Update: Saturday, 11 August 2012. I was unhappy with the title of this post, so I have renamed it, though it still does not capture the heart of my concerns. It is hard to find a title that sums up what I want to say. I do think that Roman Catholic ethical priorities tend in practice towards barbaric immorality, in respect of its completely unacceptable intrusion into the lives of women with respect to their reproductive freedom, as well as in its truly vile belief that people must suffer whatever pains may come from their disease when they are dying, or living with completely debilitating degenerative conditions (very often neurological). The Roman Catholic Church’s ability to reach into society with its numerous associations and alliances has made Roman Catholic intrusion into public morality more insidious than that of other religious groups. The power and wealth of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as its international network of diplomatic representatives makes this church a great threat to human freedom, and it is in the interests of exploring this that this post was originally written, although unhelpfully titled.

I know that many Roman Catholics do not share the moral priorities of their church, and I do not want to suggest that Roman Catholics, as individuals, are less moral or humane than others, but the institutional Roman Catholic Church and its tentacles in practically every aspect of public life is a great danger to freedom and must, in my view, be recognised as such. A good sign that many Roman Catholics are unhappy with the hard line being taken by the Vatican is indicated by the fact that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious — a group representing 80% of the nuns in the United States, according to a National Post report – may claim independence from the Vatican for its association. Expressing their concern at the Vatican’s doctrinal assessment of women religious in the United States, Sister Pat Farrell is reported to have said the following in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter:

“We have never considered ourselves in any way unfaithful to the Church, but if questioning is interpreted as defiance, that puts us in a very difficult position,” Sister Pat Farrell said in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter on Monday. “Together with people around the country who have been supportive of us, our desire is to do what we can, for their sake and for ours, to help create a safe and respectful environment, where together with church leaders we can raise questions openly and search for truth freely, addressing some of the complex issues of our times.” As a caveat, Sister Farrell added that such questioning “can only take place in a climate of mutual trust.”

It is important to note that not all Catholics are prepared, supinely, to accept Vatican dictates without question. This desire for a more open, respectful environment is clearly shared by many Catholics, and is to be encouraged and applauded.

UPDATE — Email just in from Richard N. Côté, author of In Search of Gentle Death, whose interview with Bill Thompson, of the CharlestonPost Courier, was the basis for the article “Are our lives our own? ” highlighted in a recent post here at choiceindying.com: “Charleston “Post and Courier” publishes remarkably insightful, sane and thoughtful piece on “elective death”.” I thank Mr. Côté for his kindness, and add his comment on my post here, because it is so apt to the subject of this post (I have italicised and bolded the last sentence, which is precisely what I am saying about the barbarity of the Roman Catholic Church, for it does, indeed preach the forced suffering of people as they die):

Thank you for the fine analysis of Bill Thompson’s article, which was based on my recent book, In Search of Gentle Death: The Fight for Your Right to Die With Dignity ( www.corinthianbooks.com). Gentle elective death — and how to achieve it — was the subject of my five-year study, which resulted in a book with two conjoined conclusions. The first is that only the rational adult person suffering intolerable, uncontrollable pain, or who is or soon will be incurably or terminally ill has the right to make the choice of when, where, and how to die. The second is that no other person, state, or religion has a right to forbid it.  To force another to live in agony against his or her will is an obscene act; to have it preached by an organized religion is equally vile.

You can order In Search of Gentle Death here – or by clicking on the Corinthian Books address in the quote above.

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I am going to continue to press this issue — what I consider to be the barbaric immorality of the Roman Catholic Church — because new links to Roman Catholic associations continue to be brought to my attention. I have mentioned before my concern that the Roman Catholic Church is a hydra-headed association of associations, think tanks, policy centres, lobbyist groups, political action groups, etc., many of which are not recognised for what they are: Roman Catholic propaganda organisations. Just this week my daughter, who is presently writing her doctoral dissertation on an issue in bioethics, reported that she had received an email invitation to attend a bioethics conference sponsored by the Centre for Clinical Ethics. Having a professional interest in bioethics she investigated further to see if this conference was one that would be worthwhile attending, only to find that the Centre for Clinical Ethics, despite its innocuous sounding name, is really just an arm of the Roman Catholic Church. On its home page it describes itself and its origins as follows:

In  1982 the Sisters of St. Joseph established a Clinical Ethics Service  which is jointly sponsored by Providence Healthcare, St. Joseph’s  Health Centre and St. Michael’s Hospital, three Catholic institutions  which serve the Toronto area. The first ethics service of its kind in  Canada, this service has grown over the years and today is known as the Centre for Clinical Ethics.

The mission of the Centre for Clinical Ethics is to enable members of  the health care community to identify and resolve ethical issues which  arise in the clinical setting. We do this through education, case  consultations, policy development, and research. As a faith based Centre we are committed to the core values of our three supporting  institutions and to broadening the understanding of the role that faith  plays in the questions which confront people in their search for healing.

Instead of saying that they are bound by Vatican directives concerning bioethics, the Centre for Clinical Ethics misleadingly says that they “are committed to the core values of our three supporting institutions,” all of which, are, of course, Roman Catholic institutions, and accept the dictates of the Vatican, which is represented in Canada and many other nations by a diplomatic representative called a papal nuncio, and thus has direct links to government ministers and departments.

And then, if you inquire further into the Centre’s affiliations, you will, at one point, be taken to the Catholic Health Alliance of Canada, for according to one of its brochures (which you can download), “A Principle Based Process/Framework for Ethical Decision Making,” under the heading, Evaluate Alternatives, we are told:

Identify appropriate decision makers.

Rank all relevant values i.e., Values of the institution: human dignity, compassion, pride of achievement, community of service, social responsibility. These values are derived from and relate to the values as set out in the CHAC Health Ethics Guide: dignity of every human being and the interconnectedness of every human being. They also ground the ethical values of autonomy, beneficence/non-maleficence and justice.

Justify ranking by appealing to principles as set out in the Catholic Health Association of Canada’s Health Ethics Guide. – i.e., principle of totality (a holistic perspective of the human person and or the institution), principle of double effect (cannot intentionally desire to cause harm in order to do good, principle that the benefits must be equal to or greater than burden/harm, principle of legitimate cooperation, (cannot intend to cooperate with immoral acts, principle of subsidiarity, (decisions should be taken as close to the grass roots as possible), principle of informed choice, principle of confidentiality

Evaluate the consequences in terms of principles. What alternatives are excluded? [bolding in original, my italics]

It’s upcoming conference in October begins with prayer, and the speakers and topics are all coordinate with Roman Catholic views on these questions, though the whole is presented as though it were a place where ethics is being explored on the grounds of reason, not on the basis of dogma. This pretence, that churches and other religious organisations can speak to public policy issues in their religious or “faith-based” voice without intruding considerations that have no public, as opposed to institutional, relevance, contributes to an enormous degree of confusion and misunderstanding in the public mind.

For example, Margaret Somerville, who is to speak at the conference — the title of her talk being Human like me? Vulnerable Persons as “Non-Persons” — is an academic shill for Roman Catholic ethics. She may be the founding director of McGill University’s Faculty of Law’s Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, but she speaks obediently as a proponent of ethics as understood in the Vatican. She never deviates from the strict Roman Catholic line on bioethical issues, though she is assumed, by the various media, for whom she is a bit of a darling in Canada, since she seems able to talk non-stop for hours, to speak from an academic perspective, and to provide the public with the latest developments in professional bioethics — which is very far from being the truth. For instance, in an appearance on television, shortly after the Royal Society of Canada’s Expert Panel Report on End-of-Life Decision Making had been released, one member of the expert panel, Professor Udo Schuklenk, of Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, scoffed at the idea that Margaret Somerville is a bioethicist.

Nevertheless, let’s take it as read that the Roman Catholic Church conducts its business very often through organisations, associations, alliances, and  institutions, some of which bear their allegiance in their names, while others are to all intents and purposes covert operations, which sometimes mislead as to their affiliation and purpose. Now, however, it is time to get down to the question of the barbaric immorality of the Roman Catholic Church, which is the ostensible subject of this post. It is important, though, to keep in mind just how ubiquitous Roman Catholic organisations are, because it is precisely this ubiquity that enables the Roman Catholic Church to keep its own ethical perspectives before the public, and thus limits the amount of legislative freedom that politicians have to introduce more humane legislation regarding such things as assisted dying. Abortion in Canada seems to have escaped the clutches of the Vatican altogether, though not its censure; but assisted dying and related issues, despite widespread public support, are difficult to get onto the parliamentary agenda in an effective way, since governments tend to avoid issues that arouse sensitive religious feelings.

Where does the barbarism come in? Well, precisely in the fact that, despite the fact that it is now well-known that many people die in intolerable misery, the Roman Catholic prohibition of assisted dying in any form continues to govern (at least in most jurisdictions) what help may be provided to those who are living with intolerable suffering, or who are dying in unbearable misery. Hillary Manning, who is Director of Communications for the Los Angeles Times, kindly sent me a link to a video discussion between Steve Lopez, of the LA times, and Dr. Judy Epstein, Clinical Director of Compassion and Choices End-of-Life Consultation Program, and Katheryn Tucker, Director of Legal Affairs for Compassion and Choices, which you can watch here:

I am grateful for Ms. Manning’s having brought my attention to this discussion. Steve first considers the barbarity of taking an 87-year-old man away in handcuffs, and releasing him on one million dollars bail, for having acceded to his wife’s request to turn off the oxygen which was keeping her alive, an act which, in a hospital, would not only have raised no legal concerns, but would be required, by law, if the person requested it, and then goes on to discuss in detail issues pertinent to the question of assisted dying, end-of-life choices, and the possibilities of legal change on these matters in the United States.

Steve Lopez has also written a number of articles about dying, following his father’s dying in misery last year, one of the latest being in the August 5 issue of the LA Times: “A barbaric death, and a plea for a change in the law.” In this article he tells of the death of Donnie Wester, a pressman for a Bay area newspaper, dying of cancer of the bladder. He just wanted to die, as Lopez says in the article:

I called {Mrs] Wester as soon as I got the email, and she described the scene playing out in her cabin in the Sierra foothills. Donnie, who hadn’t eaten in days, was trying to lift himself off the bed, angry that death was making him wait so long.

“He’s flipping a chair,” Sandy said, describing a light, plastic lawn chair next to the bed. “He’s saying, ‘Why can’t I just die?’”

He asked several times for help to die. He wanted a pistol brought so that he could kill himself, and then thought better of it, because it would leave such a mess, and would, I am sure he recognised, be a traumatic thing for his wife to endure. I know an elderly woman whose husband shot himself with a shotgun, and she never really recovered from the trauma, though, in this case, she had brought the gun as requested. Steve Lopez visited Mrs. Wester, but by the time he got there, Donnie had already died:

It’ll be three weeks tomorrow that he screamed that he wanted to die,” Sandy said Thursday evening. “Get me a gun. Put me out of my misery. Donnie and I were very pragmatic about this. We had our DNR [do not resuscitate] papers filled out, the POLST [physician's orders for life-sustaining treatment].”

Nevertheless, Donnie Wester suffered through to the end, without the option. Thus Steve Lopez’s call for a change in the law.

The point of all this? Well, Pope Wojtyła said that when someone is asking for help to die, they are not asking for help to die; rather, he said, they are asking for someone to hope for them, when all hope is gone. And that’s simply a lie, a bald-faced lie! He says this in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life):

The request [to die] which arises from the human heart in the supreme confrontation with suffering and death, especially when faced with the temptation to give up in utter desperation, is above all a request for companionship, sympathy and support in the time of trial. It is a plea for help to keep on hoping when all human hopes fail. [67]

Although he leaves the subject of the request vague enough to permit plausible deniability, perhaps, what Wojtyła is talking about in this and the preceding paragraphs, is assisted suicide and euthanasia. He believed, along with Aquinas, that we have a natural aversion to death — which, indeed, in most circumstances we do — and that a request to die cannot really be a request for death, so he has to transpose it into a faith-based claim about companionship, sympathy and hope.

In other words, Donnie Wester’s suffering, and the suffering of so many other people at the end of life – or, I would add, in chronic degenerative conditions whose terminality, though real, may sometimes take years – who do not have the option to receive aid in dying, are forced to die by their diseases, no matter how much pain, distress and suffering they are forced to endure. They do not have the option to choose to die as they had lived, able to make decisions for themselves, to govern their own lives. Instead, they must die in barbaric ways, just because people like the pope and other Catholics (as well as Muslims, conservative evangelicals, etc. too, of course) think that it is against the law of their god. But what have we, who may simply dismiss belief in a god or gods, to do with the pope’s god? Nothing at all. And no reason why we should take that god’s strictures and prohibitions into account. Nor should the laws be based on such retrogressive ideas as to what makes for human good. It is time we recognised that we all die, and that we die of different diseases. Some of us will die in ways that will be peaceful and kind. Some of us will die quickly yet miserably, in accidents, or by heart attacks, war, insurrection or murder. We do not have any way of predicting how we will die, although, given some diagnoses, we can be given a very good idea indeed of the course our disease will take to the point of death. But we may be assured that some of us will die in ways that will be a terrible contradiction to the ways in which we have lived our lives. We may suffer from unremitting pain or distress. We may endure indignities that simply overwhelm us with a sense of existential angst and purposelessness.

The Roman Catholic Church would have you believe that it is senseless and inhumane, as Karol Józef Wojtyła puts it in Evangelium Vitae, “to take control of death and bring it about before its time, “gently” ending one’s own life or the life of others.” (64; my italics) This is the barbaric immorality with which I charge the Roman Catholic Church. The idea that there is a specific time to die is ridiculous. We defer dying all the time by medicines and surgery; why should we not bring it to an end, if no other option for relief is available, if suffering has become an intolerable burden? The church may have rejected suicide as always a gravely evil choice, which “contradicts the innate inclination to life” (66), but there is no reason why we should continue to accept outworn taboos and unreasoned judgements such as this; for though we may, in general, have an innate inclination to life, there are times when this inclination is suppressed by miseries too great to bear. There is no such thing as a purely natural death, and no particular time associated with it. Wojtyła bases his doctrine, that assistance in dying is the “morally unacceptable killing of a human person,” on “the natural law and … the written word of God,” as “transmitted by the Church’s Tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.” (65) But it is an opinion that can be questioned by reason, and overthrown by compassion. People do not need to die in barbaric ways, and they should have the choice. Refusing them this choice is, for the time during which their lives are being lived under coercion, to enslave them, and this itself is a barbarity which even the Church, rather belatedly, came to recognise as against its teachings. I repudiate this barbaric system of belief, based on ancient literature, and upheld by pretended authority. It is time we began to look at life with new insights, which are being renewed every day. Time for our politicians to put their religious beliefs aside and trade ancient barbarisms for justice. Enough of this outworn and evil past. Basta! Enough!