.

Let’s deal with the authority of the document first and then the authority of the teaching.

The document in question is an address. Addresses are very low in the hierarchy of papal statements. They do not typically carry a high level of authority, and often are not even written by the pope, though he does retain editorial control of them, should he choose to exercise it. If the pope really wants to say something in an authoritative way, he says it in a document of a higher order, like a motu proprio, an encyclical, or an apostolic constitution (the last being the most authoritative). As a result, some matters may be found in an address that are best regarded as matters of papal opinion rather than authoritative teaching. (Indeed, such matters can even be found in weightier documents.)

The problem is further compounded by the time at which the address in question was written: Last year (2004). By this point in his pontificate, the reports indicate that John Paul II, after years of heroic service to the Church, has been forced by his ailments to turn over to aides virtually all of the day to day affairs of the Church. In recent times he has not only not written his addresses, he has not even read them in public, leaving the task of reading them orally to others. This creates a serious question about how much editorial oversight he has exercised regarding these documents, and that doubt creates further doubt about the level of authority such documents may have vis-a-vis the Church’s Magisterium. If the pope neither wrote, effectively edited, nor publicly read the document, it is a real question of the degree to which the papal Magisterium has been engaged.

From a certain perspective, these are thus dark days in the Church, just as happens at the end of almost every pontificate, when things are being issued under conditions in which it is unclear what level of engagement the papal Magisterium may have had in them. To a significant extent, people simply have to regard the documents with some reserve until there is papal clarification (either from the current pope or from the next one) how the matters contained in the documents are to be regarded.

Thus a number of the documents coming out recently, like the instruction on annulments Dignitas Conubii, are likely to be held in some reserve until there is a new pope to tell us how to regard them. This is an uncomfortable fact, but it is driven by the fact that the pope’s teaching authority is personal: He cannot delegate it to another. He can have another teach in his name (e.g., with the documents of the CDF), but the he must approve what that person said and invest it with authority–it having only the level of authority with which he invests it. In a day in which the pontiff is so incapacitated and suffering so greatly that it is difficult to ascertain the level of authority he is investing in documents, the authority those documents carry in themselves is similarly difficult to ascertain.

That being said, let’s look at the authority of the teaching contained in the PVS address:

The passage on removal of nutrition and hydration is remarkably well formulated and, quite apart from the authority that the text itself may carry, it is a tightly-reasoned passages that carries force by weight of its own logic. Here it is:

The sick person in a vegetative state, awaiting recovery or a natural end, still has the right to basic health care (nutrition, hydration, cleanliness, warmth, etc.), and to the prevention of complications related to his confinement to bed. He also has the right to appropriate rehabilitative care and to be monitored for clinical signs of eventual recovery.

I should like particularly to underline how the administration of water and food, even when provided by artificial means, always represents a natural means of preserving life, not a medical act. Its use, furthermore, should be considered, in principle, ordinary and proportionate, and as such morally obligatory, insofar as and until it is seen to have attained its proper finality, which in the present case consists in providing nourishment to the patient and alleviation of his suffering.

Further, because this passage resonates so significantly with the pontiff’s own sitz im leben, it may well  be that he invested himself in this particular passage to a greater degree than with the rest of the document, though the degree to which that was the case is difficult to determine.

However, it is not as if this is sprining out of nowhere. These issues have been under much discussion in recent years, and in fact the document goes on to cite and quote previous statements with more clearly established authority:

The obligation to provide the "normal care due to the sick in such cases" (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Iura et Bona, p. IV) includes, in fact, the use of nutrition and hydration (cf. Pontifical Council "Cor Unum", Dans le Cadre, 2, 4, 4; Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers, Charter of Health Care Workers, n. 120). The evaluation of probabilities, founded on waning hopes for recovery when the vegetative state is prolonged beyond a year, cannot ethically justify the cessation or interruption of minimal care for the patient, including nutrition and hydration. Death by starvation or dehydration is, in fact, the only possible outcome as a result of their withdrawal. In this sense it ends up becoming, if done knowingly and willingly, true and proper euthanasia by omission.

The kicker comes, though, when the document cites Evangelium Vitae, which is (a) an encyclical and thus of much higher weight and (b) a document written ten years ago, when the pontiff was by no means incapacitated. The address notes:

In this regard, I recall what I wrote in the Encyclical Evangelium Vitae, making it clear that "by euthanasia in the true and proper sense must be understood an action or omission which by its very nature and intention brings about death, with the purpose of eliminating all pain"; such an act is always "a serious violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person" (n. 65).

These quotations are, indeed, accurate. Evangelium Vitae 65 states:

For a correct moral judgment on euthanasia, in the first place a clear definition is required. Euthanasia in the strict sense is understood to be an action or omission which of itself and by intention causes death, with the purpose of eliminating all suffering.

If a person in a PVS is denied nutrition and hydration for purposes of bringing about their death and thus ending their presumed suffering then that clearly fits the definition of "an . . . omission which of itself and by intention causes death, with the purposes of eliminating all suffering" and thus counts as euthanasia.

Now, the definition that the pope supplies at the beginning of EV 65 is important because, having defined the term, he goes on to make a VERY CLEARLY AUTHORITATIVE STATEMENT ENGAGING HIS MAGISTERIUM regarding euthanasia, when he says later in the same section:

Taking into account these distinctions, in harmony with the Magisterium of my Predecessors and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that euthanasia is a grave violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person. This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s Tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.

This formulation of the doctrine is only one notch below infallible (the pope would have needed to say "I define" rather than "I confirm" to make it a new exercise of infallibility) and is thus clearly authentic (authoritative) teaching. Since the pope has, in the immediate context, defined the term "euthanasia" as it is being used in this statement, and since the definition of that term embraces the denial of food and water to a PVS person for purposes of killing them and ending their suffering, it must be held that this action constitutes "a grave violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person."

That’s not the pope’s opinion. It is a simple logical implication of a papal statement known to be highly authoritative.

When Darth McBrien tries to dismiss this as merely the pope’s opinion he is thus blowing smoke in an effort to deceive the faithful . . . which he has made the central object of his career.

Dark days, indeed.