2023-04-24 17:47:00
April 24, 2023 / 10:47 a.m.
The Pontifical Academy for Life (PAV) clarified the position of its president, Bishop Vincenzo Paglia, on the Italian law on assisted suicide.
The PAV Press Office published this Monday, April 24 a statement explaining the statements of its president, in the face of “incorrect interpretations of Msgr. Paglia’s thought”, after his intervention, on the 19th, in a meeting with journalists in Perugia where he spoke of a law in Italy on assisted suicide.
That day, Msgr. Paglia pointed out that “it must not be ruled out that in our society a legal mediation that allows assisted suicide under the conditions specified by the Judgment 242/2019 of the Constitutional Court: the person must ‘be kept alive by life support treatment and affected by an irreversible pathology, a source of physical or mental suffering that they find intolerable, but fully capable of making free and conscious decisions’”.
“Personally, I would not practice assisted suicide, but I understand that legal mediation can constitute the greatest common good specifically possible in the conditions in which we find ourselves,” added the president of the PAV.
The Italian archbishop’s remarks were part of a presentation that included a documentary about an Italian man who traveled to Switzerland to die by assisted suicide. A video of the debate can be seen, in Italian, here.
The PAV statement
In the statement published this Monday, it is stated that “Mons. Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, reiterates his ‘no’ to euthanasia and assisted suicide, in full adherence to the Magisterium”.
“Mons. Paglia mentioned, without developing it, the Italian Constitutional Court Decision 242/2019 and the specific Italian situation. The Constitutional Court confirms that assisting suicide is a crime”, the text continues.
Likewise, the Court, continues the note, “lists four specific and particular conditions in which the crime is decriminalized.”
“In this precise and specific context, Bishop Paglia explained that, in his opinion, a ‘legal mediation’ (certainly not moral) is possible in the direction indicated by the Judgment, maintaining the crime and the conditions in which it is decriminalized, since the Constitutional Court itself has asked Parliament to legislate”, the statement states.
“For Monsignor Paglia, it is important that the Judgment says that the crime remains as such and is not repealed. Any other consideration is misleading.”
In the statement, it is also explained that “on a scientific and cultural level, Mons Paglia has always supported the need to accompany patients in the terminal phase of life, based on Palliative Care and closeness, so that no one is left behind. only in the face of illness and suffering, in the difficult decisions that these imply”.
What does the Catholic Church teach about euthanasia?
The numeral 2324 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church establishes that “voluntary euthanasia, whatever its forms and its motives, constitutes homicide. It is seriously contrary to the dignity of the human person and to respect for the living God, his Creator”.
Pope Saint John Paul II published in 1995 his encyclical The gospel of life, in which it states that “euthanasia is a serious violation of the Law of God, as the deliberate and morally unacceptable elimination of a human person. This doctrine is based on natural law and on the written Word of God; It is transmitted by the Tradition of the Church and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium”.
In 2020, the Congregation – today the Dicastery – for the Doctrine of the Faith reaffirmed this teaching in its letter good samaritan “on the care of people in the critical and terminal phases of life”.
The text approved by Pope Francis affirms that “the insurmountable value of life is a fundamental principle of the natural moral law and an essential foundation of the legal system”.
“We cannot directly choose to take the life of another, even if they ask for it“, it needs.
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