Assisted suicide isn't courageous

Dartmouth ethics professor Ronald Green recently wrote an article for CNN in which he opined that it was courageous for Brittany Maynard, the 29 year-old woman suffering from terminal brain cancer, to end her life through physician-assisted suicide.  His argument was more broadly in service of legalizing assisted suicide and he contended that

[P]eople who are facing the end of life and those suffering from grievous and irreversible pain should be free to end their life.  This is a simple expression of respect for human freedom, autonomy and dignity, and it is also an expression of compassion to allow them to do it.

This is a very succinct way of putting a primary argument used by proponents of legalized assisted suicide, and that argument is often couched in terms of compassion, dignity, and even courage.

The assumption behind the assisted suicide argument is that at least some people find suffering to be undesirable and even valueless and therefore they should be have the legal means to alleviate that suffering.  In the case of terminal illness, like cancer, that suffering is—as Prof. Green puts it—“irreversible.”  The only way to alleviate the pain and suffering caused by terminal cancer is, of course, death.  If, the argument goes, some people therefore desire to avoid such suffering by a painless death at the hands of a physician before the onset of physical pain due to that cancer, then why shouldn’t they be allowed to?

Suffering is a stark reality in the human experience and therefore it cannot be nuanced or ignored.  It hits you hard in the face and demands a lot.  Ultimately, suffering is really worth something, it really means something, or it means nothing. If it means nothing, then you can either endure it or you can get rid of it, and in the case of irreversible suffering, like terminal brain cancer, getting rid of it means dying.

The assisted suicide argument is usually confined to instances of serious terminal illness.  So far, at least in the United States, it is those who are close to death and faced with deep and painful physical suffering who attract the strongest argument for legalized assisted suicide.  In other countries, “irreversible suffering” can take on a broader meaning.  Last year, twin brothers in Belgium who were born deaf used assisted suicide to die together after finding out that they would soon go blind.  The reason, says Britain’s Daily Mail, is that “they were unable to bear the thought of never seeing one another again.”  This year an elderly Belgian couple were euthanized together because they were concerned about being left alone and widowed in the likely event that one died before the other.  So they pre-empted it all by dying together by assisted suicide.

Let’s be clear: the potential suffering that the brothers and the elderly couple and the brothers from Belgium were facing would have been real, powerful, and difficult.  Likewise, the pain and suffering that death by terminal brain cancer would have caused to Brittany Maynard—and also to her loved ones watching her go through it—would also have been real. 

But why does suffering make some believe that life with suffering isn't worth living?   Why do we run so easily from pain?  Last year the New York Times reported that between 1999 and 2010 the suicide rate for middle-aged Americans rose dramatically, to a point where suicides claimed the lives of nearly the same number of middle-aged Americans as car accidents.  These suicides are probably more violent than the physician-assisted variety, but they are an identical response to pain and suffering.  When confronted with what feels like a burden that can not possibly be carried, a lot of people look for the nearest exit, and that sometimes is death.

Most of the time, though, people find the supposedly sweet escape in alcohol or drugs or shopping or women or whatever else does the job, and surely these are less serious and less dramatic escapes than suicide.  But the underlying reality remains, and it is likely one of the most significant issues facing contemporary western culture: we don’t believe in the cross any more, and therefore we don’t much want it, either.

At the heart of the Christian life is the appreciation of suffering as something to be redeemed instead of avoided.  Pain isn’t something you run from, it is something you grow from, and the only way to do that is through Calvary’s cross, all bloody and splintered and rough.  We follow a crucified Christ, and that necessarily means following him through the streets of Jerusalem with the cross on our aching backs and then up to Golgotha and finally atop the cross.

I was not yet a Christian when I visited Jerusalem years ago.  I remember standing at the foot of the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem’s Old City, which, in Latin means “Way of Suffering.”  I thought nothing of it, of course, other than that it was one more quaintly ancient historical marker in a quaintly ancient and historical city.  But the reality was that I was standing not only at the foot of where Christ began his journey of pain to Calvary, but it was the beginning of my own journey through life, indeed, every human being’s journey through life.  Because we all suffer.  Whether from blindness or cancer or grief or one more of the many forms of suffering that a person can experience.

But that isn’t the end of the story, because we also follow a risen Christ.  This is where we move beyond our suffering and into the heavenly embrace of God Himself.  But we don’t get to this point without first taking that long, bitter trek up Calvary and onto the cross.  There is no shortcut.  Neither drugs nor pornography will get us to where we're trying to go.  Death won't necessarily do it, either.  Those are shortcuts that promise a path around and beyond the cross, and yet they lead only back to a steeper and bloodier cross.

Suffering is what it means to be a human being and, yes, it takes courage.  I can only pray for Brittany Maynard and everyone else who chooses death and turns away from the cross that leads to glory.  Surely that decision was agonizing and difficult to make, but it wasn’t courageous.  Indeed, it wasn't even really human.

Abortion causing trouble in Udall World

One of the most deeply gratifying features of this election year is the apparent downfall of Colorado Democratic Senator Mark Udall, whose campaign has been almost entirely oriented around his support for broad abortion rights.  Like most of the Democratic Party, Udall is a vocal proponent of pro-choice politics, garnering a 100% rating from the abortion rights advocacy group NARAL. 

Democratic strategists believe that support for abortion rights helped their candidate to win the 2010 Senate race in Colorado and it is believed that GOP candidates’ controversially conservative views on abortion costs Republicans Senate races they should have won in Missouri and Indiana.  This year, however, the strategy has hit a wall and recent polling indicates that Udall may very well lose his seat to the more pro-life Congressman Cory Gardner, despite months of television attacks lobbed at Gardner’s sponsorship of a federal personhood bill in Congress and his past support of a statewide Personhood law, although he has since withdrawn support for the latter.  I suspect that Democrats are awfully frustrated about this. It worked in 2010 and again in 2012, why wouldn’t it work today?

There are at least two answers.  First, Democrats have gravely overplayed their hand, giving such unyielding attention to abortion that even the left-leaning Denver Post felt compelled to endorse Cory Gardner, Udall’s opponent.  The Post endorsement suggested that “Udall is trying to frighten voters rather than inspire them with a hopeful vision.  His obnoxious one-issue campaign is an insult to those he seeks to convince.”  If Udall ends up losing pundits will rightly ask why his campaign paid inordinate attention to abortion and birth control.  Republicans will suggest that he was a largely ineffective actor in Washington, consistently voted as a senator with an unpopular Democratic president, and was running in a state where the Democratic Party’s favorability has been seriously weakened by controversial legislation passed by a Democratic legislature.  With a weakened resume like that, trying to recreate the success of other election years was the only strategy worthy of pursuit.

But I doubt that is nearly as true as the reason that the Udall campaign will probably give: we thought the abortion strategy really would work.  In Udall World, abortion is an inviolable right and an incontrovertible sign of women’s equality and progress.  In terms of political issues, abortion is therefore fundamental and a kind of ideological sina qua non.  That is what led national Democrats to adopt a party platform in 2012 that supported tax-payer funding for abortion and opposed restrictions even on gruesome partial-birth abortion or hideously misogynstic gender-selective abortions.  Last year legislative Democrats in Colorado killed a Republican bill to ban gender-selective abortion and sponsored a bill to make illegal any restriction on abortion or contraceptive access.  The war on women is real, it seems, but the main provocateurs lie on the left.

In Udall World, though, the war on women meme is not only a political strategy, but it is a fight for social progress.  So in Udall World it is acceptable to run an ad featuring a mother pleading with Colorado voters to elect Udall because otherwise her young daughter’s access to abortion could be compromised.  The woman was holding the young girl in the ad.  Ads like that probably only happen in Udall World. 

Most mothers--in fact, most people--do not contemplate their daughters having abortions.  This is not only because abortion retains a kind of taboo status in contemporary American society, and few people ever want their daughter to even be in a position of wanting or considering having an abortion.  But it is also because deep down Americans do not like abortion at all, no matter how pro-choice they may claim to be.  Many Americans will support abortion rights for those people, for women and girls whose stories the Planned Parenthood campaigners love to talk about—the women abandoned by their baby’s fathers after conception, the young high school student, etc.  But those people are strangers, and most Americans are willing to allow them to do what they want even if they’re doing it to unborn human life. 

That is not so when it comes to their own wives and girlfriends and daughters.  The woman in the Udall ad is not only a mother, but her daughter’s hypothetical baby is her granddaughter, and it is especially disordered to want your daughter to be able to legally end the life of that granddaughter.  People relate to that personally and intimately, and it disturbs them.  

So this is the second reason that Mark Udall’s abortion campaign has flopped: the campaign put far too much stock in Coloradans’ views on abortion, believing them to be as rigidly supportive of abortion rights as Udall himself.  It was a mistake that failed to account for the slow, subtle, and almost imperceptible pro-life shift occurring in the country.  Americans are having to confront the reality of the humanity of unborn children, and they’re struggling with it.  Udall, on the other hand, seems to have no qualms at all about even the most permissive abortion laws, which makes him look craven. 

Of course, the truth is that abortion is far more black-and-white than the nuanced views of Americans.  Either it is a baby or it isn’t, and if it is, then that ought to be the end of the discussion even though sadly it is not.  We aren't there yet, although we are getting there.  Still, few people really believe that an unborn baby isn’t really an unborn baby, especially when they’re confronted with the ultrasounds of their own children and they experience the birth of grandchildren.  They know it’s a baby, which is why the Udall ad makes them bristle and why nearly 80% of the country wants to ban abortion in the third-trimester. There is not yet a truly pro-life majority in American and confused, nuanced views on abortion remain.  But, to the detriment of liberal Democratic campaigns, reality is slowly trumping ideology and Udall World looks more and more extreme to more and more people because of it. 

Evidence of this can be seen in North Dakota, where abortion is also a heated topic this year.  Voters in that state will vote on a proposed constitutional amendment that would establish “The inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of development.”  A recent poll gave the amendment a 50-33 percent lead.  The strongest support comes from the youngest voters, although the sample size is so small that not much can be gleaned from the poll alone.  Passing that amendment would be a landmark statement on behalf of life. 

At the same time, a firm repudiation of Mark Udall’s cynical abortion campaign in Colorado would be another landmark.  It would be a clear statement that abortion rights are not the sina qua non of political values for most voters.  And, together with North Dakota’s effort to enshrine the right to life in its state constitution, it would signal that abortion politics are changing in America.  Slowly and grindingly the country is becoming more pro-life.  Though you won’t hear much about it after November, it is nevertheless the most hopeful story of the election year.

Picking apart Archbishop Fernandez's divorce and remarriage argument




Yesterday the Argentine daily La Nacion published a perplexing interview with Synod father and rector of the Catholic University of Argentina, Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernandez.  Fernandez was also a member of the controversial committee appointed by Pope Francis to draft the two “relacios” of the Church’s Extraordinary Synod on the family.  There is a lot to talk about with regards to the whole interview, and some of what Fernandez says really is rather odd and tendentious.  But I want to focus on just one part, wherein Fernandez opines about the possibility of divorced and civilly remarried Catholics receiving Communion.  Here is what he says (with the help of Google Translation):

 

No one wants to deny the indissolubility of marriage and we all wish to encourage couples to be faithful, to overcome their crises, to start over again and again, especially considering the suffering of children. But many have insisted on second marriages who have spent many years living with generosity and who have children.  Most think that it would be cruel to ask them to separate, causing unjust suffering to the children.  So we continue to believe in the possibility that they can receive Communion, given that, as in the Catechism, where there exists a condition that a person cannot overcome that person’s liability is limited.

I’ll tackle the argument point-by-point.

1.)    No one wants to deny the indissolubility of marriage and we all wish to encourage couples to be faithful, to overcome their crises, to start over again and again, especially considering the suffering of children. 

Good so far, right?  It is a shame, then, that the Synod did not seem to make this the emphasis of the now completed Synod.  I’m not sure how you can even begin to approach the pastoral challenges of broken families and the culture’s disordered approach to sexuality without spending a long time studying and contemplating the Christian family.  It is from this Gospel vision of the family that your answers will come.

 

2.)    But—and there is always a but—many have insisted on second marriages...

He is right, of course, that many have insisted on second marriages.  People insist on all sorts of things that are neither holy nor good.  That’s what sin is!  The phenomenon of divorce and remarriage is hardly an especially modern malady, either.  Christ was confronted in His own pastoral ministry with the problem, too, and he chose to address it with almost abrasive clarity when he said, “[w]hoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband marries another she commits adultery” (Mk. 10:16).  It doesn’t get much clearer than that, and if you’re making it more complicated than it is, you’re doing it wrong. 

 

Yes, the Church ought to reach into the messiness of irregular situations, of sin, and of the various calamities born of deformed consciences and cultural rot, and to bring the light of Christ into those areas and thereby draw people out of the darkness of sin and into the Christian life.  But the emphasis must always be on drawing individuals out of that darkness rather than a pathetic coming to terms with it.  The pastors of the Church ought to pick up “the smell of the sheep” in the process of bringing them back to life in Christ.  Yet it is one thing to propose, invite, shepherd, and pastor.  It is another thing to accommodate and chase the spirit of the world in a shallow attempt at relevance.  The Synod came awfully close to that this year.

 

3.)     … who have spent many years living with generosity and who have children.

 

This is probably the sort of thinking on which at least some of the Synod’s now-infamous relatio post disceptationem “midterm report” was founded.  Remember this?  It said, among so many other things, that “some ask whether the sacramental fullness of marriages does not exclude the possibility of recognizing positive elements even the imperfect forms that may be found outside this nuptial situation, which are in any case ordered in relation to it.”  That is one way of suggesting that even second unions, civil unions, and cohabitation carry the same sorts of qualities as Christian marriage.  After all, even cohabiters have to respect each other, share food, put the cap back on the toothpaste, put the toilet seat down, and sometimes participate in the upbringing of children.  Is that like marriage?  Well, no, it really isn’t, actually, because matrimony is a sacrament and therefore a conduit of the graces that bring about salvation, and it is indissoluble, it is forever, and it cannot be ended when “the flame dies,” as it were.  But it is true that the daily life of cohabiters nevertheless requires some selflessness and generosity.  And, yes, we should celebrate that generosity, for whatever it’s worth. 

One potential problem with this approach is that it almost sidesteps the fact that the misuse of human sexuality utterly undermines whatever generosity there might exist within these irregular situations.  Divorced and remarried couples may practice a great deal of human virtue, but they’re still committing adultery, which is an abuse of their own sexuality as well as a serious breach of the promises that they made to their first spouse.  Adultery is corrupting and, most glaringly, it cuts souls off from Charity and corrodes their ability to love their second spouse or anyone else.  A person who engages in adultery, premarital sex, homosexual acts, or various other sexual sins with a person is saying effectively saying something like this, even if they never actually say as much:



I love you.  I selflessly, generously, authentically love you.  I want to give myself to you.  And I also am going to help destroy God’s love in your life by engaging in this adulterous/homosexual/premarital act because I am selfish, ungenerous, and superficial, and I want to do this with you.

P.S. I love you.

Come on.  Adulterous relationships are not loving.  They destroy grace in one’s soul and they corrupt the precious gift of sexual love that God granted to genuinely married couples.  Are there elements of mutual love  in these relationships?  Yes, of course, and we can freely concede as much.  God can and does use that generosity to open hearts to supernatural charity.  But the stark reality is that adulterous relationships kill the soul and there is a whole lot that is unloving about killing the soul.  While acknowledging the good within even the most wounded soul, it is necessary to understand and especially confront the weapons of sin that have caused those wounds in the first place.

4.)    Most think that it would be cruel to ask them to separate, causing unjust suffering to the children.

 

The problem for Archbishop Fernandez is that nobody is necessarily requiring them to separate.  In Familiaris Consortio, the apostolic exhortation written by St. John Paul II at the end of the 1980 Synod on the family, says this: “when, for serious reasons, such as for example the children’s upbringing, a man and woman cannot satisfy the obligation to separate, they [must] ‘take on themselves the duty to live in complete continence, that is, by abstinence from the acts proper to married couples.’”  And when they observe this requirement, they may access the sacraments of Penance and Communion.  Familiaris Consortio very clearly contemplates the serious reasons that Archbishop Fernandez also sees in terms of physical separation, and it also provides a route by which couples in those situations can still access the sacraments.  Yes, that route is a real cross, but why should any Christian ever fear or avoid the Cross?

5.)    So we continue to believe in the possibility that they can receive Communion, given that, as in the Catechism, where there exists a condition that a person cannot overcome [then] that person’s liability is limited.

Perhaps Fernandez is referring to part 1860 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states that “[t]he promptings of feelings and passions can also diminish the voluntary and free character of [an] offense, as can external pressures or pathological disorders.”  If I am following the archbishop’s thinking on the matter, he is suggesting that the pressure and circumstantial difficulty involved in ending a second “marriage,” especially when children are involved, would be an “external pressure” that mitigates at least full culpability for the act of remaining in what is an adulterous (or “irregular) situation.

But just a few pages earlier in the Catechism it also says that “[it] is … an error to judge the morality of human acts by considering only the intention that inspires them or the circumstances (environment, social pressure, duress or emergency, etc.) which supply their context.  There are acts which, in and of themselves, independently of circumstances and intentions, are always gravely illicit by reason of their object, such as blasphemy and perjury; murder and adultery.  One may not do evil so that good may result from it” (part 1756, emphasis mine).  Can circumstances reduce culpability even of adulterous acts?  Yes, of course, although such an act is still gravely evil.  And it may very well be the case that spouses in irregular situations may indeed have reduced culpability for sexual relations within the context of an irregular situation, especially if the one spouse places extraordinary pressure on the other spouse to maintain a sexual relationship, and surely that does happen when one spouse decides to follow Christ and the other objects and even threatens divorce or resorts to emotional or physical abuse to compel sexual relations.  Such circumstances might mitigate some culpability for isolated acts of, for lack of a better term, pressured adultery.  But those circumstances are probably extreme, and an abused spouse should seek immediate help anyway, regardless of their ability to access Communion, when one spouses turns to abuse or threats when denied sexual relations.  The problem in most cases is simply that the Church cannot permit a divorced and remarried individual to have a sexual relationship with anyone other than their first spouse.  That isn’t casuistry.  It is Christ’s own words.  In certain cases divorced and remarried spouses can remain together under the same roof, but they must do so without engaging in sexual relations. 

Impossible, it is often said.  What married couple can reasonably be asked to refrain from a sexual relationship?  First, of course, it should be said that they aren’t married in the eyes of the Church, which are the eyes through which every Catholic should be looking at their lives.  But there is something more to be said about this, and I think it touches on a malady that particularly strikes modern man.  As it does so often, it comes down to this: either we believe in the power of the Cross or we do not.  Either the Cross really is an instrument of redemption and liberation or it is not.  Either the Christ on that Cross really can save us and help us in even the stickiest situations or He cannot.  Is it asking a lot of remarried spouses to remain celibate within that union?  Yes, it is, indeed it is asking for them to bear a heavy cross, and the bishops at the Synod should be especially focusing on ways to help these couples bear that cross.  But who is Archbishop Fernandez or anyone else to take it upon themselves to take away that cross—a cross that ought to be seen as a gift and an instrument of the couple’s salvation. 

In his final speech to the Synod, Pope Francis told the gathered bishops that there is “a temptation to come down off the Cross, to please the people, and not stay there, in order to fulfill the will of the Father; to bow down to a worldly spirit instead of purifying it and bending it to the Spririt of God.”

That is beautifully put, and it appeared to have been a temptation that the Synod struggled mightily against.  It will be a temptation for many heading into the Ordinary Synod, too.  Next year that 2015 Synod  on the family will open October 4^th, on which the Gospel reading for the day comes from the tenth chapter of the Gospel of St. Mark.  That reading contains the following declaration by Jesus Christ:  “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband marries another she commits adultery.”

How timely.

Archbishop Gadecki and the Synod. There is a backstory here.

There was an interesting interview today in the Italian daily, La Stampa, with Polish Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki of Poznan.  Recall that it was Gadecki who slammed the controversial relatio post disceptationem released last week as part of the Catholic Church’s Synod on the family that wrapped up yesterday in Rome.  That document, of course, was the same synodal midterm report that was hailed in various circles as a landmark step in the direction of new openness towards gays and lesbians and acceptance of the gay lifestyle because of language suggesting that the Church should welcome homosexuals and even value homosexuality.  The report also indicated the possibility of divorced and civilly remarried Catholics receiving Communion and it—amazingly—suggested viewing the positive aspects of cohabitation and other “irregular” situations.  One Vatican commentator referred to the report as an “earthquake,” breaking pastoral ground in areas and ways that had been previously resisted.  Soon after the release of the midterm report, though, Gadecki took to Vatican Radio to denounce it as “unacceptable.”  He outrage was understandable given comments that he had made prior to the Synod, in which he called cohabitation a “self-mutilation of love.”  After making his post-relatio comments on Vatican Radio, Gadecki was soon joined by other prelates who also vigorously advocated for significant changes to the document to bring it in line with Church teaching. 

Ultimately, Gadecki and those prelates were successful at considerably altering the content of the document at the end of the Synod, removing much of the doctrinally shaky content.  Speaking about what happened, Gadecki told La Stampa this:

I am under the impression that, had I had not spoken up, things might have ended up even worse. I consider that there was a need to say something, because of the calls rising up from the families, they were terrified. Something had to be said, so as not to confirm to people the certainty that we were about to abandon the doctrine of the Church. Because everything had to have a more serious format, more detailed and analyzed. 

Whether it was Gadecki who ultimately altered the trajectory of the two-week Synod is, of course, debatable.  His quick and strong denunciation of the midterm report surely had an impact, although it is still murky just how broad that impact really was.  In the interview Gadecki explained that the prevailing narrative that the Church is undergoing a “revolution” of mercy and compassion is false:  “The impression cannot be given that for two millennia there had been no mercy in the Church, that mercy now shows up unexpectedly. Mercy makes sense if it is related to truth.”

That is an important point and Gadecki’s role in this year’s Synod has no doubt been an important one.  But there is an aspect to this story that has received scant coverage.  His participation in the event was enabled by his election as head of the Polish bishops’ conference in March of this year.  His election was celebrated by the left-liberal Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza because of his apparent willingness to rein Polish bishops away from their intense (and usually right-wing) political involvement.  Gadecki is said to be a kind of episcopal moderate, neither belonging to the Polish Church’s right-wing or liberal faction. 

It is impossible to know what (or who) prompted Gadecki to make his strong statement against the Synod midterm report.  He would likely lay it at the hands of the Holy Spirit, and of course he would be right.  But what is most striking here is the fact that Gadecki is a Churchman very much in the mold of Pope Francis, despite the fact that some media have characterized him as one of the “conservative” bishops who revolted against the midterm report last week. 

That is not to suggest that Gadecki’s protest was at the behest of Francis.  There is no evidence of that at all  But it does raise questions about how the media has been covering what has happened in Rome over the last couple of weeks.  The conservatives-versus-Pope-Francis-and-the-“progressives” narrative is an imperfect one, if not an outright falsehood.

Most notable, perhaps, is something Gadecki said upon his election as president of the Polish bishops’ conference.  He noted that “if the Church does not remain faithful to tradition it will 'fall.’”  It was surely that same conviction that led him to label an unacceptable relatio post disceptationem as such.  Speaking to reporters in March, Gadecki commented that “I am shaken in the face of this responsibility, which moves me from a diocesan level to a nationwide one.”  Now it seems that he has taken on a global profile, and the Church is surely better off because of it.