No to euthanasia and no to useless therapeutic persistence: that, in sum, is the position of the Catholic Church repeated by the bishops of France in a statement issued by the Episcopal Conference on 8 October, just over a week after the death of Vincent Humbert, a young man who had become a deaf, dumb and blind tetraplegic following a car acccident, and who had asked his mother to help him die with an injection of barbiturates. Noting that the public debate in France had been concentrated not on the “particular circumstances of this tragic case, nor on the assistance that could be offered to these unfortunate people”, but “on the young man’s request to die”, “on society’s acceptance of euthanasia” and its plea “that exceptions to the law that condemns every form of homicide be recognised”, Archbishop Jean Pierre Ricard, president of the French Episcopal Conference, reaffirms the position of the Catholic Church and asks that the question of euthanasia be clarified. “Today says the communiqué the confusion between deliberately caused death and the legitimate interruption of treatment is extreme, even in certain medical circles. This confusion does not facilitate the necessary ethical discernment”. “The Catholic Church”, declares Msgr. Ricard, though firm in her conviction that “man cannot deliberately cause the death of his own kind”, has repeatedly pronounced her support for the adoption of reasonable and humane forms of treatment, that do not imply in any way the obligation to preserve life at all costs”: John Paul II has himself affirmed that “the renunciation of extraordinary and disproportionate therapeutic means” disproportionate, that is, to any possible benefits “is not equivalent to suicide or euthanasia”. It is essential, concludes Msgr. Ricard, “that our society interrogate itself on the functions of medicine and its duty to furnish physicians with sufficiently clear indications on the limits of their mission” and to “offer to everyone a medicine with a human face, respectful of the will of the invalid, and yet guaranteeing obligatory compliance with the prohibition of homicide”.
