Contra Ivereigh: not just 'converts' are worried about the Church

Dan Hitchens, "It’s not just converts who are worried about the Church" (Catholic Herald, August 10, 2017):

In the last few years, many Catholics have become uneasy about statements coming out of Rome, and about the general direction of the Church. But which Catholics? According to a recent article in the Vatican newspaper, the “main obstacle” is “a good part of the clergy”. Then again, an article in Crux last year identified those “going against the Pope” as “almost always lay”.

Some believe that the issue is geographical: Massimo Faggioli describes an unease about the Church changing its style “from a Western one to a global religion”. Conversely, Cardinal Walter Kasper has said that the recalcitrant tend to be African or from “Asian or Muslim countries”....

This brings me to Austen Ivereigh’s latest piece suggesting that the epicentre of current anxiety is neither priests nor the laity, neither Westerners nor Africans, but converts. Ivereigh diagnoses “convert neurosis” in a range of writers, from “elegant commentators such as Ross Douthat” all the way down to “ex-Anglicans in my own patch such as Daniel Hitchens of the Catholic Herald.” Our neurosis reveals itself in disproportionate anxiety at the state of the Church; a horror of doctrinal development beyond our favourite period of Catholic history; and a failure to trust that “the Holy Spirit guides” Pope Francis. In sum, “their baggage has distorted their hermeneutic”.

I’m wary of this kind of psychologising: it is hard, even with those we know best, to say how their psychological issues affect their opinions. And in this instance the psychoanalysis seems needless, since there are at least as many cradle Catholics who have the same worries as us converts....

... I’m sorry to go over this again, but it seems worthwhile, since there is a determined effort in some quarters to change the subject. The concerns are about the sacraments and about doctrine. Nothing on this earth is more beautiful and precious than the sacraments, and it is natural for Catholics to be alarmed about the abuse of them. Scarcely anything is as necessary for our happiness as sound doctrine, and it is normal for Catholics to worry that doctrine is being contradicted or confused. There have been as many saints who were relaxed about heresy as there have been saints who despised the poor.

So of course converts and cradle Catholics will be dismayed by sacramental abuses and doctrinal confusion. And it is hard not to use such terms when we read Malta’s bishops claiming that avoiding adultery may be impossible; when we hear of priests, bishops and even cardinals abandoning the Church’s practice on Communion; when papal teachings are used – without contradiction from Rome – to justify novel approaches to divorce, euthanasia and extramarital relationships....

[Hat tip to JM]

On the whole "death with dignity" thing

From Guy Noir: "A Protestant sermon on Euthanasia that is essentially Catholic moral theology.

"Well-done; and far more connecting in its directness than a polite interview with Rev. James Martin, I daresay."

John Piper, "We Are Not Our Own: On God, Brittany Maynard, and Physician-Assisted Suicide" (Desiring God, October 31, 2014).

[Hat tip to JM]

Dutch euthanasia expert: "We were wrong -- terribly wrong, in fact"

A Dutch expert on euthanasia has not only stopped supporting the death practice and the euthanasia law for which he campaigned, but he has made the reasons for his about-face public -- something usually frowned upon in Dutch circles.

Professor Theo Boer held a unique position for seeing how the country's euthanasia/assissted suicide law, enacted in 2002, actually worked. For nine years, Boer, a medical ethicist was a mamber of one of the five Dutch regional review committees charged with investigating all reported euthanasia and assisted-suicide deaths for the government to see if each case complied with the law.

In an article Boer submitted to London's Daily Mail -- in the hope of persuading Britain's House of Lords not to pass an assisted-suicide law -- Boer said he and his colleagues were "terribly wrong" when they concluded five years after the Dutch euthanasia law took effect that there was no "slippery slope" associated with that law. Starting in 2008, the numbers of induced deaths began increasing 15% each year. By 2012, the euthanasia review committees recorded 4,188 deaths (compared to 1,882 in 2002), and Boer expects the reported annual death count to reach 6,000 this year or next year at the latest.

"Euthanasia is on the way to become a 'default' mode of dying for cancer patients," he wrote, and there's been a sharp increase in the deaths of people with psychiatric illnesses or dementia, and those simply suffering from grief, loneliness, or age. "Some of these patients could have lived for years or decades," he explained.

There have been other undeniable signs of a serious ethical slide due to the law. One example he cites is the "End of Life Clinic," established by the Dutch Right to Die Society (NVVE), that sends out teams of euthanasia doctors to end the lives of those who have been denied an induced death by their own doctors. These mobile doctors, Boer wrote, do not have an established relationship with patients, having only seen them three times before terminating those patients' lives. NVVE is also relentlessly campaigning for a "lethal pill" for anyone over 70 years of age.

According to Boer, the Dutch law "sees assisted suicide and euthanasia as the exception," but "public opinion is shifting towards considering them rights, with corresponding duties on doctors to act." A new law being drafted would place added pressure on doctors who refuse a death request to refer the patient to a "willing doctor." "Not even the Review Committees, despite hard and conscientious work, have been able to halt these developments," Boer wrote.

Finally, Boer implored Britain's Parliament not to pass the assisted-suicide bill currently being considered before looking closely at teh Dutch experience, suggesting that "the mere existence of such a law is an invitation to see assisted suicide and euthanasia as a normality instead of a last resort." "Once the genie is out of the bottle," he wrote, "it is not likely to ever go back in again." [Boer, "Don't make our mistake," Daily Mail, 7/9/14]

[Hat tip to Rita Marker, in Patients Rights Council Update, pp. 1, 6]

"Nazi 'unworthy of life' doctrine driving abortions in the U.S.?"

Michael Haverluck, "Nazi 'unworthy of life' doctrine driving abortions in the U.S.?" (One News Now, May 8, 2014):

A Catholic theologian who is considered one of America's leading public intellectuals says the abortion holocaust in his country can trace its roots to the murderous, life-denying ideology of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

During his keynote speech at the International Pro-Life Conference in Rome Saturday, U.S. commentator and bestselling author George Weigel reminded the world that its embrace of abortion is rooted in the exact doctrine that propagated and "justified" the horrific slaughter of tens of millions under Nazism and Stalinism in the 20th Century.

One correspondent asks whether Mr. Weigel isn't referring to the idea of eugenics espoused by Margret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. She notes that Margaret Sanger was not only one of Hitler's inspirations, she also founded the organization which would later become Planned Parenthood. She proposed in Birth Control Review, April 1932 in A Plan for Peace:

"...to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feeble minded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924...to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of the population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring...to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization...to apportion farm lands and homesteads for those segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives."

The correspondent further notes that Sanger lists further candidates for this type of treatment and then goes on to celebrate that "having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health instead of punishment, it is safe to say that fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense--defending the unborn against their own disabilities."

While one could argue that there is a difference between the "unfit" and those imprisoned in Nazi death camps, the difference is negligible and the logic behind disposing of them "for the good of the race" is identical.

[Hat tip to C. G.-Z. and M.]

Chilling claim: UK hospitals kills off 130K elderly patients annually

Steve Doughty, "Top doctor's chilling claim: The NHS kills off 130,000 elderly patients every year" (MailOnline, June 19, 2012).

Make way for Obamacare!

"The pro-life homily that rocked the world and caused 3 priests to be beheaded"

Dr. Gerard M. Nadal's August 15th post comes to you via Nina Bryhn from Deacon Greg Kendra, who posted this homily by Cardinal Clemens von Galen earlier this month on the 70th anniversary of its delivery, originally, on August 3, 1941, in Münster Cathedral. It is archived at historyplace.com, which has an excellent repository of historical speeches and commentary.

Dr. Death meets his Maker

Known as Dr. Death even before launching his fierce advocacy and practice of assisted suicides, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, 83, died today at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak -- right here in Metro Detroit -- where he had been hospitalized with kidney and heart problems.

Attorney Geoffrey Fieger, who made a celebrity career for himself by defending Kevorkian on many of his assisted suicide cases, gushed: "History will look very favorably upon Dr. Jack Kevorkian. I will personally miss him. I am personally grateful to have known such a great man." Conveniently (or perhaps not so conveniently) Feiger assumes that the final chapter of history will be written by self-congratulatory Death-with-Dignity liberals, rather than by His Lord and Maker at the Final Tribunal.

In a video linked in the last paragraph, Kevorkian is interviewed by a reporter whom he drives around in his little electric car, waxing philosophical. One catches bits of Nietzsche: people "make up this stuff" about heaven and hell because "it makes them feel good. THEY'RE WEAK!" And, when asked what HE believes, bits of Skepticism: "How should I know?" -- as well as bits of Silenus: "I wish I had never been born." He adds: "Who needs this ... going to jail..." Silenus, of course, was the Greek mythological figure cited in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, who declared that "the best thing for a man is not to be born, and if already born, to die as soon as possible."

Well, it might be tempting to say that Dr. Death has finally gotten his wish. But that wouldn't be quite accurate. There must be one very surprised Dr. Jack Kevorkian at the moment. One wonders what he would tell Geoffrey Feiger if he had the chance now.

"Dignity House": Jack Kevorkian business cards, anyone?

Rita Marker's International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide newsletter of July 6, 2010 asks the reader to imagine the following scenario:

A psychiatrist has announced that he's setting up a clinic in a quiet suburb. That clinic will be called the "Dignity House." It's a place where people can go to kill themselves under the State's Death with Dignity law.

Bluntly stated, it is an assisted-suicide clinic.

The clinic will be "full service" where you can schedule the day of your death and -- for an extra fee -- arrange for pre-death amenities. These extras include catering for a special last meal. Fresh garden flowers are also available. If you want music, that can be arranged. There's even the option of a makeup specialist so you'll look better if you select the option of an "end-of-life camera" to videotape your death.

A person can also request that the clinic's psychiatrist-owner be present at the time of death -- for an extra fee, of course. And, yes, you can bring friends, family and your pets if you'd like them to be present at your death. Total cost for the "package deal" is $5,000.

Marker concedes that some readers may find this unbelievable, saying that's a natural reaction; but she insists it's true. She writes: "In late June, Portland Oregon psychiatrist, Stuart Weisberg, MD, announced the planned opening of his 'Dignity House.' All of the details described above are from his web site and news articles about his endeavor."

See Thaddeus Pope's post, "Weisberg's Death with Dignity House" (Medical Futility Blog, June 27, 2010).

In a move toward damage control for Oregon's image, the state medical board issued an emergency suspension of Weisberg's medical license, not because of problems with the concept, but because of prior drug prescribing irregularities. Weisberg has vowed to get that suspension lifted, and, indeed, the winds of history clearly seem to be pointing his way.

Jack Kevorkian business cards, anybody?

Related

Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One,Waugh's vicious little nightmare of a satire on the L.A. funeral industry, where Whispering Glades provides deluxe service to deceased stars and their families, and the Happier Hunting Ground does the same for dead pets. (Staffers at Whispering Glades refer to corpses, of course, as "Loved Ones."

Eat your heart out, Jack Kevorkian!

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, originally from Pontiac, Michigan, must have dreamed of the day when he could walk through a retirement home passing out business cards and be welcomed as a philanthropist. If he ever wondered whether he would live to see the day, he need wonder no more: his dream of servicing his countrymen as "Dr. Death" has now been embraced, as we have been learning lately, by the current administration of our national government.

Some recent links:

• "The Death Book for Veterans" (Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2009)
• "Obama Revives VA Death Book" (Rush Limbaugh, August 21, 2009)
• "VA Death Book" [PDF]
• "The Death Panels Are Real. We Have the Video" (RS Red State, August 21, 2009).

Shifting focus just a bit, remember that scene in the Monty Python film, The Meaning of Life, where the organ harvesters show up at the door of an elderly couple for the grizzly task? "Can we have your liver, then?" [Advisory: macabre humor] Never mind that you may still be using it -- your liver, that is. That may have seemed funny when the film came out. Maybe it still is. But in these times, under the Obamanation of Desolation, fiction meets reality, and dark humor descends toward becoming a matter of dreary gray policy.

[Hat tip to S.K.]

Dignifying ourselves to death

Thesis

"Washington state woman 1st death under new suicide law" (My Way News, May 23, 2009): "I am a very spiritual person, and it was very important to me to be conscious, clear-minded and alert at the time of my death," said Linda Fleming, 66-year-old woman with late-stage pancreatic cancer, before taking a deadly dose of prescription barbiturates, with family members, her physician and her dog at her side at her home in Sequim, Washington. Fleming became the first person to kill herself under Washington state's new assisted suicide law, known as "death with dignity."

Antithesis

"Undercover sting operation exposes the assisted-suicide group Final Exit Network" (International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide Update, 2009, Vol 23, No. 2):

On February 25, 2009, the organization Final Exit Network (FEN) made headlines across the country. But, it was not good news for the group. Four of its key members had been arrested as a result of an undercover sting operation conducted by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI). Mainstream media called the organization a "suicide ring" and law enforcement's investigation in nine states a "raid" and a "bust"-much to the dismay of FEN faithful, who view themselves as compassionate, volunteer "exit guides" out to help their fellow members with "intolerable medical conditions" commit suicide. [FEN Press Release, 2/26/09]

... The GBI's investigation revealed the process FEN uses for suicides. After paying a $50 FEN membership fee and applying for suicide assistance, the member is visited by an exit guide, who instructs the member to buy two helium canisters and a clear plastic "Exit Bag" customized with tubing to connect to the helium tanks. On the day of the scheduled suicide, the member is visited by both the exit guide and a senior exit guide who explains the details involved in bringing about the member's death. After the member is dead, the exit guides remove all evidence from the scene and make it look as though the member died naturally. [GBI Press Release, 2/25/09; AP, 3/2/09] "It's grotesque," said ITF Executive Director Rita Marker. "There's no dignity in getting a plastic bag over your head." [LA Times, 2/27/09]

Key in the case against the 3,000-member FEN will be testimony by the GBI undercover agent who infiltrated the organization by claiming to have pancreatic cancer (a claim, the GBI said, FEN accepted without requesting confirmation). [Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2/25/09] When senior exit guide Ted Goodwin demonstrated what would happen after the agent put the plastic bag over his head, "[Goodwin] got on top of him and held his hands down," explained GBI spokesperson John Bankhead. "[He] firmly held his hands down so he couldn't move." This action, Bankhead said, would have prevented the agent from removing the bag during an actual suicide if he had changed his mind. In the Celmer case, for which Goodwin and Blehr have been charged, both exit guides admitted they held Celmer's hands down. [NBC News 11, 2/27/09; NY Times, 3/11/09]

FEN's new president, Jerry Dincin, denied the allegation that exit guides restrain the hands of soon-to-be dead members. While he admits that holding hands is a part of the assisted-suicide process, he said exit guides do it "in the way that you would a frightened child, to calm them." But FEN's own "First Responder Information" form reportedly outlines why exit guides might want to firmly hold a member's hands down: once the process starts, if the flow of helium is interrupted, severe brain damage could result-and they would have a botched suicide on their hands. [Sunday Paper (Atlanta), 3/29/09]

Rome vs. Harvard on transplants and brain death

Sandro Magister, "Transplants and Brain Death. "L'Osservatore Romano" Has Broken the Taboo" (www.chiesa, September 5, 2008), reports that L'Osservatore Romano," the Pope's newspaper, ran a prominent front-page article three days ago, calling into question whether the 40 year old Harvard criterion for "brain death" (cessation of measurable brain activity) is enough to certify human death.

40 years ago, on August 5, 1968, the "Journal of the American Medical Association" published a document – referred to as the "Harvard report" – promoting the idea that
the total cessation of brain activity, instead of the stopping of the heart, ought to serve as the criterion for the moment of death. The idea seemed plausible, and all the countries of the world, and Catholic officials as well, quickly adopted the same position.

With the L'Osservatore Roman article, however, Rome has reopened the discussion on taking organs from "warm cadavers" while the heart is still beating. Scholars of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, according to Magister, are even more critical of the Harvard Report. Furthermore, when he was a cardinal, Ratzinger gave a speech to the cardinals at the consistory of 1991 on the "threats against life," in which he said, among other things:

Later, those who are not put into an "irreversible" coma by disease or injury will often be put to death to meet the demand for organ transplants, or will be used in medical experimentation as "warm cadavers" ... Finally, when death seems to be near, many will be tempted to hasten this through euthanasia.

Again as pope, Ratzinger published the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states (no. 476):

Before allowing the noble act of organ donation after death, one must verify that the donor is truly dead.

The inference is that the Holy Father already had strong reservations about the Harvard criterion and the practice derived from it long before he became Pope.

Furthermore, Paolo Becchi, professor of the philosophy of law at the universities of Genoa and Luzern, states in his book, Morte cerebrale e trapianto di organi: Una questione di etica giuridica (Brain death and organ transplant: A question of legal ethics, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2008):

Because there are good arguments today for maintaining that brain death does not mean the real death of the individual, the consequences in the matter of transplants could be truly explosive. And one might wonder when these will be the matter of an official statement of the Church's position.

Is this the Daily News or Monty Python?

I first read something about this in Rita L. Marker's Newsletter for the International Task Force on Euthanasia & Assisted Suicide, and it seemed just so far off the edge that I decided to Google it and see what turned up. Lo and behold, there it was: "State denies cancer treatment, offers suicide instead" (World Net Daily, June 19, 2008).

Happily, the story appears to have a favorable ending, not, however, thanks to the State of Oregon: Tim Christie, "A GIFT OF TREATMENT: When the Oregon Health Plan fails to cover a cancer drug, the drugmaker steps in" (The Register-Guard, June 3, 2008).

Vatican: gay marriage 'evil', abortion & euthanasia 'terrorism'

Philip Pullella, "Vatican official calls gay marriage 'evil'" (www.iol.co.za, April 24, 2007):

Vatican City - The Vatican's second-highest ranking doctrinal official on Monday forcefully branded homosexual marriage an evil and denounced abortion and euthanasia as forms of "terrorism with a human face".

The attack by Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was the latest in a string of speeches made by either Pope Benedict or other Vatican officials as Italy considers giving more rights to gays.

He denounced a number of "evils that remain almost invisible" because the media presented them as "expression of human progress." Among these he listed abortion clinics, which he called "slaughterhouses of human beings", euthanasia, and "parliaments of so-called civilised nations where laws contrary to the nature of the human being are being promulgated, such as the approval of marriage between people of the same sex..."

Proper end-of-life opioid use does not hasten death

A study involving 725 patients conducted in 13 U.S. hospice programs found that the use of opioids (narcotics, such as morphine) need not hasten the death of patients with advanced illnesses. "Undertreatment of pain is a far more pressing concern than is the risk of hastening death in those with advanced disease," researchers discovered, "and physicians should be encouraged to use opioids effectively to relieve suffering at the end of life." [R.K. Portenoy et al., "Opioids Use and Survival at the End of Life: A Survey of a Hospice Population," Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, pp. 539, 12/6/06]

The research undermines the frequently used claims by right-to-die advocates that euthanasia and assisted suicide should be legalized because those induced death practices are no different than the yield of aggressively treating pain when death is hastened. According to the study's leading author, Dr. Russell K. Portenoy, "Opioid drugs can be used aggressively at the end of life to relieve pain and suffering, and this use should not be constrained by inappropriate fear of serious consequences like earlier death." [Reuters Health, 1/26//07]

[Source: International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide Update, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2007), p. 2]