Spiritual Call to arms: Monday OCTOBER 25, 2010 - A Day of Fast & Prayer for Life

Everyone is going to die. Life is a terminal illness. The concern the proponents of euthanasia  are raising deals with the means and conduct of death. If we have the desire and capacity when we are able, we can legally suicide. What they are speaking to is that moment when one no longer has the capacity to effect their own death.

This desire to have someone else act as our agent when we approach our end is our fear of pain and profound existential angst.  If a medical coma is as effective as claimed, in as much it can suppress all conscious and unconscious thought, then it would seem to provide the same conclusion sought for with suicide. Why change the law to permit euthanasia when palliative care can provide the same abyss that is desired by those who rush to embrace in death just to alleviate an irrational fear?  This irrationality is all the more ironic coming as it does primarily from those who claim Voltaire's model of reason 'above all else' as their clarion call.

 To define personhood  by consciousness only, one would be 'effectively dead' since they would no longer be physically or mentally sentient. They would no longer meet the test of 'self-awareness'. That which euthanasia proponents accept as fact (which is to say scientific truth only) says one would no longer merit status as a 'person' under the law. It is a strange quirk of modern day jurisprudence that courts are granting institutions the status of being a 'person' under the law, while concurrently stripping those same rights from other human beings and the beginning and end of life. As the issues of such fundamental principles as the rights to life and the means to control the means of our death are constantly brought before the courts, this inconsistency must inevitably be resolved. Pro-Life advocates clearly believe that human life should be protected where ever and when ever it exists.

 The alternative approach seems fraught with terror for people who either appreciate history or faith. The palliative care option does not expose society to the real threat that euthanasia has proven to bring to the weakest members of our society. The last culture that adopted euthanasia as an acceptable option was Fascist Germany. Do we honestly believe that German culture, which was by the middle of the 20th century the pinnacle of intellectual and artistic achievement, would have  willing accepted the slaughters of WWII had they  not first become inured to the value of life itself?

John Pacheco (from SoCon or Bust) is calling on Catholics to fast and pray on this coming Monday as the Canadian Bishops open their annual national plenary sessions in Cornwall as a spiritual weapon wielded in the defense of life. No matter one's position on some of the other issues he has promoted on his site, this seems to me to be a most worthy initiative. It marshals biblical based techniques to promote a spiritual and moral probity.

'Life' needs all the help it can get these days.