12-November-2004 -- EWTNews Brief
VATICAN CITY, Vatican, November 12 (CNA) -
Receiving participants in the international conference on palliative cures at
the Vatican this morning, Pope John Paul II issued strong words against the
practice of euthanasia as a means to alleviate suffering, saying it is
"motivated by sentiments of a poorly understood compassion" and that
it "supresses" rather than redeems the person from suffering.
"Medicine," said the Pope, "always places itself at the
service of life. Even when it knows it cannot defeat a serious pathology, it
dedicates its own capabilities to alleviating suffering."
"To work with passion to help the patient in every situation means to be
aware of the inalienable dignity of every human being, even those in the extreme
conditions of a terminal state," he said.
"In fact, there is a directly proportional relationship between the
capacity to suffer and the capacity to help those who are suffering," said
the Holy Father. He noted that people who are sensitive to the pain of others to
helping them "are also more disposed, with the help of God, to accepting
their own suffering."
Euthanasia, said the Pope, is one of those "dramas caused by an ethic
which seeks to establish who can live and who must die."
"Even when motivated by sentiments of a poorly understood
compassion," he said, "euthanasia, instead of redeeming the person
from suffering, suppresses them."
John Paul II said that wrongly understood compassion "leads to snuffing
out life in order to alleviate pain, thus overturning the ethical statute of
medical science."
"True compassion, on the contrary, promotes every reasonable effort to
favor the patient's healing," said the Pope.
The Pope also addressed the question of intense therapy, saying that
"the eventual decision to not undertake or to interrupt therapy will be
considered ethically correct when (such therapy) is inefficacious or clearly
disproportionate to the ends of supporting life or recovering health. Refusal of
intense therapy, thus, is an expression of the respect that is owed to the
patient in every instance," he said.
The patient should be accompanied lovingly to the end of his life, and
special care taken to alleviate his suffering, as well as preparing his
"soul to meet the heavenly Father."
The Pope underscored that administering painkillers "must be
proportional to the intensity and cure of pain, avoiding every form of
euthanasia" by giving a quantity of medicine that would cause death.
The Pope concluded his discourse by reaffirming that "science and
technology, in any case, can never give a satisfactory answer to the basic
questions of the human heart. Only faith can answer these questions. The Church
intends to offer her specific contribution by the human and spiritual
accompaniment of the ill."