Chronicling the Adversary's Global Takeover of the Healthcare Industry

Most people who are alive today go about their daily lives without giving a thought to the monstrous life and death decisions that so-called “medical professionals” and judges render upon the fate of innocent human beings whose only “crime” is that they suffer from medical problems that make them “expendable.” Although it is anesthetized by the use of many different euphemisms, including “mercy” and “compassion” and “quality of life,” the plain fact of the matter is that the medical and judicial monsters who induce so much needless sorrow into the lives of parents and children is nothing other than rank utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism is a political ideology (i.e. secular “belief” system) that is based, at least loosely, which contends that public policy is to pursue the “greatest good for the greatest number.” It is the same thing as Social Darwinism that has led governments around the so-called "civilized"world to create a world of the “fit,” a world where the “unfit” have to be killed or, more "passively," left to die off because their care causes an expenditure of money and “human resources” that are said to be “better” used elsewhere.  After all, Margaret Sanger said as much in her Birth Control Review:

"More children from the fit, less from the unfit -- that is the chief aim of birth control." Birth Control Review, May 1919, p. 12. (Margaret Sanger Quotes.)

The medical industry—and it is nothing other than a money-making industry—has been in the forefront of killing innocent human beings, starting with the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn in their mothers’ wombs and continuing at all subsequent stages of life thereafter.

Victims of accidents or sudden medical traumas are declared to be “brain dead” even though this profit-making myth that was invented by a team of supposed physicians at the Harvard Medical School in 1968 in order to provide an “ethical” justification for the vivisection of living human beings for their vital bodily organs so that they could be transplanted into other human beings.

The following report, written by the heroic apostle of Catholic truth, Dr. Paul Byrne (see No Room In The Inn For Jahi McMathEvery Once In A WhileDr. Paul Byrne on Brain DeathStories That Speak For ThemselvesHeadless Corpses?First-Hand Evidence Of FraudWhy Should Death Of Any Kind Get In The Way?Grand IllusionEvery Once In A WhileCanada's Death Panels: A Foretaste of ObamaCare, Someone Was Killed To Keep "J.R." AliveTrying To Find Ever New And Inventive Ways To Snatch BodiesDispensing With The Pretense of "Brain Death"Good Rule Of Thumb: Reject What Conciliarists PromoteTo Avoid Suffering In The Name Of CompassionJust Obey GodDeath To Us AllChoosing To Live In States Of ApoplexyObamaDeathCare, Dr. Byrne's Jahi is alive -- praise the Lord and pass the ammunition and an article that attorneys recently tried to use against Dr. Byrne in court in Reno, Nevada, Dr. Paul A. Byrne's Refutation), provides a history of “brain death” in the context of how it was applied to a sixty year-old man a few years ago:

Michael, 60 years old, had just finished eating. Michael and his family were watching television when Michael suddenly slumped and fell to the floor. His family called 911. The emergency medical team resuscitated Michael. On the way to the hospital, a pulse was detected. Medications to support blood pressure were used during the resuscitation.

A diagnosis of mental illness was made many years earlier. Michael had no known physical illness prior to his collapse. Michael lived with his mother and sisters. They were Catholic and lived in accord with the teachings of the Catholic Church. Michael did not use tobacco or drink alcohol. Michael took 2 medications for his mental illness. Both affect the brain; one of them "increases risk of death."

On admission to hospital, Michael was breathing, but unresponsive. He was anemic (Hemoglobin 8) and his white blood cells showed many young forms (occurs with infection). On admission, his temperature was normal, but the next morning was elevated to 103 degrees (occurs with infection).

One consultant wrote, "There has apparently been some discussion back-and-forth between the hospitalist team, the intensivist, and the organ donor people as to how to properly manage him." In less than 24 hours after admission to hospital the neurology consultant wrote, "Limited neurological examination. The patient is unresponsive. Pupils are fixed. Absent corneal reflex bilaterally. Absent doll's eyes. No purposeful movements of the extremities noted. No movements of extremities to noxious stimuli. Reflexes are absent throughout. Toes are mute. IMPRESSION:... clinically, the patient is brain-dead status post cardiac arrest, likely with severe anoxic damage to the brain. May consider, do not resuscitate."

EEG showed "intermittently fast background activity of very low amplitude. Anteriorly also record consist of an irregular fast activity of small amplitude. No focal slowing or frank epileptiform features noted throughout the recording."

Sodium was abnormally elevated to 157 mEq/L; repeat was 162. Two days after admission he was determined to be "brain dead" per neurology. During an apnea test, no breathing was observed.

No blood levels of drugs that were prescribed or any other drugs were obtained. No cause of collapse of Michael was overtly considered other than statements that Michael had suffered from lack of oxygen and that Michael was "brain dead." It didn't matter that there was brain wave activity and that his heart was beating 100,000 times per day and that circulation and respiration were occurring with support from the ventilator.

Michael's relatives were assured that the determination of "brain death" was done in accordance with the hospital policy of certification of death by neurological criteria, which is patterned after, and consistent with, the New York State Department of Health and New York State Task Force on Life & the Law, "Guidelines for Determining Brain Death," published November 2011. In this document "brain death" is defined as "irreversible loss of all function of the brain. The three essential findings are coma, absence of brainstem reflexes and apnea." It was determined by a neurologist, an intensivist, and a hospitalist that there were no "confounding clinical circumstances." Under New York State law, Michael was determined to be "brain-dead" and was legally dead.

A Catholic priest who is Chairman of the Ethics Committee at the hospital volunteered that the hospital operated in accordance with the Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Bishops. This man was legally "brain dead" and ventilator support of the vital activity of respiration would be stopped at a precise hour and Do Not Resuscitate (DNR), which was already in place over the objection of the relatives, would be carried out. The ventilator was then taken away at the precise hour, even though Michael's relatives strongly objected. Prior to removal of the ventilator Michael's heart was beating; blood pressure was normal. Michael had respiration supported by a ventilator that pushed air in. Michael had to push the air out before the ventilator could push the air in again. A ventilator can push air into a cadaver, also known as a corpse, but quickly after death, the air will not and cannot come out of a cadaver.

Michael was judged to be "brain dead" shortly after arrival at the hospital, which Michael's relatives and the general public expect to be a healing center. In the hospital Michael was sentenced without a trial to true death. How was true death imposed on Michael? The Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) includes "irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain." Note that the word "functions" is plural.

The statute in New York includes "total and irreversible cessation of brain function." Thus, the statute has reduced the plural "functions" to the singular "function." The brain has many functions; absence of any function as determined by the three doctors in the New York Hospital meant absence of "all function." Thus, the statute and Rules do not protect the life of the patient.

The Rules and Regulation call for providing "reasonable accommodation of a Surrogate Decision-maker's religious or moral objections to use of the brain death standard to determine death." Michael's mother and sisters pleaded with the administrator of the hospital not to take away the ventilator, but the judgment had been made; nothing could be done to stop the removal of the ventilator. It was the hospital's decision that they had provided "reasonable accommodation" to Michael's family's religious and moral objections to the "brain death" criteria used by the hospital. They had a Catholic priest, the Ethics Committee, and it was stated that they were operating in accordance with the Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Bishops. It was also stated that they had a judge who agreed with what they were doing and they would give no more time to Michael, not even one more hour or one more day!

Prior to 1968, ventilators were in use but there was no controversy. Patients died on ventilators. So how did all these issues that involve taking organs and stopping ventilators come about? The goal of medical practice used to be that a living person would not be declared dead. Until the advent of mechanical ventilators and other complex life supporting therapies, the mistake of judging a dead person as alive was practically impossible. Prior to these developments and the desire to do vital organ transplantation, medicine made every effort to judge the moment of death in the direction of preserving human life from a death-dealing mistake.

"Brain death" did not originate or develop by way of application of the scientific method"Brain death" began with the appointment of the Harvard Committee to consider the issues. The results of their work were in the "Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death." [1] The first words of this report are as follows: "Our primary purpose is to define irreversible coma as a new criterion for death." Only persons who are alive can be in a coma, whether reversible or not. Was this the hubris of a few academicians or was it simply a surrender to fear of legal chastisement regarding perceived economic and utilitarian needs in 1968, especially the desire to get healthy living vital organs for transplantation? It seems that a predetermined agenda existed from the onset. There were no patient data and no references to basic scientific studies. In fact, there was only one reference, which was to Pope Pius XII. [2] While there was a reference to and a quotation from this Allocution of Pope Pius XII, they neglected to include the following: "But considerations of a general nature allow us to believe that human life continues for as long as its vital functions – distinguished from the simple life of organs – manifest themselves spontaneously or even with the help of artificial processes."

The primary purpose of the Committee was not to determine IF irreversible coma was an appropriate criterion for death but to see to it that IT WASestablished as a "new criterion for death." With an agenda like that at the outset, the data could be made to fit the already arrived at conclusions. There was a serious lack of scientific method in the origination and development of "brain death."This has continued to the present time where there is no consensus as to which of the myriad of sets of criteria to use and criteria for "brain death" are not evidence based.

"Brain death" is not true death. Rather it is observing cessation of functioning of the brain, which is then translated into "brain death." The primary reason for the origination and propagation of "brain death" was and is the desire to obtain vital organs for transplantation. It can now be ascertained that a validly applied scientific method, sound reasoning, and available medical technology were not utilized in developing the new way of determination of death called "brain death" for the simple reason that death is the absence of life. Life and true death cannot and do not exist at the same time in the same person.

When a person has a head injury or, as in this case, sudden collapse, explainable or not, quickly the possibility of getting organs for transplantation is entertained. In Michael's case no attempt was made to get his organs. Why not? No reason was apparent to indicate that Michael's organs would not be suitable for transplantation. Was it related to mental illness? "Discussion with the organ donor people did occur." Quickly it was determined that Michael was "brain dead" and Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) was considered and later carried out over the objection of Michael's relatives.

Michael's mother and sisters wanted Michael to be treated. Why wouldn't they? They took care of Michael during his entire life. When Michael collapsed, they called 911 expecting to get help for Michael. Paramedics responded. During transport the pulse returned. At the hospital Michael was said to be "brain dead" based on absence of brain stem reflexes and no visual observation of breathing. The fact that Michael had electrical activity in his cerebral cortex, the largest part of his brain, meant nothing to the doctors who said all they needed was absence of the brain stem reflexes that they had tested and a positive apnea test (positive meaning that he did not show breathing efforts at that time sufficient for observers to see). I add that for these doctors at this New York hospital, they had all they needed to discontinue care! Yet, these doctors, quick to evaluate for "brain death," did not do basic diagnostic tests to rule out infection, identify causes of the metabolic derangements of his electrolytes nor did they test for the presence of obvious drugs or toxins as the reason for his sudden collapse. They did not provide basic supportive care more than 48 hours. Once they determined that he was not an organ donor, they seemed not only to want a "do not resuscitate order" in the event of another collapse, they were intent on withdrawing life-sustaining ventilator support making another collapse, anoxic events and death almost inevitable. They refused family wishes to continue to treat the patient and even denied them time to make transfer arrangements so that their loved one might have a chance at life at a different institution with different doctors. Michael, an innocent person, was effectively executed without trial in a New York hospital. (See: www.lifeguardianfoundation.org for information on how to protect and preserve your life.)

One will note the role played by a supposedly Catholic priest in this execution. So much for the conciliarspeak of "solidarity" with the "poor and the suffering," including the mentally ill. The counterfeit church of conciliarism has made its "official reconciliation" with each of the anti-Incarnational errors of Modernity, including the "progress" made by the medical industry. A false church based on false premises accepts the very false premises of separation of Church and State and "religious liberty" that the made the triumph of the contemporary Aztec body-snatchers inevitable.

Obviously, insurance companies already pay for the execution of the innocent preborn by chemical and surgical means and by means of the starvation and dehydration of living human beings and by the vivisection of living human beings for their vital body members and in cases such as Michael's above that was described so poignantly by Dr. Byrne. These killings increased under ObamaDeathCare and the so-called American Health Care Act does nothing to stop them. Indeed, the American Health Care Act, as written and passed by the United States House of Representatives will continue to force us to finace the killing of innocent human beings under the guise of "mercy" and "compassion." 

The thirst for the blood of innocent human beings has become so insatiable in the past forty-nine years that the medical-industry that the “definition” has had to be “expanded” considerably:

OTTAWA, Ontario, 4 September, 12 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As Ontario’s organ donation agency aggressively campaigns to grow a list of registered organ donors, a legal scholar has slammed the updated national guidelines for establishing the moment of death, arguing that the guidelines were deliberately loosened to “increase the proportion of donors eligible for organ harvesting”.

Jacquelyn Shaw, BSc, MSc, LLB, LLM, writing in the McGill Journal of Law and Health, wrote that the updated 2008 Canadian Council for Donation and Transplantation (CCDT) guidelines, “dramatically altered the criteria for brain death declaration with the goal of increasing organ supplies.”

In Canada the whole-brain criteria for death has been practiced since 1968, but the new “brainstem” criteria enables doctors to declare a patient brain dead “potentially weeks, or more, sooner than under a whole-brain criterion,” observes Shaw.

This enables the CCDT to hit donor increase targets by “making many more organs available sooner, and in a more transplantable state” – but this begs the question, is someone declared dead under the brainstem criterion really dead?

While organ and tissue donation agencies which operate on the CCDT guidelines, such as Ontario’s Trillium Gift of Life Network, stress that brain death is death itself, underscoring that neurological death is “permanent and irreversible and there can be no hope whatsoever of recovery”, Shaw argues that there are both medical and legal problems with this criteria.

The updated CCDT criterion of death requires that only the lower part of the brain which is responsible for breathing, wakefulness, and certain other reflexes be shown to be permanently non-functional. “Significantly, the CCDT’s criterion contains no requirement for non-functionality of the brain’s cortex, responsible for conscious awareness, voluntary movement, sensation (e.g. pain), and communication,” wrote Shaw.

“A brainstem criterion could declare dead some patients who are only super locked-in. With damaged brainstems, but intact cortices, such patients might retain pain-awareness, but could be declared brain-dead under CCDT standards, making them eligible for (unanaesthetised) organ harvesting.”

Because not all patients may be actually dead when their organs are harvested, Shaw argued that the CCDT’s brainstem criterion may “infringe patients’ rights to life and to physical and psychological security of the person.”

Shaw said that the USA and other nations have rejected the brainstem criterion of death due to a high risk of error.

Dr. John Shea, MD FRCP(C), who has written extensively about the highly controversial theory of brain death, told LifeSiteNews that respect for life means that “it’s important to determine that a person is actually dead before harvesting organs because if they are not dead, and you harvest the organs, you are essentially killing them.”

“With brain death criteria, there is no absolute certainty that the person is dead,” he said. “Criteria for establishing brain death have been deliberately developed in such a way so that even though a person is not biologically dead, they are declared dead so that their organs can be harvested and no one can be prosecuted.”

“The fact is that people have to be alive when their organs are harvested because their organs are harmed when death actually occurs,” he said.

The gruesome fact that organ donors are often alive when their organs are harvested — a necessary condition to produce healthy, living organs — prompted three leading experts last year to advise the medical community to adopt a more “honest” moral criteria that allowed for the harvesting of organs from “dying” or “severely injured” patients, with proper consent.

The experts argued that this approach would avoid the “pseudo-objective” claim that a donor is “really dead,” which is often based upon purely ideological definitions of death designed to expand the organ donor pool. They argued this would allow organ harvesters to be more honest with the public, as well as ensure that donors don’t feel pain during the harvesting process.

Dr. Paul Byrne, an experienced neonatologist, clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Toledo, and president of Life Guardian Foundation told LifeSiteNews at the time that “all of the participants in organ transplantation know that the donors are not truly dead.”

“How can you get healthy organs from a cadaver? You can’t,” he said.

Shaw called the CCDT’s updated guidelines for brain death determination in Canada “significant, dangerous, [and] under-the-radar” adding that they are “virtually unknown” and that they warrant “greater public attention.”

Meanwhile, numerous stories have emerged of awakenings following medical declarations of brain death. In one particularly chilling case, 21-year-old Zack Dunlap, who was in a locked-in state following an ATV accident, recounted hearing doctors discuss harvesting his organs in his presence. Zack showed signs of life mere moments before he was scheduled to be wheeled into the operating theater to have his organs removed, when one of his relatives tried to get him to react by digging a pocketknife under one of his fingernails.

These stories provide weight to the arguments of doctors, like Shea and Byrne who say that the declaration of brain death is not sufficient to arrive at a moral certitude of actual death and that the recovery of organs based on that declaration is immoral. (Canada’s new ‘brain death’ criteria slammed as scheme to increase organ donations.)

Some might protest by claiming that these "abuses" can be corrected, that a "strict adherence" to "brain death" needs to be maintained. What idiocy. What utter idiocy. Do we really expect those who believe in the killing of babies in their mothers' wombs to be honest about anything? Anything? Why believe these killers when the actual evidence proves them to be merchants of body-snatching who prey on unsuspecting relatives, filled with grief and confusion, by using a combination of sentimentality and guilt ("give the gift of life," "let your relative 'live on' in a recipient," "your relative would have wanted it this way even though he didn't sign up to be an 'organ donor'") to pressure bereaved human beings into agreeing to the execution of their loved ones.

This is monstrous. It is even more monstrous and scandalous beyond all telling that any Roman Catholic, no less members of clergy, could be party to encouraging parishioners to become accomplices in their own executions and that of their loved ones. Such men are not reliable moral guides. They have to be moral monsters to ignore the evidence presented in these stories and also willfully blind to the point of complete irresponsibility not recognize that cases above are not isolated instances whatsoever.

The medical industry has dispensed with the pretense of "brain death." Why does any Catholic, whether in or out of the conciliar structures, still keep to the pretense?

As I have noted before, some might object that "vital organ donations" should proceed as long as there is a "dispute" within the medical community as to whether "brain death" constitutes a true criterion or is what, in all truth, it is: a manufactured myth to harvest human body members for the sake of profit. Sure, the "dispute" exists. The dispute is based on false premises. And even those who claim that it is morally licit to proceed with a "vital organ donation" because the matter is in dispute and has not been pronounced definitively by a true pope forget one little-bitty qualification that blows their contention right of the water with that dead goldfish: if there is doubt as to what constitutes genuine death, the doubt goes in the favor of human life.

However, there is no doubt at al. The facts are plain. The medical-industry invented this false notion of "brain death" in 1968 to justify the killing of human beings for heart transplantation surgery, and the resort to this false “diagnosis” is applied rapidly by moral monsters who are determining for themselves who is “fit” to receive proper medical care. These monsters—and the judges who are in cahoots with them—induced much sorrow into the lives of parents, wives, husbands, and grown children.

"Palliative Care" As The Substitute for Redemptive Suffering

Pain and suffering are two of the many consequences of Original Sin and of our own Actual Sins. It is only the true Faith, the Catholic Faith, that teaches men the truth about pain and suffering, exhorting them to recognize that each of us must suffer on account of the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin in the world and on account of our own personal sins.

The Catholic Faith alone teaches men that they must see in suffering and pain and humiliation and rejection and calumny and ridicule and ostracism and poverty and ill-health the path of our sanctification and salvation.

The Catholic Faith alone provides men with the means to accept with joy and with gratitude each of the sufferings that come our way. She alone has the graces, won for us by the shedding of every single drop of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces, to equip men to carry their crosses with equanimity as they seek to make reparation for their sins and those of the whole world as the consecrated slaves of the Divine Redeemer through His Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

Catholics understand that nothing we suffer in this mortal, passing vale of tears that is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused Our Lord to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death and that caused His Most Blessed Mother to suffer as those Seven Swords of Sorrow were pierced through and through her Immaculate Heart, out of which His Most Sacred Heart was formed and is perpetually united in a bond of perfect love. Catholics know that they have no reason to complain or grumble about anything that happens to them in this life. They have only to accept the adorable will of God as He manifests it for them in their lives, accepting suffering and pain and rejection as the means by which they can save their souls and give honor and glory to Him as they are conformed more perfectly with the patience and obedience exhibited by His only begotten Son on the wood of the Holy Cross.

While there are times when intense, debilitating and/or physically incapacitating pain can be relieved by various types of over-the-counter analgesics or prescription medications, we are not to expect that we can live our lives without enduring our share of pain. We are also to understand and to accept the fact that we will suffer more and more pain, both emotional and physical, as we grow closer and closer to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His true Church.

Many saints prayed to suffer for love of Our Lord and the souls for whom He shed His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross, being willing to take up themselves various penances to make reparation for the sins of others just as Our Lord took our own sins upon Himself as He suffered and died for us to make atonement for those sins. Other saints prayed specifically for the gift of martyrdom so that they could make expiation for their own sins by a perfect act of self-immolating love for the Most Blessed Trinity and thus go straight to Heaven after their deaths. Catholics embrace suffering as the path of their salvation.

Although, as noted just before, it is licit to seek to relieve various types of physical aches and pains by certain types of pain relievers, it is not licit to seek to end that pain by committing suicide, either by ourselves or with the assistance of others, or to submit oneself to a regime of “palliative care” that is but an Orwellian euphemism for killing off those who have outlived their “usefulness” and/or for have become a supposed “burden” for others.

Also, of course, none of us suffers anything within the depths of our souls that can match what Our Lady endured as she suffered a true martyrdom of her spirit as she stood so valiantly at the foot of her Divine Son's Holy Cross. The graces won for us by Our Lord and that flow into our souls through Our Lady's loving hands are sufficient for us to embrace with love each one of the crosses that we are asked to bear.

We are never to have recourse to agents of the devil in white coats carrying decreed credentials and programmed to “ease” those who acute, chronic or terminal illnesses on the “pathway” to “death with dignity.” Contingent beings, that is, creatures who did not create themselves, are not the arbiters of moral right and moral wrong. There are simply no exceptions to the inviolability of innocent human life. The Fifth Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," admits of no exceptions for the direct, intentional taking of an innocent human life, and this applies whether the action of killing is done at one time or is part of a “process” to disguise its ugly reality by sanitizing it to be appear “merciful” and “compassionate.”

Sadly, it is the case time and time again in our world of emotionalism and sentimentalism that find that proximate antecedent roots in the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles that men and women seek to anesthetize their pain in life with illegal substances and excessive consumption of alcohol and, unable to accept pain as the penalty for human sins (their own and those of the whole world), they want an "easy exit" from their suffering. The system of spiritual and physical death which envelops us at this time is the product of the revolt of an Augustinian monk named Father Martin Luther, O.S.A., on October 31, 1517, when he posted those ninety-five theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany.

This sick, perverted world created by Luther's revolt against the Catholic Church has wound up convincing non-Catholics and Catholics alike that there is "no purpose" to human suffering, which is why even the pain from the mildest headache must be alleviated immediately and why any kind of permanent discomfort must be treated with a variety over-the-counter and/or prescription pharmaceuticals. This naturalistic, sentimentally-based aversion to pain and suffering, rooted in Luther's belief that one is "saved" by making his "profession of faith" in the Name of Our Saviour Jesus Christ without having to work out one's salvation in fear and in trembling as one seeks to make reparation for one's sins and those of the whole world, leads many people to conclude that it is morally licit to starve and dehydrate brain-damaged human beings death, that it morally licit to use increasingly higher doses of morphine in a hospice or a hospital to expedite the death, by heart failure, of a terminally ill patient, that is an act of "compassion" to kill an innocent preborn baby who has been diagnosed in utero with some kind of malady that would cause him to suffer throughout his life.

As I used to explain to my college students when I exploded the various shibboleths and slogans used by pro-aborts to justify the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn under cover of the civil law:

"Which one of you can tell an expectant mother that her baby will be perfectly happy throughout the course of his life?

"Which one of you can tell an expectant mother that her baby will never get ill, will never experience pain of any kind, will never break a limb, will never be ridiculed by his siblings or peers, will never be rejected in friendship or in love, will never fail an examination, will never lose a job, will never suffer from economic distress?

"Which one of you can tell an expectant mother that her child will never die or know the sufferings of old age prior to death if it is God's Holy Will or them to live a long life?

"Each of us comes into life with spiritual deformity, Original Sin. Each one of our Actual Sins deforms our souls all the more, darkening our intellects and weakening our wills. The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became Man in His Most Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb to remedy these deformities, to make it possible for us to make reparation for our sins so that our souls would be as white as wool.

"Those who are born with physical or mental deformities are given to us by Our Lord to see His very image within them as we seek to serve them as we would serve Him in the very Flesh. Those who suffer are given to us to be occasions of grace for us so that we can go out of ourselves and to perform for them the Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy. Far being something to flee, suffering is a great gift of the merciful, loving God to permit us an opportunity to make reparation for our sins as we conform our hearts to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

"Nothing you or I can ever suffer is the equal of what we caused these twin Hearts of matchless love to suffer during the events of Our Divine Redeemer's Passion Death. Embrace suffering with joy and gratitude. It is the path to your salvation as a member of the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order."

Can you see why I am no longer employed as a college professor of political science?

An aversion to all pain and discomfort will lead many to seek the "Great Escape" represented by the self-annihilation that is suicide. Even more dangerously, all but a relative handful of people who are aware of the dangers of “palliative” care The devil has convinced so many today that the "angels of death" who pose as false "angels of mercy" have the "final solution": to their suffering. So much for the Holy Cross in this, our shallow, sick, perverted world of naturalism and emotionalism and sentimentality wrought by Protestantism's revolt against the Social Reign of Christ the King that was institutionalized by the multi-faceted and inter-related forces of Judeo-Masonry. Got a problem? Take a pill. Take lots of pills. Who wants to suffer?

Following the Money to Institutionalize the Killing of Innocent Human Beings After Birth

I received a study on the history of “palliative care” that was sent to me in early April by Dr. Paul Byrne. The study was put together by a Catholic who relied upon a number of sources, although most of the information came from the well-documented work of Dr. Elizabeth Wickham and Ione Whitlock. Dr. Byrne considers this entire study, which was sent to every single “bishop” within the structures of what its author presumes to be the Catholic Church, in the United States of America, to be very accurate. (To make the study a bit readable, Dr. Byrne edited it for style without changing its substantive content afer this commentary was posted on May 23, 2017: Dr Paul Bryne Edit of Palliative Care Study, part one, and Dr. Paul Byrne Edit of Palliative Care Study part two. The text used below remains unchanged from the original posting, although I made some minor editorial changes of my own for clarity of presentation as I transcribed it.)

Although pages three through seven of the study are appended below, I want to highlight several very important facts in the body of this commentary in order to prove to those who remain unconvinced that contemporary “palliative care” is not an alternative to suicide. It is a cleverly disguised and carefully “sold” way to kill innocent human beings.

Stealth Death

Euthanasia must be understood both spiritually and tacitally.

Spiritually it is evil and like all evil it will appear as something virtuous where no virtue exists.

Tactically, persons who have researched this over one or more decades, tell me it has a defined history in this country going back to the Hemlock Society (1930s) and defined tactics. 

See www.lifetree.org

From the beginning, by the 1980s, two opinions/strategies emerged.

The Oregon side wanted a militant approach in assisted suicide.

The New York side wanted to do things in a more nuanced way.

This “new” eugenics” movement is all about influence over the minds and hearts of the people who care for the dying—caregivers, physicians, nurses, chaplains, social workers to name just a few—so that they can control the timing and the place of death.

Alphabet Soup

The Oregon side, the militants, rebranding themselves from the Hemlock Society to Compassion and Choices to Death with Dignity all pushed for legal assisted suicide. 7/1/16 New Mexico Supreme Court Rules Unanimously There is No Right to Assisted Suicide reported by

LifeNews.com. A recent defeat for Compassion and Choices and the ACLU which brought the suit.

The New York side became the Euthanasia Society of America by morphing into the Society for the Right to Die and Concern for the Dying in the 70s and 80s. Choice in Dying in the early 90s and Last Acts Partnership in the early 2000s. The wing claimed to be against physician assisted suicide. Beware. These so-called moderates have tried to distinguish themselves as offering the moral high groundSee enclosed June 5, 2016 WSJ “Canada Debates Right-To-Die Limits,” by Paul Vieira.

In 1987, Dr. Josefina Magno of Washington, D.C., and Dr. Gerald Holman of St. Anthony’s Hospice in Amarillo, Texas, called a meeting of hospice physicians in Granby, Colorado, to for what would later become known as the American Academy for Hospice and Palliative Care (AAHPM), the professional organization for palliative care physicians.

A pivotal event took place in 1998 when Ira Byock, then-President of AAHPM oine with Choice in Dying to form Partnership for Caring and therein was born a major public-relations campaign to gain public support and a political mandate for their agenda. Then they seemed to disappear, but the evidence shows that they quietly filtered into the new field of palliative medicine. In her 2005 book Terri’s Story: The Court Ordered Death of an American Woman, author Diana Lynn describes it as the “third path to death, not wholly natural, not suicide, but something in between. The “moderates” insist there is a big difference between withholding and withdrawing medical treatment and giving someone access to a lethal dose of barbiturates.

The Never Satisfied Elites

In November 1995, George Soros called 20 foundations together who were committed to transforming the culture of dying. See enclosed Participants at Soros Meeting, 11/1995. In addition to Sorors’ Project on Death in America and his Open Society Institute, attendees included AARP, Commonwealth Fund, Greenwall Foundation, Mayday Fund and Cornfield Foundation, Milbank Memorial Fund, Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Office, and the Gerbode Foundation. Also in 1995, the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation began a big communications and outreach effort called Last Acts. Last Acts worked at the grass roots level. They held a big communications and outreach effort in March 1996. 140 national leaders came to Washington, D.C. See enclosed participants at First Last Acts Conference, 3/1996. Representatives of bioethics (Hastings Center, Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City and Par Ridge Center in Illinois), providers (American Hospital Foundation, American Nurses Association, Hospice Foundation of America, National Association for Home Care) and euthanasia (Concern for Dying) and many foundations were there. All told 140 nationa leaders met in Washington, D.C.

Two major funders stand out: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded research and infrastructure and George Soros’ Project on Death in America fund a cadre of professionals. (Institutionalizing Death by Palliative Care.)

This is critical to understand and to digest.

George Soros is the notorious atheistic Talmduist who funds everything evil imaginable and, of course, works closely with the lords of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, up to and including Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who supports Soros's efforts to fund Alinsky-style “community organizing” movements that agitate in favor of “open borders” and “economic justice.” Soros, of course, also supports the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn and perverse acts in violation of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law and is a major contributor to candidates who support these evils.

Indeed, Sororo’s “Open Doors” Society has been a great ally in attempting to generate support for Bergoglio’s Bolshevisitic application of the “Second” Vatican Council (as opposed to its Menshivistic application by Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI by means of his philosophically absurd and dogmatically condemned “hermeneutic of continuity,” which Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul II had termed as “living tradition”) within the United States of America (see Jorge Plays Tag Team With George Soros and Comrades.) Soros is a singular vessel of perdition whose work has nothing to do with the spiritual or temporal good of human beings. He is a socialist ideologue who uses “leftist” Catholics within the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism to do his bidding for him and the organizations he funds in order to achieve his globalist, anti-life, anti-family and anti-Incarnational agenda.

The principal funding source of transforming the healthcare industry around the world, however, has been The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which was founded by Robert Wood Johnson II, the grandfather of President Donald John Trump’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Robert Wood Johnson IV (he goes by “Woody” and is known by that nickname to those who follow the organized competition of heavily tattooed, steroid-enhanced humanoids who play what was once known as “football” some decades ago).

The Foundation, with which “Woody” Johnson maintains cursory ties as his father and grandfather had a falling out in 1965, got its seed money from Robert Wood Johnson II, who was at the helm of the Johnson & Johnson Company in 1963 when it became the pioneer in the development and manufacture of the abortifacient known commonly as the “birth control pill.” The Johnson & Johnson Company remains one of the world’s leading manufacturer of contraceptive pills and devices. Although the company is separate and distinct from the foundation, which has no Johnson family members on its board of trustees at this time, it has given large grants and a great deal of funding to “reproductive rights” programs:

In 2004, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation named Lon Newman, MS, an RWJF Community Health Leader for his work to make family planning and contraception accessible and affordable for poor, young, and uninsured women in Wausau, Wis.

The problem. Limited access to contraceptive care places women at heightened risk of unintended pregnancy. Lack of health insurance coverage and of access to family planning-related services, such as sexually transmitted disease (STD) screenings, contribute to other negative sexual health outcomes. So how can contraceptives and reproductive health information be delivered conveniently and at low cost, especially in poor, rural areas?

Putting a face and a name to teenage pregnancy. As a high school student in the mid-1960s, Lon Newman was vaguely aware that teen pregnancy was a serious issue in his small rural town of Austin, Minn. “There was no sex education, no birth control pills, nothing other than morality and shame for the girls who got pregnant,” Newman recalls. “There were no options other than go away and have the baby or seek an early abortion. It was really traumatic.”

But it wasn’t until the late 1970s that Newman was able to put a face and a name to a teenage pregnancy that he never forgot.

After getting his bachelor of arts degree in psychology–sociology from Minnesota’s Winona State University and a master’s degree in guidance and counseling from the University of Wisconsin–Stout, Newman landed a job as guidance counselor at a high school in Melrose/Mindoro, Wis.

One of the female students had suddenly stopped attending school and it was Newman’s job to find out what had happened and encourage her to return. “She was a little girl, probably 16 at best,” Newman says. “Tammy was her name.”

In his search for Tammy, Newman recalls walking through a muddy cornfield to get to an abandoned farmhouse, “except they were living in it, so it was not abandoned. Here she is—this is true—seven months pregnant. She had a stick like a broom handle in her hand, and she’s stirring a 55-gallon drum of laundry over a fire in the front yard, while her twin brothers played around her. Her father was there, sitting in the living room watching TV. Her mom was timid and withdrawn.

“I talked to Tammy a little bit—she had no doctor, no help from anyone, no prenatal care, no social services; and she was going to deliver at home. She was not coming back to school,” Newman says. “It was a heart breaker. I kept thinking, ‘What is going to happen to this little girl?’”

With the help of the school superintendent, Newman arranged for prenatal care for Tammy and social services for the family. But Tammy never returned to school, and Newman never found out what happened to her. And the experience remained fresh in his mind.

After his job in Melrose/Mindoro, Newman and his wife, Janet, moved to Stevens Point, Wis., where he took a new job with the local Cooperative Educational Service agency, coordinating sex education programs for students in 24 school districts. After several years in this position, Newman worked briefly for a state senator, and then tried his hand as an entrepreneur with his own small business start-up. Then, in 1988, Newman landed the job he always wanted: executive director of Family Planning Health Services (FPHS), a nonprofit, community-based agency in Wausau, Wisc., that provides family planning and reproductive health services for families at all income levels.

Family planning champion and innovator. In his new position, Newman quickly established himself as the champion of what he called the four dimensions of sexual health care, reproductive health care, and family planning: “It has to be acceptable, accessible, affordable, and confidential.”

“Everybody becomes sexually active, or at least 98 percent do,” says Newman, “so they need that information and access to health care related to their bodies and sexual health.”

Newman added clinics and services at the agency, including an Emergency Contraception Hotline and expanded WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) nutrition and healthy food services. From 1997 to 2003, Newman also worked to pass and implement Wisconsin’s Medicaid Family Planning Waiver that allowed an estimated 150,000 low-income women to receive free contraceptive care.

To help women enroll in the new waiver program, in 2003 Newman set up “contraceptive kiosks” similar to ATM machines at some Wisconsin college campuses and local businesses. He also worked with then-Lieutenant Governor Barbara Lawton to form a women’s health task force in 2003 to develop a long-range strategic plan, including improved access to reproductive health services. This effort, Newman says, resulted in the formation of a Department of Health Services Family Planning Council charged with developing an integrated family planning program in Wisconsin.

Becoming a Community Health Leader. For his work championing improved access to health care and family planning, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation named Newman a Community Health Leader in 2004. By then, the Family Planning agency led by Newman served about 10,000 women a year in eight clinics in seven central counties in Wisconsin.

Though the agency had already taken significant measures to make family planning and reproductive health acceptable, accessible, affordable, and confidential, Newman also wanted it to be convenient.

With part of his $125,000 award, Newman borrowed a concept from fast-food restaurants, opening the first drive-up window in Wisconsin (and one of only three in the United States) to conveniently dispense contraceptives and prescribed birth control supplies.

The drive-up window, installed at the Family Planning headquarters in Wausau, opened on Valentine’s Day in 2006. Existing Family Planning clients who had already received medical assessments could pick up refills of their prescription birth control supplies, while new customers could get non-prescription birth control. “This is especially convenient for parents with small children and working women,” a news release said of the service. “In a busy world, clients expect fast, friendly, convenient service.”

Pro-life advocates in Wisconsin immediately denounced Newman’s new concept. “Lon Newman’s new birth control window has made love a commodity as cheap as a cheeseburger,” Peggy Hamill, then state director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, said in a press release. “Will girls be asking, ‘Can I get fries with that patch?’”

But Newman disagrees. “Our patients are our wives, our sisters, our business associates, and our friends, and there is nothing cheap about them!” he argues. “That is our response to that criticism. The idea is to be open and acceptable in the community. We are not going to be shaming ourselves. We have a drive-up like every other business.”

To help his agency do a better job advocating for reproductive health, Newman used a portion of his RWJF award to hire a social media expert. One result was a new blog called “Below the Waist,” in which Newman and other contributors have posted videos and columns that discuss recent news and legislation related to family planning and contraceptive issues.

Seeing a higher vision. Being named a Community Health Leader “not only gave me self-confidence that we were headed in the right direction, but it gave others the sense that there is some value to this,” says Newman. The RWJF program provided “a working network of ongoing friendships that raised my sights and enabled me to see a higher vision every day.”

The RWJF program provided “a working network of ongoing friendships that raised my sights and enabled me to see a higher vision every day.”—Lon Newman

Protesters have continued to show up in Wausau, and Newman routinely uses humor to ease the tension. When a group of Catholic abortion protestors gathered several years ago outside the agency (which has never offered abortion or adoption services), they were greeted with two 18-foot-high red inflatable tube figures dancing friskily in the Wisconsin wind. “That brought a festive air to the day,” a reporter for a news website noted. “The clients of FPHS were instantly relieved of their long walk of shame by the happy distraction the balloons created.”

Even as he neared retirement, Newman has continued to champion innovative methods to make family planning options accessible to a wider public that included men and women ages 15 and up. With the agency’s drive-up window still operating, Newman set up virtual clinic services, which today connect clients online with health care providers at different locations.

“Young people have to be able to access practitioners by cell phone, and pick up prescriptions at Walgreens,” he says. “It sounds simple, but it’s not really that simple. It has to be done technologically.”

Newman retired in 2014 to his woodworking shop and pontoon boat in northern Wisconsin, but he’s open to projects that require the kind of innovation and tenacity that RWJF Community Health Leaders are known for. “At the retirement party, my wife said, ‘Lon was able to find a job where he could be himself.’ ... If someone wanted to work on these kinds of initiatives, I’d be delighted.”

RWJF perspective. RWJF recognized the first 10 Community Health Leaders in 1993. They are unsung and inspiring individuals who work in their communities—often among the most disenfranchised populations—to address some of the nation’s most intractable health care problems. The formal recognition of these Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Community Health Leaders and their programs often launches them to greater levels of influence and extends their reach to serve more vulnerable populations. For more information on the program see the Program Results Report.

Under the RWJF Community Health Leaders award, each year from 1992 through 2012 RWJF has provided a $125,000 award to 10 individuals and their organizations ($105,000 supports a project at their organization and $20,000 goes directly to the leader for personal development). RWJF also connects the Community Health Leaders with each other so they can continue their work with the support and experience of their peers and previous award winners.

“Community Health Leaders are characterized by three specific traits—they are courageous, they are creative, and they are committed,” says National Program Director Janice Ford Griffin. "The Foundation recognizes the tremendous resource of experience among the leaders and we look forward to mining that resource as we consider future initiatives."

“Through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Community Health Leaders award, we at the Foundation have the opportunity to recognize innovative and courageous local leaders behind ground-breaking efforts in communities across the United States,” says Sallie George, MPH, program officer at RWJF. “These individuals remind us that one person can have a powerful impact on health and health care within their communities.” (http://wMaking Non-Reproductive Health Services Available .)

It is very important for those who read this article to understand that they very same peope who have helped to propagandize in favor of the chemical and surgical slaughter of the innocent preborn segued into the killing of human beings after birth who suffering from some kind of acute/chronic illness or disability. George Soros’s network of “movements” and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have been two of the leading sources of funding the disguised killing of human beings in hospitals, hospices and by most, although perhaps not all, “home” healthcare givers, under the cover of what is called “palliative care.” The American Association for Retired People (AARP) is another of the major funders of this killing.

The text of the study that was sent to the conciliar “bishops” demonstrates how the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, aided by “ethicist” Daniel Callahan, provided the money for pilot projects to advance its version of “palliative care” into the healthcare system in the United States and around the world. Soros provided much funding for this as well in order to convince patients and relatives alike that ordinary care for suffering human beings is really “extraordinary” and thus should not be provided or, perhaps a tad bit more accurately, should be withdrawn a little at a time as part of a "process" of "pallative care" that winds up of causing the death of innocent human beings by calling it "natural death"!:

In the last 20 years these two foundations have provided several hundred million to advance THEIR VESION OF PALLIATIVE CARE into our American health care system and worldwide. From its beginning, the RJW Foundation acted like a quasi-university, allowing intellectuals to test ideas with the Foundation’s money. The Foundation is notorious for funding pilot projects so that it can later convince government to replicate them on a much grander scale. After the Clinton attempt at health care failed, their message became: “The way we care for people who are dying and their families is dreadful. But with adequate communication we could change all that. . .just get people to fill out living wills and forego treatment.” But it didn’t work. Fewer than 20 percent signed living wills.

Daniel Callahan described the Last Acts three-pronged strategy moving forward:

Change the education of healthcare professionals

Change health care institutions and public policies and the regulatory apparatus

Engage the public to gain support.

The first Soros scholar-led projects were directed at professionals—EPEC was for physicians and ELNEC was for nurses. Other projects were aimed at changing the general culture, including RCEPEC for Roman Catholics and APPEAL for African-Americans. Soros’ Project on Death in America provided the physician leaders to integrate RWJ projects into mainstream America. His PDIA Faculty Scholars were quickly in place in many of the country’s medical schools. (Institutionalizing Death by Palliative Care.)

This means that there was a concerted, coordinated effort, backed by the funding of the Soros’s money and that of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to change the entire way that physicians, nurses, social workers, home healthcare givers, chaplains, medical school professors and everyone else in what used to be the healthcare industry but has become the death care industry treated sick people. Even some fully traditional Catholic priests have permitted themselves to be swayed by this regimen of death as it is accepted by most practicing Catholics in the medical profession. This shows just how skilled the indoctrination process has been, and it shows yet again what the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen called the lie of "professionalism" as refuge of the devil to convince even believing Catholics that the "experts" know best.

To be sure, however, the efforts funded by Soros and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation built upon a foundation of practices that sought to kill patients by over-sedation that had begun in various institutions in the 1970s and 1980s.

It is only in hindsight that I can come to realize that my late mother, whose inability to endure her suffering was noted earlier in this commentary, had been subjected to a regime of "treatment" that was designed to expedite her death, although the aggressive metastasis of the stomach and esophageal cancer that had been diagnosed only on Friday, January 29, 1982, certainly was killing her. Efforts were made by a social worker at the M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston, Texas, to help her “deal” with her pain and my mother was heavily sedated when she died at the then-named Spohn Hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, several hours after arriving there via air ambulance on Thursday, March 18, 1982. Her death was certain. However, I can see more clearly now what I thought to be the case at the time: that sedation may have hastened her death. 

What was done on an institution-by-institution basis prior to the 1990s became part of a program with universal reach as result of the systematic efforts by the agents of evil unleashed by George Soros and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

These efforts have included, of course, the programming of priests and presbyters to think within the paradigms established by the utilitarian merchants of death, not according to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law:

The Big Enchilada

All roads lead to palliative care. The “third path” is totally committed to “upstreaming” or changing the American healthcare system so that palliative care is integrated with traditional care early onSee the table contrasting the present “old model” of end of life are with their expanded model. The traditional (old) view of palliative care was associated with volunteer hospice care for cancer patients. The current (new) view of palliative care is not only for cancer patients. See the diagram of Traditional and Current Views of Palliative Care. This diagram shows that the new view is to introduce palliative care at the time of diagnosis, and then increased the PROPORTION of symptom management “palliative” treatments to traditional “curative” treatments to the point of death. Note that palliative care includes a period of managed grief.

Eight Palliative Care Training Centers (PCLCs) are by Dr. Diane Meier’s Center to Advance Palliative Care. They are training people who work in all healthcare settings—hospitals, rehabilitation centers, nursing homes, assisted living centers, outpatient clinics, volunteer respite caregivers, volunteers at healthcare community centers,  . . . The lists goes on.

2001 to 2004, the National Consensus Project for Quality Palliative Care, with the collaboration of four major care organizations and Partnership for Caring, develops an issues the National Consensus Project Guidelines.

In 2006, hospice and palliative medicine became an official medical subspeciality.

In 2007, the National Quality Forum established its National Framework and Preferred Practices for Palliative Care and Hospice Care. There are 38 Preferred Practices with 8 Domains. Here is one example:

Preferred Practice 22: Specialized palliative care and hospice care teams should include spiritual care professionals appropriately trained and certified in palliative care.

Put another way, they are educating your priests, ministers and rabbis. The Florida Clergy Ending-of-Life Education Enhancement Project is a model to educate the clergy about accepting hastened death.

For only four years—2008-2012—no palliative care fellowship is required for anyone to sit for the certification exam to become board certified.

Staring in 2013, only fellowship-trained palliative professionals are allowed to sit for the certification program. It is very significant that you can no longer be grandfathered in without official fellowship training!

In summary, they created the standards, got the specialty officially recognized, and now require that you complete one of their fellowships before you can even sit for the board exam—all in 12 years! (Institutionalizing Death by Palliative Care.)

In other words, utilitarianism is now “hard wired,” if you will, into the very fabric of the American healthcare industry. The Hippocratic Oath’s injunction to do no harm” has been replaced by an effort to carefully prepare an unsuspecting human being to accept a course of “treatment” that will conclude with his death. Such a course of “treatment,” of course, is offered by a “compassionate” “inter-disciplinary team” of “professionals” in white coats while clergymen of one sort or another assure them that “everything” is being done for them:

The palliative care team helps develop relationships. It is designed to promote and then help implement advance care planning. The team communicates risks and benefits of various "treatments" with an emphasis on “realistic” expectations, discusses the patient’s concerns—all with the objective of helping the patient develop goals of care. The underlying problem is that they emphasize supportive rather than “real” medical services, and they base their analysis on a quality of life index. The palliative care team will insert itself into the family dynamic and try to bring consensus that it is time to “let go”!

Under the direction of Dr. Diane Meier CAPC has become a well-oiled training and marketing machine. Among its projects was to develop a list of triggers for recommending palliative care consultation in the presence of a serious or chronic illness. This is an all-encompassing list that considers not only the medical state of the patient but the dynamic between the patient and the physician and also the family relationships. Several of those triggers indicate clearly how the new palliative care does not wait to enter at the end of life like it used to! The universe of hospitals and other care facilities presently under the influence of this new palliative care where a patient care team can be found, and the list of triggers for adult and pediatric patients to be referred for a palliative care consult is available at www.getpalliativecare.org. Practically everyone and their cousin will qualify. Here are a few examples of the triggers:

Declining ability to complete activities of daily living

Weight loss

Multiple hospitalizations

Difficult to control physical or emotional symptoms related to serious medical illness

Patient, family or physician uncertainty regarding prognosis

Patient, family or physician uncertainty regarding goals of care

Patient or family requests for futile care

DNR order conflicts

Use of tube feeding in cognitively impaired or seriously ill patients

Limited social support and a serious illness (e.g., homeless, chronic mental illness

Patient, family or physician request for information regarding hospice appropriateness

Patient or family psychological or spiritual distress

These triggers will introduce the palliative care process into patient populations which may be declining but are not dying. Note especially that those with limited social support and/or declining abilities are identified as ripe for palliative care. (Institutionalizing Death by Palliative Care.)

These are facts. To ignore these facts is to make oneself and one’s relatives vulnerable to a highly-sophisticated program of mental and emotional manipulation whereby one becomes conditioned to accepting the word of the “experts” as to what is in their best interests. Patients and their relatives are accepted to sign on the dotted line upon the “recommendation” of the “professionals,” whose word must be taken at face value because the legal forms put in front of patients contain all manner of code words that enable them to be killed:

Box ‘Em

Polst

Not enough people signing living wills? Enter the POLST or MOLST, a living will with teeth. Once it is completed, all medical personnel must obey it. The Physician’s Order for Life Sustaining Treatment has been crafted to scare and intimidate patients from acute surgical or medical care using technical medical jargon and through persons trained to present the document or via video. Moreover, the creators of such forms nowhere include food and water under comfort care or any other level of care for that matter. They bend over backwards to make the form more clinical and sterile. In later iterations they prefer the wording Comfort-Focused Treatment over Comfort Care. Has caring become anathema? How voluntary is the from when a patient is being manipulated to sign it and nudged to check the boxes that they will hasten their death? The designers use words like natural death as a moving target placing them where they will best steer the patient toward refusing treatment.

Food and water provided in any manner provided in any manner are merely ordinary care but the POLST creators make it medical care to induce withholding of essential for life. They even propose a trial period! Why would anyone who can eat and drink suddenly stop because they surpassed the trial period on the form? There is no goal for the trial period and there are no parameters to continue it or discontinue it. (Institutionalizing Death by Palliative Care.)

This is entirely correct. Those who believe that the provision of food and water, no matter how they are administered, to a human being is somehow “extraordinary” “medical care” have permitted themselves to become duped by the propaganda that has been spread by the Soros and Robert Wood Johnson foundation axis of evil that has sought to make the natural and necessary seem to be unnatural and extraordinary. 

To amplify this point, we know of several recent cases in which relatives have asked for their hospitalized loved ones to be permitted to have a drink of water only to be told by the "experts" that doing so would "prolong" the process. What process? The process of causing their death by means of starvation and dehydration and is aided by the use of heavy sedation designed to stop their hearts from beating when the pain of the hunger and thirst becomes intolerabe to bear.

Natural death means whatever the merchants of death want it to be any given time during the course of their “caring” for a patient and his relatives to help them “accept” what they have made inevitable and which they can justify legally by having secure “informed consent”:

These forms, when introduced and completed by other parties, create a wedge between patients and their doctors. These forms fail informed consent when all the variables surrounding a future medical condition are unknown. These forms lack a conscience clause for health care professionals who may have concerns about medical orders they are asked to fulfill. Many states don’t even require that the patient sign the form! In Oregon, it’s only recommended that the patient sign it. See the enclosed Oregon POLST. Later in some versions they dispensed with the word recommended altogether(Institutionalizing Death by Palliative Care.).

The communitarian nature of the organized system of death that has been institutionalized into of American healthcare industry. This system of death was incorporated into the Robert Wood Foundation’s grant to Last Act, which is an organization that was created to organize a network of various healthcare “communities” into a “groupthink” ideology that was to become the sole basis of “palliative care”:

It Takes a Community to End a Life

Last Acts focused on communities—Community-State Partnerships. As part of Last Acts, RWJ funded an $11.25 million national framework for statewide activities called Community-State Partnerships. The National Program Office was at the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City. Grants which averaged $450,000 were given to set up 25 statewide coalitions, often tapping into established bioethics networks. See the list of Community State Partnerships.

These statewide coalitions acted as “social entrepreneurs” at the grassroots level. You may recognize some of their advocacy activities at the state level. They advocate 1) for required professional training in palliative care, 2) for POLST legislation, 3) for better reimbursement for palliative care, 4) to reduce restrictive requirements for pain policy boards, and 5) to mandate honoring of patients advance directive choices. What the proponents of euthanasia want is access to kill, the freedom to kill without fear of prosecution, and to be paid to be kill under the guise of patient advocacy.

We call your attention to a new coalition which has been “under the radar” these last couple of years. The Last Acts Partnership people have come together again for round two of forming a new, much larger coalition to manage the news media. The director of the Center for Practical Bioethics and a former head of AARP joined forces with a former chairman of Partnership for Caring to form the Coalition to Transform Advance Care (C-TAC). C-TAC is a unique group of 120 members or “stakeholders” across the world of healthcare including the same five groups identified earlier (the original euthanasia/eugenics people, bioethics centers, providers of healthcare, “grassroots” community organizations and private foundations). See the list of C-TAC members.

This new “third path” juggernaut is deep in to our society, working to “create change in normative and expected behavior regarding advance illness”, working to change our moral sentiments and avoid any future “death panel” hysteria. Their guiding principle is not DO NO HARM but rather consensus based on “communitarian” ethics—what is the greatest good for the community, rather than the good of the patient.

The recurring theme is best expressed by Dr. Joanne Lynn of the Center for Bioethics. According to Lynn, “We have overinvested in medical care. We have had the wrong set of priorities. What we need is more community volunteers to give companionship, food and keep people safe.” Lynn argues that hospice manages those who die within a short period of time, but our system acks a well-funded program to address those with multiple chronic conditions. (The expensive ones!) She is saying that better quality healthcare means more community healthcare organizations and fewer hospitals! See Joanne Lynn’s series of short videos on Care Transitions Program Initiative at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb46VHuaJLA&list=PLBCFE9967989A6F5E [Back]

RWF infused over $200 million into the caregiving industry. In 2001 alone the Foundation gave $112 million to develop Faith in Action (FIA) which trains community volunteers who are available to offer free respite care to family caregivers, home care and other supportive services. One of the “third path’s” strategies is to “mobilize” family caregivers to apply pressure for policy reform. National standards for the caregiving industry are popping up all over the place. Recently the US Department of Labor mandate that “direct care” workers must be paid the minimum wage. Will all this political activity in the caregiving industry benefit the patient or will the increased cost of regulated caregiving make families more willing to concede to the pressures of palliative care? (Institutionalizing Death by Palliative Care.)

Once again, the entire text of this important study can be found on the original Adobe Contribute platform on which this website was created in February of 2004: Institutionalizing Death by Palliative Care. (The Adobe Contribute platform permits me to upload a file from my computer, something that is not possible on the current Drupal platform, which is why I had to transcribe the passages above over the course of several days.) The full timeline of the documentation upon which the information provided in the quotations above can be found at  Life Tree Timeline, although I think that it is instructive for present purposes to provide you with this timeline’s precis:

How a handful of progressive foundations and quasi-government agencies 
set out to provide equitable distribution of health care, 
and in the process, created a duty to die and a culture of death. 
And how they hope to secure their legacy . . .

Featuring the collaboration of:
the Hastings Center,  the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF),
George Soros's Project on Death in America (PDIA), Institute of Medicine (IOM),
AARP, Choice in Dying, and a number of prestigious universities,
to name only a few.

CONTENTS

  • Introduction
  • 1963-1988:
  • The concept of hospice is introduced. Bioethics centers develop across the country. Concepts such as futile care theory and duty to die are introduced.
  • 1989-1996
  • SUPPORT study is conducted and published. Oregon passes the Death With Dignity Act. Soros launches Project on Death in America; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launches Last Acts.
  • 1997-2003
  • US Supreme Court decisions Vacco v. Quill and Washington v. Glucksberg. Project on Death and RWJF's end-of-life projects focus on change within the states, and changing culture — popular culture, and professional practices. Soros and RWJF announced the end of funding.
  • 2004-present:
  • Pilot projects that were launched with PDIA and RWJF funding move forward.
  • Bibliography

Introduction

From 1996 forward, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and George Soros's Project on Death in America (PDIA) implemented end-of-life (EOL) programs that fit into a three-point strategy to change American culture.  Bioethicist Daniel Callahan (healthcare rationing proponent), argued that America was a death-denying society, and suggested a three-point plan for cultural change. The strategy for change was published in a 1995 Hastings Center Report. Callahan's three points were later refined in recommendations from the Institute of Medicine. Those three areas of emphasis -- professional education, institutional change, and public engagement -- provided the framework for RWJF funding thereafter. In the timeline below, we have flagged the EOL programs with corresponding icons:

1) Professional
education

2) Institutional
change

3) Public
engagement

While RWJF provided the lion's share of the funding, Soros's Project on Death in America funded the leadership.  The list of Open Society Institute/Project on Death in America grant recipients reads like a who's who of palliative care. In fact, many of the key project designers were Soros scholars, e.g., Diane Meier, Joanne Lynn, Christine Cassel, Charles von Gunten, Joseph Fins, and Frank Ferris. (A Timeline of the Adversary's Takeover of Palliative Care. I urge the readers of this site to take the time to review the facts on this timeline as anyone who does so will never be able to say that he has not been warned about the simple truth that today’s medical industry is committed to provide “palliative care” as a means to kill innocent human beings.)

Significantly, all of this was fully funded in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and it will remain fully funded under the so-called American Health Care Act as passed by the United States House of Representatives by a vote of 217-213 on April 27, 2017.

We cannot, as mentioned above, live in a vacuum and think “healthcare professionals” know best.

These “professionals” don't have the interests of Christ the King and the good of the souls for whom He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood during His Passion and Death on the wood of the Holy Cross to redeem, do they? Then why is that we trust them we our very lives and the lives of our relatives?

Yes, of course, the preservation of physical life is not an ultimate end in and of itself. We must, however, see in the disabled and the infirmed the elderly and the chronically and terminally ill the very image of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, considering it to be our privilege to serve them, perhaps even for years on end, as we would serve Our Lord Himself. Those who are dependent upon others for their daily needs can thus serve as a source of grace for those who treat them with the genuine compassion as shown by Saint Camillus de Lellis to the incurables and the hopeless of his own day. How many graces are being thrown away by relatives who refuse to suffer along with their loved ones until God chooses to take them unto Himself in His good time, no matter how long a time may be involved?

The care provided by Catholic physicians and consecrated men and women in the religious life is not what inspires the modern hospice industry, whose practitioners, no matter their intentions, do indeed play God in the name of "compassion" and "mercy."

It is not to "prolong" the life of anyone to attempt to treat them when they are sick or suffering from some kind of disability, and it is not to "prolong" the life of anyone by providing them with the ordinary care that any human being deserves, namely, food and water regardless of how they are to be administered. Helpless infants and many suvivors of strokes need help from others to be fed and hydrated. It is monstrous to deny to what Our Lord Himself told us was a duty to to do:

[42] And whosoever shall give to drink to one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, amen I say to you, he shall not lose his reward.

Several Distinctions and Qualifications

Now, it is important to make some careful distinctions as so many Catholics have fallen prey to the merchants of death, who have cleverly manipulated them into believing that it was “necessary” to “let go” of their loved ones and to do nothing to question the “process” or to intervene to stop it.

First, the spiritual and emotional duress that patients and their loved ones experience during times of illness, injury and disability is exploited by the merchants of death in a variety of cleverly-devised manners. Indeed, each member of the “disciplinary team” reinforces a common message of proselytizing in favor of the “process,” but they do so by shrewdly measuring the patient’s condition and the “readiness” of the relatives to “accept” their plans uncritically. As noted in the study quoted above, the “team” endeavors to build “trusting relationships” with patients and relatives to “help” them during the different stages of the “process.”

Second, this use of emotional manipulation means that those who have consented to the “process” without realizing that they were being convinced to become enablers of the willful killing of an innocent being cannot beat themselves over the head once they come to realize what how they were used by the merchants of death.

Thus is it that we can never judge the subject culpability of anyone involved in this monstrous system of death, least of all the relatives of victims who did not realize how they were being manipulated and/or who never understood that it is morally impermissible to cause or to hasten the death of an innocent human being. God alone knows the subjective culpability of the souls of those who believe, albeit erroneously, that they were acting in good faith despite participating or consenting acts that are gravely evil in the objective order of things.

To be sure, the conciliar revolutionaries bear great culpability, objectively speaking, for systematically robbing Catholics of the inability to use right moral principles in matters of life and death. Correction, these revolutionaries bear great culpability, objectively speaking, for systematically robbing Catholics of the sensus Catholicus. Period. 

The conciliar revolutionaries have made it much easier for Catholics within the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism to be swayed by the pull of the sentimentality and emotionalism that is entirely unfettered in this world of Protestant rationalism and Judeo-Masonic naturalism. This is all the more difficult because of the fact that those Catholics who participate in the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic liturgical service are not receiving Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in Holy Eucharist as this service is invalid and offensive to God nor do they have access, at least in most cases, to true priests to actually absolve them of their sins. It is the paucity of the superabudnance of Sanctifying and Actual Graces, coupled with the revolutionary overthrow of Catholic doctrine on Faith and Morals, that has made Catholics attached to the conciliar structures more suspectible than ever before to the pull of sentimentality and emotionalism of the sort used today in "palliative care" in our system of death.

Consider these words of Father Edward Leen in Why the Cross?

For men, as a rule, have but shown themselves too eager to manage their own temporal affairs. They resent what they call the Church's interference. This resentment culminates in a deliberate exclusion of the Church from the councils of peoples. Even at the best of times, when States were not yet professedly secularist, what jealousy was always manifested with regard to the action of the Church in secular matters! How slow men were to take her advice! How her efforts for procuring the temporal welfare of men were hampered, thwarted and positively resisted!

The gradual silencing of the voice of Christianity in the councils of the nations is the evil cause of the chaotic conditions of modern civilized life. This issue was inevitable. For though the Church's wisdom is primarily in the domain of things of the world to come, yet she is wise, too, with regard to the things of the world that is. She is not for the world, and yet she is able and even ready to act as if she were equipped specially to procure the temporal good of men.  [See Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas, p. 134.] She is able and willing to give men directions in temporal matters, which, if followed, will result in temporal prosperity. She is too wise to promote unrealizable Utopias, from which all suffering and toil will be banished. She can give prudent directions how to devise measures for the mitigation of inevitable hardships and the elimination of unnecessary evils. If rulers and ruled alike listened to her voice, the authentic voice of Christianity, what a change would come over the world! It would not cease to be a vale of tears but would cease to be a vale of savage strife. It would not become an earthly Paradise but would become an earth where man's dreams of a satisfying order of things could be realized. (Father Edward Leen, Why the Cross?, originally published by Sheed & Ward in 1938, and republished in 2001 by Scepter Publishers, Princeton, New Jersey,  pp. 14-15. The entirety of the Introduction to Why the Cross? is found in the appendix below.)

Third, none of the documentation above is to suggest that it is impossible to receive good medical care from devoted professionals who have the true spiritual and temporal good of patients and their relatives at heart. Such an inference from the documentation provided in this commentary would be wrongheaded and unjust. There are many dedicated physicians and nurses and other healthcare professionals who are aware of the system of death and who attempt to treat rather than to kill living human beings. There also places, such as the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, that advertise the cost of their procedures and are operated by solid professionals, many of them Catholic, who practice medicine according to sound medical principles and while observing the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

Nonetheless, however, the system of death that has overtaken the healthcare industry as a result of the hijacking of palliative care by the very same people who support the chemical and surgical execution of innocent preborn babies is hard for the average person to recognize clearly and to reject unequivocally, and this is exactly how the adversary has arranged things as he desires the death of human beings in this life and in the next so that he can torment them for all eternity in hell after the Particular Judgment. One must be very careful, therefore, and make sure to consult with Catholic medical professionals who understand the reality of the system of death that has become institutionalized in the American healthcare system.

Fourth, priests have the obligation to inform themselves about the system of death and to realize that it is (a) designed to kill living human beings; (b) based upon a shifting-narrative and definition of what constitutes “natural death”; (c) designed to make ordinary care to a human being seem “extraordinary” and thus so burdensome that there is no moral obligation to provide it; (d) to anesthetize reality by “staging” the act of killing over the course of time as the circumstances and the patients and their relatives require in the judgment of the “interdisciplinary team.”

Killing is killing, and it is not act of “compassion” for relatives to consent to their being executed by “professionals” in white coats who want to “accompany” them while a loved one is in a very clever process of a carefully-programmed execution. No priest can be any part to this whatsoever, not unless he can justify being on the same side as George Soros and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that is, and they do not have the teaching of Christ the King and good of soul in mind, do they?

Fifth, it is imperative to reject so-called "living wills." Although I have include it in the body of several other articles, an article in Homiletic and Pastoral Review twenty years ago attested to the dangers of these "living wills."

Dr. Paul Byrne worked with a Catholic attorney to devise a set of Advance Medical Directives that each person who reads this site should read and then sign in front of witnesses other than family members as the form requires to be legally binding even upon the merchants of death. Also attached is a declartion to receive the Last Rites of the Catholic Church by a traditional priest. These documents are linked at: Advance Care Directives.

We Must Lift Our Minds and Hearts to Christ the King as  His Consecrated Slaves through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary

We must lift our minds and hearts to Heaven as we embrace the Holy Cross, ever conscious of the price that Our Lord paid to redeem us thereon, a price that was shared by His Most Blessed Mother as she stood so valiantly under It. We do not not need hospice or end-life "counseling" sessions. We need the Holy Cross and Our Most Blessed Mother. Period!

Father Benedict Baur, O.S.B., explained how deeply we must always united ourselves to Our Lord's sufferings:

Christ and His members must be one. They must walk the same road, not only during the liturgical service, when they are lifted up together in the mysteries of the sacrifice, but also in every event of life. Christ welcomed suffering, and accepted it freely; He did not flee the hardships of life. He makes suffering in us, His members, serve the spirit; He uses it as a means of freeing us from the world and all that is temporal and thus raises us from things of his world to the thins that are eternal.

Now, during Passiontide, we must begin to live and treasure pain and suffering. In the cross, in suffering, in or crucifixion with Christ, we shall find salvation. For Him and with Him we should bear all the slight injustices committed against us. For Him we should suffer freely and willingly the unpleasant and disagreeable things that occur to us. But our faith is weak. We flee from from the cross instead of holding it dear, instead of loving it and welcoming it our as Savior did.  (Father Benedict Baur, O.S.B., The Light of the World, Volume I, B. Herder Book Company, 1954, p. 595.)

Father Leen made a similar point in the conclusion of Why The Cross?

Why God should have decreed that the obedience of His Son should be expressed through the awful sufferings of the Passion, when it might have been expressed in a ritual act involving no such pain, is a secret of His inscrutable designs. All we can now is that the sacrifice of Calvary was decreed out of a merciful regard for man.

St. Thomas, while not pretending to solve this great mystery of pain, shows how, practically, the dreadful sufferings of Christ on Calvary aid man to profit by the salvation that these sufferings have merited for him. He points out that, though from the very beginning of His conception Jesus merited the divine life of grace for men, yet their remained obstacles to their profiting to the grace so won for them. The Passion was directed toward the removal of those obstacles.

Calvary brings home to men in a vivid way the great gravity of sin and the terrible tribulation that awaits it. The Passion, bringing home to the imagination, as well as to the mind, the loathsomeness of sin and the chastisement that it merits, act as a powerful deterred from evil. Calvary, by its example, encourages that heroism which is often demanded of men if they are to prove faithful to God in times of great trial and temptation. Above all, it moves men to the love of God, Who, in surrendering Himself to death on their account, gives such a convincing proof of His love for them. Love is, in final account, the great force in life, for love alone can inspire that sacrifice which is the price of unwavering fidelity to the Lord.

Every Christian who proves himself faithful in his vocation will deduce form his own experience the wisdom of the divine decree. He will learn by practical experience that it is only through contemplating with faith the sufferings of the Man-God that he nerves himself to abide in obedience to the Lord in spite of the hardships that such obedience so frequently entails. In a world that is ever at with Christ and His ideals, there is a constant call for heroism if one is to persevere to the end in loyalty to God. The Cross, is for the Christian, the standard that rouses his courage to withstand bravely the assault of the consequences with Christ, risen from the dead, “to walk in newness of life.”

Christ has traced for the Christian the path he most follow if he is to achieve himself and conquer happiness.

The life of Christ on earth was a career of conquest, closing in on the magnificent triumph of entry into heaven on the day of the Ascension. The Christian who wishes to share in Christ’s victory must be prepared to take active part in Christ’s struggle. He must, in other words, display, in conflict with the adverse forces within and without himself, the moral and spiritual qualities of his Leader.

The great obstacles to final success in this welfare of the spirit are the concupiscence of the flesh, the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life. If the Christian is to cleave his way to the peace that surpasseth all understanding, and the happiness which such peace gives, the concupsicences must be beaten down and reduced to a state of impotence. The poverty, chastity, and obedience of Christ are he weapons with which this result is achieved. These are the moral qualities of which Christ’s life was the sustained expression.

The Christian will catch a reflection of Christ’s noble distinction if he emulates Christ’s grand independence of men and things. His contempt for purely fictitious glory, and His utter disregard for any honor except that which comes of God’s approval bestowed on a man’s life and actions. He will capture something of Christ’s moral grandeur if, reproducing something of Christ’s chastity, he attains to that majesty of spirit over matter which leaves the will free to expand in the purest love for God and man. He will clothe himself with a measure of Christ’s serene sovereignty if, acquiring Christ’s humility, he brings his nature to its highest in harmonizing it completely with the mind and will of its Creator and Sovereign Lord. In this lies the achievement of perfect truth: through this the Christian attains the excellence that comes of the flawless realization of the divine ideal of manhood. Undeniably, all this involves bitter suffering for man’s fallen nature, but the follower of Christ must be ready to sacrifice with Him if he wishes ‘to be glorified with Him.’ (Father Edward Leen, S.J., Why the Cross?, originally published by Sheed & Ward in 1938, and republished in 2001 by Scepter Publishers, Princeton, New Jersey,  pp. 310-312.)

While death will come to us all at time that God has appointed for us from all eternity, we must be willing to suffer until the time of a true natural death, not one defined by the merchants of death, in a world of escapism that has rejected the necessity of redemptive suffering. We must be well-prepared to make a good death, which can occur at any time, of course, and to ready to make a good Confession of our sins to a true priest if God has granted us the grace to be conscious, alert and in full control of our rational ability to do so, something for which we must beg Our Lady every day. A lifetime of embracing suffering by uniting it to the Cross of the Divine Redeemer as a member of His true Church is the only path to prepare as adequately as possible for the fearful moment of the Particular Judgment that will be rendered to us by Christ the King, our Divine Judge.

Protestantism has created a Christianity without the Cross. Judeo-Masoniry has created a world without Christianity. The end result must be slavery to the "professionals" in a world of unspeakable savagery.

Father Robert Mader offered words of great inspiration eighty-four years the very country, Germany, where Bishop Clemens von Galens was to preach against the Hitlerian practices of eugenics, which involved the killing off of the feeble in body and in mind, most of which had originated during the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, that have become accepted as normal and nature in the "developed" world at this time, including here in the United States of America:

Following the destruction of Jerusalem, the Romans covered the places of hallowed memory to he Christian with rubble. The cave of the Holy Sepulchre was buried under such rubble, and over as well Golgotha pagan images and temples were erected in honor of Venus and Jupiter. For this reason the Christians did not go there anymore, in order not to be mistaken for idol-worshippers. Emperor Constantine ordered the temples and images torn down and the rubble carried away. After long and hard work the cave of the Holy Sepulchre was found. Not found away three crosses with nails were discovered, and along with them the superscription, which, however, lay separate from the cross.

Without doubt one of the these must be the Cross of the Savior, but there was no certain sign that would differentiate it from the crosses of the two thieves. This was given when a mortally il woman was suddenly cured by touching the true Cross. The Holy Cross was then encased in silver and precious gems, and a church was built over it, which according to Emperor Constantine's order was to be more magnificent than anything ever seen before. In memory of these events, the Church recalls the Finding of the Most Holy Cross on May 3, in order that on every day until the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14), land and people with be blessed with a splinter, a particle of the Cross.

We have every reason to remember these events. Christianity is the religion of the Crucified One. In his first letter to the Corinthians the Apostle of the Nations, St. Paul, declares: "For I judged not myself to know anything among you, but Jesus Christ, and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2). St. Paul's preaching, no matter how many-sided it appears, always returns to the central Sun of Christendom: Jesus on the Cross, King of the World! Everything else is either a ray from this Sun, or it is nothing. In the Crucifix lies our entire dogmatic and moral theology, our entire teaching on faith and morals, our catechism. The Cross is our library. Every other book has value only inasmuch as the spirit of the Cross speaks in it.

Modernists have attempted to ban the old preaching of St. Paul, the Gospel of the Cross, to oblivion. The Cross means the teaching of the necessity of sacrifice and of grace, and this now lies under the rubble on which a new paganism has erected once again the pagan images and temples of Jupiter, Mercury, Venus and Bacchus--in other words, the absolutist state, capitalism, immorality, and addiction to pleasure. A certain superficial Christianity, which puts more value on being modern than on being Catholic and Biblical, and for which the imitation of the spirit of the times is more understandable than the imitation of Christ, has made itself a willing accomplice.

We have lost the Cross. We have a Christianity that no longer understands sacrifice and there is no Christianity or only a soulless version of Christianity. We need Constantines and Helens who will once again dig out the the Cross from under the rubble and make it their shrine and their sign, and who believe that the King's throne is the Cross.

The crucified King! In the family we must have a Finding of the the Most Holy Cross! The modern family has lost the crucifix, and in its place it has raised up the political hero, the artist, old pagan gods, nudity and the prostitute. The crucifix does not fit into the modern home. The modern living room preaches money-grabbing, pride, vanity, lasciviousness, laziness. The modern living room is the exaltation of the seven deadly sins. At least one is honest enough to feel the Cross no longer fits into this milieu and has got rid of it because in the long run the crucifix can only remain there where the spirit of the Crucified One remains, and the spirit of the Crucified is no longer there.

The spirit of the Crucified is the spirit of love and sacrifice, but the spirit of the modern family is the spirit of selfishness and enjoyment. The speech of the Crucified says: First the others, I come last! The speech of selfishness is: First I, then again I, the others come last! The Christian family is built on the notion of sacrifice and devotion. The concept of the Christian father is: Work from morning to evening for others. The concept of the Christian mother is: Care for others! Let the self always come last! The concept of the Christian child is: Respect, love, obedience. Father and mother first, only then I!

The notion of sacrifice is dying out in the modern family. The modern family is built upon the law of egotism. The modern family takes as its motto: "As much enjoyment and as little sacrifice as possible!" This is the source of Malthusianism. That is where characterless education comes from. And that is the doom of the family. Only the Cross and its sermon of self-discipline, self-denial and devotion can save the dying family. (Father Robert Mader, Cross and the Crown, edited and translated by Dr. Eileen Kunze, Sarto House, 1999, pp. 117-119.)

The myth of “brain death” and the practices of the modern "palliative care" industry are founded upon a rejection of the Holy Cross. So is most of modern medicine, especially for the chronically or terminally ill. We must embrace the Holy Cross of the Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, not flee from It, the very instrument of our salvation.

May we always trust in the tender mercies of the Sacred Heart of Jesus as we fly unto It through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary so that we can embrace suffering with love, knowing that a safe and sure shelter awaits us in the love of these two Hearts if only we persevere until the end in states of Sanctifying Grace as members of the Catholic Church.

We do not play God in life. We want to know, love and serve Him as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His Catholic Church so that He will greet us when we meet Him at the Particular Judgment with these consoling words:

Well done, good and faithful servant, because thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will place thee over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. (Matthew 25: 21.)

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary of reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary?

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us, now and the hour of our death.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us. 

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint John Baptist de Rossi, pray for us.

Appendix A

Father Edward Leen's Introduction to Why The Cross?

A European politician once stated that Christianity had failed. It did not seem to him that his assertion needed proof. The actual condition of things in his ow country appeared to him to be ample justification for what he said. Yet the statement, so far from being indisputable, can be shown, on analysis, to betray a gross confusion of thought.

Christianity has not failed, for the simple reason that it has scarcely been tried. It certainly has not been tried on any extensive scale. It could be branded with failure, if having been guaranteed by its founder to be able to achieve certain definite results, it had been, when put to the test, found wanting. But it Christianity is but imperfectly or incompletely applied to the task of reducing to order the confused issues of human existence, it cannot be blamed for the relative chaos that results. If Christianity in its integrity was accepted by all and its principles were applied in efforts to solve the practical problems of life, peace and comparative happiness would be the result. If Christianity were put in practice for one entire day by all people throughout the whole world, then for that day the woes that afflict mankind would in great part have ceased.

Though all suffering and sorrow would not have ended (Christianity does not guarantee that it will put an end to distresses inherent to mortality and the fallen state of mankind), yet the earth would bear a not-too-remote resemblance to the Garden of Paradise. To dream of bringing about this happy state of affairs without applying the principles of Christianity to the unraveling of the tangled issues of human existence is to dream a dream that can never be realized. Many world leaders indulge this idle dream. It is not astonishing that the result of the political efforts of such dreamers is but to intensify that existing disorder and to make confusion worse confounded.

As has been said, Christianity cannot be accused of failure: it is mankind that can, with strict justice, be accused of failure, because, on the whole, man has failed to respond to the appeal of Christianity. It is more than doubtful if it can be maintained with any truth that, at any time, since the beginning of the Christian era, any body politic wholeheartedly accepted and applied the full Christian program in the organization and regulation of its life. Doubtless such an application has been made partially and, on occasion, even to some considerable extent. But the Christian philosophy of life, in its political and social aspects, was never given full and unhampered play in molding the public life of modern nations. There was a time when things were shaping towards this, more and less remotely. The condition of public affairs was satisfactory or unsatisfactory according to whether there was an approach to, or a falling short of, the Christian ideal.

What has been said of social groups in not universally true of individuals. There have been individual men and women who have given a wholehearted trial to Christianity and have not found it wanting. In their hands it has been a complete and triumphant success. There persons are known as saints. They have illustrated the annals of the Church in all ages. They understood Christianity to be what it actually is, a divinely fashioned instrument, made for the express purpose of transforming human nature. Christianity guarantees this result – if it is applied to the work. It asserts that it is equipped with ample resources to bring this process to a successful issue. It does not guarantee this result if inadequately used, or if ill used; and ill used it must be if it is not wholly accepted or if it is badly understood.

The saints accepted Christianity wholeheartedly. In their case there was no failure. They became exactly what Christianity guaranteed to make them, super-men in the highest sense of the term. They became transfigured with a transfiguration symbolized by that of Christ on the Mound. They became human beings – more human that the others, and yet human beings who diffused rays of the divinity. They are people who have permanently benefited mankind. Their spirit and their works survive them and serve as an enduring leaven in the mass of humanity. The good they did was not interred with their bones. They were eminently great, and Christianity was the source of their greatness. In others, be they individual persons or groups of persons, Christianity succeeds in a measure that corresponds exactly with the degree in which it is accepted. Unfortunately, to subscibe to Christianity is not the same thing as being integrally a Christian. To be this latter, one must accept the Christian standard of values. If this is not done fully, elements of disorder and distress necessarily invade the life of the individual and of society. The failure to achieve an existence that is satisfying must not, in these circumstances, be laid at the door of Christianity, but of those who profess Christianity, while forgetting Christian values in practice. This is not the failure of Christianity, but the failure of men to be Christians.

The life of the follower of Christ is bound to be filled with contradiction and inconsequence, unless he is clearly aware of what Christianity is for, what it guarantees to do, and what promises it hold out. Amide the clamor and tumult arising from social and economic disorders, the real message of the Gospel of Christ can, with difficulty, be heard. The enemies of Christianity – and many of them, very likely, are enemies only of what they conceive Christianity to be – attack it, either as being the cause of evils from which the nations are suffering or, at least, as not playing its due part in striving to remedy these evils. There is a certain amount of tragic irony in seeing Christianity blamed for those evils that have arisen from the abandonment of Christian principles. For from the corruption of the Christian social structure, resulting in the great schism of the sixteenth century, emberged those germs of economic theory and practice that have been in subsequent times so prolific in fruits of economic evil. Men were not aware at the time that, in replacing the living authority of Christ by private judgment, they were actually abandoning Christianity. They were not aware of the logical implications of their revolt. Retaining much of what materially belong to Christianity, they believed themselves to be formally Christians. The logical consequences of their premises, derived from their revolt, are becoming perfectly clear now. Their errors in doctrine reacted on the organization of human life in a way they could scarcely have foreseen. The economic, social, and political principles that formed from their dogmatic positions contained, in germ, the social, economic, and political evils that afflict civilization today.

When man has declined in spirituality; it is natural that he should find his material needs to be the most insistent and the most important. People feel far more intensely their economic than their spiritual distress. Aristotle acutely remarks that a person is prone to make happiness consist in a condition of things that is the direct opposite to a misery from which he happens to be, at the moment suffering. [Arist. Nich, Ethics, bk. 1, ch.2] To the dispossessed multitudes cut off from the sources of wealth by the operation of modern industrialism, happiness appears to lie in free access to the world's goods and secure possession of them. They are taught by their guides to believe that Christianity blocks the path to economic security and are roused to fierce anger against it. The folly and injustice of this attitude have just been pointed out. It is the extreme of perversity to blame Christianity for what has followed from the abandonment of Christianity. It is not Christians who are responsible for the woes that afflict humanity. It is men, who, whether they call themselves Christians or not, apply to the solution of life's problems and to the regulation of life's conduct principles that deviate from the principles taught by Christ. They are responsible to the exact degree of that deviation.

But this is not the only point to make. The defenders of Christianity in the ardor of their defense are prone to be drawn away into a position dictated by their adversaries. When, for instance, the Church is bitterly assailed for not remedying the economic evils, the Christian apologist hastens to point out all that the church has done in this sphere of action. What the Church has done and is doing is immense, undoubtedly. But it must not be forgotten that her primary concern is with spiritual and not with temporal values. Very willingly she leaves the sphere of temporal interests to be regulated by man's own thought and by man's own inventions. Social, political, and economic problems can be solved by the exercise of human reason and by the right use of human will. The Church, the living voice of Christianity, does not wish to supersede, but to stimulate, human activity. She contents herself with giving direction that will prevent the activity from taking courses she knows, with her divinely infused wisdom, will ultimately militate against man's good. She desires that man should himself exert his faculties to the full to secure, by human designing, a satisfactory arrangement of human affairs, and such a measure of temporal well-being as is feasible.

This attitude is not one of haughty aloofness from, or cold indifference to, men's earthly cares. It is dictated by a sovereign respect for those inborn possibilities of development, which can be evolved by man's use of his own powers. She has a notable precedent for it in the attitude of her Divine Founder. A contemporary of the Savior urged Him to leave aside for the moment His labors for the establishment of the Kingdom of God, and devote Himself to something more immediately practical, the settlement of an economic dispute.

“Master,” he said, “speak to my brother that he divide the inheritance with me.” Here there is a very characteristic situation. When things go to men's satisfaction, they are quite willing to dispense with the guidance of God. But when, left to their own resources, they have thoroughly mismanaged their affairs, then they turn to Him, that is, to His living voice on earth, to put order into the confusion they have created. More likely than not, they upbraid the Church and assail her as being responsible for the existing disorder. The Church could reply to the appeal and the calumny in the words of Jesus: “O man, who hath appointed me judge and divider over you?” [Lk 12: 13-14.]

For men, as a rule, have but shown themselves too eager to manage their own temporal affairs. They resent what they call the Church's interference. This resentment culminates in a deliberate exclusion of the Church from the councils of peoples. Even at the best of times, when States were not yet professedly secularist, what jealousy was always manifested with regard to the action of the Church in secular matters! How slow men were to take her advice! How her efforts for procuring the temporal welfare of men were hampered, thwarted and positively resisted!

The gradual silencing of the voice of Christianity in the councils of the nations is the evil cause of the chaotic conditions of modern civilized life. This issue was inevitable. For though the Church's wisdom is primarily in the domain of things of the world to come, yet she is wise, too, with regard to the things of the world that is. She is not for the world, and yet she is able and even ready to act as if she were equipped specially to procure the temporal good of men.  [See Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas, p. 134.] She is able and willing to give men directions in temporal matters, which, if followed, will result in temporal prosperity. She is too wise to promote unrealizable Utopias, from which all suffering and toil will be banished. She can give prudent directions how to devise measures for the mitigation of inevitable hardships and the elimination of unnecessary evils. If rulers and ruled alike listened to her voice, the authentic voice of Christianity, what a change would come over the world! It would not cease to be a vale of tears but would cease to be a vale of savage strife. It would not become an earthly Paradise but would become an earth where man's dreams of a satisfying order of things could be realized.

But when all this has been said, it remains true that the sphere of activity in which the Church's efficacy is to be tested is not the sphere of economics. That is not her proper province. There, nothing more than relative success can attend human efforts, whereas, in that work which is properly belongs to Christianity to accomplish no failure can attend on its efforts. The function of Christianity is not to reform or devise economic or social systems: her function is to reform and to transform the economists themselves. The Church, the organ of Christianity, is well aware that a change in social conditions, unaccompanied by a change in the disposition of people, will only result in the substitution of one set of wrongdoers for another. “And the last state of men is made worse than the first.” [Mt 12: 45.] The Church undertakes to change people, not systems. She knows that if individuals become what they ought, systems will become what they ought. The dictum of her Divine Founder remains her own and voices her wisdom as well as her experience. “Seek first the kingdom of God and His justice and all these things shall be added unto you.” [Mt. 6: 33, LK 12:31]

There is so much clamorous abuse of the Church for not remedying social evils, that both her friends and her enemies gradually have their minds dulled to the apprehension of what the Church's essential function is in the world. But it must be repeated that the creation of satisfactory social conditions is far from being the primary, much less the only, aim of Christianity. What that aim is – what promises Christianity holds out to people – what it guarantees to effect for them-- what means and processes it offers for the realization of these hopes – what is the reason that these means and processes take the form that they actually assume – and finally, what a wondrous life, satisfying every desire and aspiration, it infallibly provides for all, if people will only consent to make use of the resources it puts at their disposal. In short, to set forth the real message of Christianity, its promises, its methods and its guarantees, is the purport of the following pages.

In Christendom today, conflicts regarding particular points of the Christian dispensation have come to an end. The battle in the realm of the spirit is now waged on a narrow front. It is the value itself of the Christian notion of human character and of the Christian ideal of life that is challenged. [See A. E. Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist (Gifford Lectures, 1926-1927), pp. 10-11.] the world is dividing itself rapidly into two hostile camps, one combating that ideal a outrance, the other defending it will what might be accurately termed a dogged tenacity. The protagonist of the Christian theory of human existence are rapidly shrinking in numbers They know that they are not fighting a losing battle, but they undergo all the agony of mind of men who feel that they are fighting against overwhelming odds. The fight cannot be lost, but the losses can be very heavy.

In this strife, where all Christian values are called in question, the vest vindication of the Christian ideal is its bold, uncompromising expression. Such an expression may not be without its effect on the enemies of Christianity, and may not be without its utility for those who are loyal to Christianity. It is possible that the sincere among the former have but a distorted idea of what they attack, and that many among the latter have an imperfect view of what they defend. Many are the misguided who in their revolt against the Christian ideal of human character and the Christian rule of life are in revolt not against that ideal itself, but against what they conceive it to be. It is hard to say how far Christians themselves are responsible for this state of affairs. Not only inadequacy in the practice of Christianity, but also a faulty presentation of its values, is apt to rouse antagonism in the sincere and the reflective. The Christian theory of life is so coherent, so logical, so simple yet so mysterious, so accommodated to the average person as well as to the most highly gifted and finally so soul-satisfying that, when adequately presented, it must readily recommend itself to all people of sincerity and good will. It alone among all other theories faces the problems offered by human existence and gives an answer to them. Contrasted with the Christian theory of life and life's experiences, all the theories that conflict with it and set themselves up in opposition to it must appear barren, ignoble, and utterly incapable of satisfying the ineradicable aspirations of the human spirit. On the other hand, for those who rally to the standard of Christ, a clear and explicit notion of what Christianity essentially means must have the effect of strengthening their hands and confirming their resolution in the defense of the values to which they give their allegiance. (Father Edward Leen, S.J., Why the Cross?, originally published by Sheed & Ward in 1938, and republished in 2001 by Scepter Publishers, Princeton, New Jersey,  pp. 9-17.)

Appendix B

From An Article by Miss Mary Therese Helmueller, R.N., in Homiletic and Pastoral Review, 1997

In 1984, while working as charge nurse in the intensive care unit, a 20-year-old man asked, “Can you give my mother enough morphine to let her sleep away?” I was horrified. “I can not kill your mother,” I responded. That was only the beginning. Recently, an 80-year-old was admitted to the emergency room and the physician said, “LET’S DEHYDRATE HER”; one more patient was sentenced to die in hospice with NO TERMINAL DIAGNOSIS and once again, THE LIVING WILL determined the death of a 70-year-old man regardless of how he pleaded to live. I can no longer remain silent.

Your life may be in danger if you are admitted to a hospital, especially if you are over 65 or have a chronic illness or a disability. The elderly are frequently dying three days after being admitted to the hospital. Some attribute it to “old age syndrome” while others admit that overdosing is all too common. Euthanasia is not legal but it is being practiced. Last year the New England Journal of Medicine reported that 1 in 5 critical care nurses admit to having hastened the death of the terminally ill! I believe the percentage is much higher. I have worked with nurses who even admit to overdosing their parents. No one knows the exact euthanasia rate in the United States, however Dr. Dolan from the University of Minnesota states that 40 percent of all reported deaths is probably a conservative estimation. If this is true then the United States is executing euthanasia at a higher percentage rate than the Netherlands where it is also illegal but widely practiced.

Did you know that many doctors and nurses whom we trust are speaking openly about their desire to practice euthanasia? In fact they are even speaking about ending their OWN lives when they reach the age of 65 or BEFORE if diagnosed with an illness. Some even admit to stealing the drugs for their own lethal injection. Think about it. These are the same people who will determine the value of YOUR life. If they do not value their own, how can you expect them to value yours?

I am a registered nurse in the St. Paul/ Minneapolis area with 15 years experience in emergency and critical care. My knowledge of euthanasia not only comes from my experience working in the critical care units throughout the Twin Cities, but also comes from a personal tragedy and loss in 1995. This is my true story. My hope is that you will educate others and protect yourselves and loved ones.

On Monday, February 20th, my grandmother was admitted to a local Catholic hospital with a fracture above the left knee. She was alert and orientated upon admission but became unresponsive after 48 hours and was transferred to hospice on the fourth day and died upon arrival.

I was in Mexico City conducting a pilgrimage and unable to be at her side so there were many questions upon my return. The doctors could not tell me the cause of her death so I began to search for the answers and was fortunate to obtain the hospital chart. It then became very clear that my grandmother had been targeted for euthanasia!

Carefully tracing the events it was evident that my grandmother became lethargic and unresponsive after each pain medication. She would awaken between times saying “I don’t want to die, I want to live to see Johnny ordained”; “I want to see Greta walk.” Johnny was her grandson studying in Rome to be a priest and Greta was her new great-grandchild. Even though over-sedation is one of the most common problems with the elderly she was immediately diagnosed as having a stroke. When she became comatose a completely hopeless picture of recovery was portrayed by the nurses and doctors who reported that she had a stroke, was having seizures, going in and out of a coma, and was in renal failure.

The truth however can be found in the hospital chart which indicates that everything was normal! The CAT scan was negative for stroke or obstruction, the EEG states “no seizure activity” and all blood work was normal indicating that she was not in renal failure! How were we to know that the coma was drug induced and that all the tests were normal? Why would they lie?

Looking over the chart it is clear that obtaining a “no code” status was the next essential step in executing her death. This is an order denying medical intervention in emergency situations. The “no code” was aggressively sought by the medical profession from the moment of her admission but was not granted by my family until it appeared that she was dying and there was no hope. Minutes after obtaining the “no code” a lethal dose of Dilantin (an anti-seizure medication) was administered intravenously over an 18-hour period. It put her into a deeper coma, slowing the respiratory rate and compromising the cardiovascular system leading to severe hemodynamic instability. The following day she was transferred to hospice and died upon arrival. The death certificate reads “Death by natural causes.”

My grandmother had no terminal diagnosis but the hospice admitting record indicates two doctors signed their name stating that she was terminally ill and would die within six months. How was this determined? The first doctor, who was the director of hospice, never came to evaluate her or even read the chart. More interesting is the fact that the second doctor was on vacation and returned three days after her death! Obviously these signatures were not obtained before or even upon her admission to hospice. How can this be professionally, morally or even legally acceptable? Can anyone therefore be admitted to hospice to die? It certainly seems possible especially if sedated or unresponsive. In fact, this hospice has recently been under investigation for accepting hundreds of patients who had no terminal illness.

It could happen to you

How can this happen? A serious problem lies in the definition and interpretation of “terminal illness” which permits the inclusion of chronic illnesses and disabilities. Terminal illness is defined as “an incurable or irreversible illness which produces death within six months.” The fact is that many chronic illnesses such as diabetes and high blood pressure are incurable and irreversible and without medical treatment such as insulin and other medications these illnesses would also produce death within six months. Therefore, those with chronic illnesses or disabilities can be conveniently denied medical treatment and even food and water to make them terminal. Typically it is the elderly who arrive in the hospital that are at the greatest risk. But it could be ANYONE! Especially those whose life and suffering is viewed as useless and burdensome.

Difficult to believe? Well it was for our prolife lawyer until his mother-in-law was admitted to a hospital several months later for a stroke. She became “unresponsive” and “comatose” a few days after her admission. The neurologist wrote an order to transfer her to hospice refusing an I.V. and tube feeding stating “this is the most compassionate treatment.” Remembering my story, our lawyer requested the removal of all narcotics and demanded an I.V. and tube feeding. This infuriated the neurologist. He began to accuse the family of being uncompassionate and inhumane. To prove his point he began a neurological assessment on the patient. Just then she opened her eyes and pulling the physician’s neck tie, forced his face to hers and said very clearly “Give me some water!” It was obvious that she was awake, alert and orientated. He angrily cancelled the transfer to hospice and ordered a tube feeding and intravenous. Several weeks later she was discharged and was exercising on the treadmill! She escaped the death sentence. Unfortunately many others like my grandmother have not. A stroke does not make you terminal but not receiving food and water does!

A clear understanding and definition of euthanasia is essential for a correct and moral judgment. Unfortunately the meaning is being altered by those who hold society’s values and by those who seek financial gain. According to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and reaffirmed by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae euthanasia is defined as “an action or omission which of itself and by intention causes death, with the purpose of eliminating all suffering

The killing in hospitals today is commonly referred to as “the exit treatment” and disguised by the word “compassion.” Many doctors and nurses honestly believe that this is the most compassionate treatment for the elderly, the chronic and terminally ill, especially those whose suffering is seen as hopeless, inconvenient and a waste of time or money. Those who hold this twisted and corrupted idea of compassion actually believe they are doing good because suffering has no value and materialism is their god. For instance, how often have we heard that Medicare and Medicaid are “running out?” “So why not relieve pain and lighten the financial burden of our families and society?”

As a result, many patients are intentionally oversedated and forced to die from dehydration, starvation or over medication. “Death by natural causes” will be officially documented on the death certificate. Did you know that this is the exact same proclamation on the death certificate of St. Maximillian Kolbe? Everyone knows however that he died from a lethal injection in Auschwitz concentration camp after many days of dehydration and starvation!

Pope John Paul II states clearly in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae: “Here we are faced with one of the more alarming symptoms of the ‘Culture of Death’ which is advancing above all in prosperous societies, marked by an attitude of excessive preoccupation with efficiency and which sees the growing number of elderly and disabled as intolerable and too burdensome.”

Many souls are being denied the opportunity to reconcile with God and family members because their death has been hastened or deliberately taken. This is a grave and moral injustice. Pope Pius XII in his Address to an International Group of Physicians on February 24, 1957 stated, “It is not right to deprive the dying person of consciousness without a serious reason.” Pope John Paul II confirmed this in Evangelium Vitae saying, “as they approach death people ought to be able to satisfy their moral and family duties, and above all they ought to be able to prepare in a fully conscious way for their definitive meeting with God.”

Recently the Carmelite Sisters shared this tragic story of a friend whose husband was euthanized. Her husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer but was not expected to die for several months to a year. He had been away from the Catholic Church and the sacraments. He also was estranged from his children. One day he complained of pain that was not relieved by medication. The wife spoke to the nurse who then called the doctor. When the doctor arrived he gave an injection through the intravenous line. The husband took three breaths and died! The wife screamed, “I did not ask you to kill my husband!” “We needed time to reconcile our marriage and family.” She continued to cry, “He needed time to reconcile with God and the Church!”

It is evident that euthanasia is being even more cleverly planned and executed. A very holy priest from St. Paul was called to the hospital by a nurse to administer the last sacraments to a hospice patient. When the priest arrived he was surprised to find the patient sitting up in the chair! He visited with the patient approximately a half hour then heard his confession and administered the last sacraments. Just before he left the room the patient jumped up in bed and the nurse administered an injection. Perplexed and concerned, the good priest called the hospital upon returning to the rectory. The patient had already expired!

There is a good and legitimate purpose for hospice units, but how can it ever be morally acceptable to transfer patients to a unit to die when they have NO TERMINAL ILLNESS? How can sedating a patient and refusing a tube feeding and intravenous be considered compassionate? Dehydration and starvation is not a painless death! Has this become the Auschwitz of today? A convenient and economically efficient place to dump the unwanted, imperfect, and burdensome of our society?

Would a “living will” prevent these tragic events? The living will makes you a clear and easy target to be euthanized. A “living will” has nothing to do with living. It is your death warrant. It actually gives permission to facilitate your death by denying medical treatment. Did you know that it was originally developed by Luis Kutner in 1967 for the Euthanasia Society of America? It is the most cost effective tool for hospitals, insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid. Therefore, since 1990 it has been deceptively packaged and promoted as a patient’s right known as “the Patient Self-determination Act.” If cutting care for those patients who ask for it wasn’t so successful in saving money and controlling the budget, why then did it originate in the Senate Finance Committee and why was it supported by the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health? These are finance committees whose only interest is controlling the budget! It is obvious that the living will is all about saving money, not your life!

Many people fear the loss of control that comes with illness and hospitalization. Tragically, they are deceived in thinking that the “living will” protects them and restores this control in their lives. Nothing could be further from the truth. No one knows the exact condition in which they will be admitted to the hospital. The “living will” is written in very broad terms leaving it open to the interpretation of medical professionals and others who stand to benefit from your demise. Remember your best interests or your interpretation may not be theirs! Can you imagine writing general instructions or signing a legal contract for the care of your Mercedes Benz several years before any problem occurs? “Please do not give oil or gas”; “If in three days it can not be fixed stop everything and trash the car.” How absurd and ridiculous! It takes time to diagnose and treat even car problems! If we would not foolishly demand this for a car then how can we demand it for a human life which has an eternal value?

Recently, a 70-year-old was admitted through the emergency room in respiratory distress. He was placed on a ventilator and transported to the intensive care unit. He was awake, alert and orientated anxiously writing notes: “I don’t want to die”; “I changed my mind”; and “Please don’t take me off the machine.” He was very persistent and urgent with his pleading. I soon understood why! His family and physicians were meeting to discuss a serious problem. He had signed a “living will” declaring that he did not want “any extraordinary measures.” He was now viewed as “incapable” of making any decisions and they wanted to follow his wishes as stated in the legal document! Very convenient for those who do not want their inheritance spent on hospital costs and for those who do not want to be bothered with a “useless burden” to our society!

Today hospitals and health care facilities are required to ask patients if they have a living will or lose government funding! The question is proposed in such a way to create pressure on patients so that they think it is something good, desirable and necessary. “Do you know that you have a right in the state of Minnesota to possess a living will?” Please remember that the living will targets you for euthanasia by denying you medical treatment. Living wills kill; they do not protect you. Instead, I urge you to obtain a copy of “The Protective Medical Decisions Document” (PMDD) from the International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force, P.O. Box 756, Steubenville, Ohio 43952. Sign it and keep it among your records. Please get rid of your living will! [Droleskey editorial note: With all due respect, I believe that Dr. Paul Byrne's Advance Care Directives superceds this older document.]

Can you or a loved one be targeted for euthanasia without a living will? The course of events and treatment in my grandmother’s short hospitalization are documented. She did not have a living will. Please know the following steps—it could save your loved one’s life.

1)    Oversedation causing lethargy and unresponsiveness. Difficulty or inability to awaken a patient.  Some patients, especially the elderly, are very sensitive to pain medications which are slowly metabolized by the liver. Toxic levels build quickly with very small doses commonly producing lethargy and unresponsiveness. Elderly patients require approximately 20% less of the normal adult doses.

2)    A hopeless picture of any recovery. The patient appears to be comatose and dying. The medical staff affirms this with overwhelming reports and statements.

3)    No code status also referred to as DNR/DNI (do not resuscitate/ do not intubate)—The consent is obtained from the family.
It is a request to deny a patient delivered emergency care in a life-threatening situation.

4)    Lethal doses of Dilantin or narcotics —(morphine)  This will hasten the death, shortening the hospital stay and expenses.

5)    Transfer to hospice without tube feeding or intravenous. Due to sedation and inability to eat or drink the patient will die of dehydration and starvation. (Life Matters: Are You Being Targeted for Euthanasia?).