Dutch Euthanasia

from
Archpriest Anthony Augustine

The "pro-choice" camps promised that this would never happen, but it finally did... A week ago, the Netherlands legalized the euthanasia of children. On Aug. 30, the Dutch judiciary allowed Groningen's University Hospital to induce the death of children under 12, including newborns, when they are suffering from incurable sicknesses or enduring unbearable suffering.

To date, we have yet to see or hear of even one of our Utrechian-rooted bishops issue a pastoral letter on this ontological and deontological contradiction of bioethics and/or react in any way. Their loud SILENCE is deafening!

[The Dutch parliament legalized euthanasia November 2000. A 2002 law regulated the practice of euthanasia in that country. Belgium and Switzerland also condone euthanasia. In the United States, Oregon state law permits assisted suicide. Last week a bill to permit euthanasia was introduced in the UK Parliament.]

Therefore, this Old Roman Catholic archpriest calls upon ALL our "independent" bishops who hold a common Apostolic Succession via the Dutch Catholic Episcopacy of Utrecht to end their loud silence and speak out as one unified voice! Let all the sundry Old Catholic councils of bishops finally be heard and/or read. They must stand up as one organic body opposed to this new politically correct "contractualism" where ethics follows the majority. Inevitable, the liberals will soon be calling for this in our own land. Next we will have more "Dr. Kavorkians" and Irish Democrat "catholic" politicians boldly supporting such options and shamelessly approaching our altar rails and Communion lines.

Although human beings, as living bodily beings, possess connatural dignity just in virtue of their existence as human beings, secular modernists are devaluing human dignity by justifying infanticide and advocate the legitimacy of killing newborn infants who suffer from medical problems such as Down syndrome, etc. Their moral relativism maintains that killing is only wrong when the victim is a human person, and to be a person "an entity must be rational, self-conscious, aware of its own existence over time, able to communicate and so on."

Those who think that certain human beings possess no connatural dignity -- and acquire a kind of dignity only in virtue of developing the abilities to decide what is to count as worthwhile and to choose accordingly -- also include a large number of human beings who to them seem to appear to lack dignity: the embryo and the fetus, infants, those suffering from mental impairments, many of the comatose and those whose intellectual abilities have been damaged through dementias. The characteristic secularist view of their lives is that they are disposable and/or utilitarian.

This is why secularists defend embryo experimentation, abortion, and non-voluntary euthanasia (induced either by poisoning or starvation) of the mentally immature or impaired. And since human beings in the earliest phases of their development are considered by them to lack intrinsic dignity, modes of generating them which treat them as manipulable products -- IVF, cloning, etc. -- are regarded as entirely acceptable. To them, procured abortion and euthanasia are misconstrued as acts of "compassion" toward the suffering.

The first and foundational human right is the right to life, and the first duty of the state is to protect that right by safeguarding the lives of its citizens. Legalizing euthanasia or assisted suicide would directly breach this duty because it would be legalizing intentional killing. It would radically undermine the moral and legal basis of society. From a Christian perspective it directly contravenes the Gospel imperative to love and care for our neighbor.

Our churches and "independent" clergy must speak out against instrumentalizing human beings. Our autocephalous bishops must finally condemn the non-therapeutic experimentation on non-consenting subjects. They must affirm that human beings should not be generated in ways which treat them as products, only conditionally acceptable, depending on the desires of others. They seem content to leave it to our present U.S. President to speak out against such evils. Therefore, I respectfully petition our various Old Catholic and Old Roman Catholic bishops and clergy to immediately include this issue on their pastoral teaching agendas and give it their highest priority.