VATICAN, November 12, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a November 9 message from Pope John Paul II to the president of the Association of Italian Catholic Doctors, the Pope condemned euthanasia and embryonic stem cell research. “There are no lives that are not worth living; there is no suffering, no matter how grave, that can justify killing a life; there are no reasons, no matter how noble, that make plausible the creation of human beings, destined to be used and destroyed,” said the Pope. The Pope added, “No type of research can ignore the intangibility of every human being: to violate this barrier means to open up the doors to a new form of barbarity.”
Pope John Paul II repeated the Church’s teaching on issues pertaining to euthanasia today in an address to 600 participants in the international conference on palliative cures, sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry and currently underway in the Vatican. “Medicine,” said the Pope, “always places itself at the service of life. Even when it knows it cannot defeat a serious pathology, it dedicates its own capabilities to alleviating suffering. To work with passion to help the patient in every situation means to be aware of the inalienable dignity of every human being, even those in the extreme conditions of a terminal state.”
Of euthanasia, the Pope called it one of those “dramas caused by an ethic which seeks to establish who can live and who must die. … Even when motivated by sentiments of a poorly understood compassion, … euthanasia, instead of redeeming the person from suffering, suppresses them.” He stated that compassion, when wrongly understood, “leads to snuffing out life in order to alleviate pain, thus overturning the ethical statute of medical science. … true compassion, on the contrary, promotes every reasonable effort to favor the patient’s healing.” Jhw