At a press conference held in Berlin in recent days, the president of the German Episcopal Conference, Cardinal Karl Lehmann, and the president of the Council of the Evangelic Church (EKD), Wolfgang Huber, announced the theme of this year’s “Pro-Life Week”, which will be inaugurated in Aachen on 24 April and end on 1st May. The slogan chosen for the week is “The dignity of the person at the end of life”. This year, in numerous communities of both Churches, a wide variety of events and services will be held, all of them inspired by “a relation with the end of human existence respectful of the dignity of the person”. “Sensitizing people to the unconditional dignity of human life and the need to protect it in an integral way, also and especially at the end of life”: that is the objective declared by Lehmann and Huber during their press conference. “The less people fear dying in suffering, the less they will seek to induce the active killing of the dying”, declared Cardinal Lehmann. To this end, he pointed out, “personalized care” and “respectful assistance” are not in themselves enough to ensure an approach “full of respect” for the terminally ill: what’s also needed is the “promotion of palliative treatments”, aimed at alleviating the pain and accompanying the “process of death, without prolonging it in a superfluous way”. In Huber’s view, “the legalization of active assistance in helping a person to die would be tantamount to the declaration of the bankruptcy of humanity”. “Human suffering should be tackled not by killing”, he added, “but by human devotion and by a ‘culture of caring'”. “Also in relation to illness and death”, he underlined, “it’s important to refer to an ‘ethics of dignity’ that conforms to the fundamental intention of our constitution”.
