DoNoHarm!

Introduction: Conservatism’s True Colors

It never ceases to amaze how perennially apt is the saying of a good Catholic wife in this writer’s acquaintance: Conservatives are just liberals in slow motion. Here is some proof of the invariable veracity of that statement:

It was unseemly for critics to compare [Terri Schiavo’s] end with that of victims of the Nazi regime. There was never a more industrious inquiry than in the Schiavo case, into the matter of rights formal and inchoate. It is simply wrong, whatever is felt about the eventual abandonment of her by her husband, to use the killing language. She was kept alive for 15 years, underwent a hundred medical ministrations, all of them in service of an abstraction, which was that she wanted to stay alive. There are laws against force-feeding, and no one will know whether, if she had had the means to convey her will in the matter, she too would have said, Enough. - “The Great Quandary”, Wm. F. Buckley, Jr., online at “Townhall.com”, 22 March 2005

As if the complete capitulation by conservatives to liberals on the issues of abortion, sodomite marriage, ballooning big government, usurpation of parents’ rights by public educators, and broadcast obscenity and blasphemy under cover of the First Amendment to a Constitution wholly oblivious to the existence of a First Commandment were not “Enough!”, there is now the spectacle of the high priest of conservatism, the venerable if at times overbearing William F. Buckley, Jr., inveighing against the preservation of life and rationalizing that somehow the willful starvation of a human being is not murder. Mr. Buckley sees fit to ignore common sense, philosophical truth, and the authority of the Catholic Church, of which he is a member. Any child knows that not feeding someone is cruel; thinking men by definition understand that moral absolutes must be applied else they become futilities whose pursuit is deemed naught but “service to an abstraction”; and, all the novelties of Vatican II notwithstanding, Catholics agree that the Fifth Commandment remains firmly and fully in force.

Modernity has grown more than accustomed to voices from the left abandoning reason in favor of emotionalism. The murder of children in the name of convenience, easy pleasure, and rights whose only origin - and destination - is hell, has been a goal sought for almost two centuries now. Liberals pleaded, demanded, litigated, marched, and murdered (in secret) until they got their way (to murder in full view of the public). Hidden from view, along with untold instances of fornication, adultery, rape, and marital boredom, was the equally desired result that all of society, not only liberals, but conservatives, the indifferent, and the ignorant, would as well accept slaughter as an ordinary way of life among enlightened citizens of the modern world. The twenty-first century has dawned on a day in which “conservative” advocates of the “pro-life” movement have resigned themselves to the fact that abortion is “the law of the land” and must be enforced by government servants, that America “is not ready” to end abortion, and that their position is somehow different from “moderate” liberals who personally find child murder distasteful and so wish to make it “affordable, safe, and rare”.

Let us not predict that the stentorian proclamations from the pen of Mr. Buckley added to the chorus of bloodthirsty compassionates lobbying for the accelerated demise of Mrs. Schiavo are the last or the ultimate outrage to be perpetrated by the treacherously fickle partisans of the un-right. None would have thought thirty-five years ago that Catholics would be marching in the streets shrieking loudly that mothers should have government funding to murder their babies, that a Catholic bishop would apologize for not allowing a funeral Mass for a sodomite drug-user whose business was to provide a venue for sodomy and drug use under the guise of “entertainment”, or that another Catholic bishop would make repeated public statements that a right exists for family members to starve a “loved one” to death. It is dangerous to assume the worst is about to happen, and equally perilous to assume that the worst has already happened. Hard experience demonstrates that men but loosely clinging to a sense of virtue, truth, and sanctity will eventually embrace thoroughly foul positions, astonishing in their repudiation of what had till then been considered absolute verities rejected by none but the depraved.

But, ladies and gentlemen, it is none but the depraved with whom we are dealing here. The abandonment of the social reign of Christ the King - by members of His own Body, the Catholic Church, and, obviously, by His enemies outside of the Catholic Church - has brought about the disgusting state of affairs in which it is considered necessary to debate whether sins that cry to Heaven for vengeance should be permitted in civil law for those who consent. None but the depraved favor child murder, sodomy, usury, divorce, euthanasia, and the regicide committed against our Sovereign Lord Jesus Christ. The social order is not protected by the fools and/or fiends who defend the state when it attacks the right to life, the natural order, and the supernatural destiny of mankind. At the same time, truth is not served when its adherents fail to point out clearly how foul in the eyes of God are the banes of apostasy, heresy, deceit, oppression of the weak, and the seven deadly sins. It is long past time to declare the “debate” ended, the “quandary” solved: Repent now, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand - or suffer the consequences forever in hell!

Where We Have Been: Nasty Nazis and Awful Americans

In the happy lands of yore where Christ was King, the letter of the law as well as its spirit contributed to the wellbeing of those subject to His Law. Loving God above all things, with one’s whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, and one’s neighbor as one’s self unto death, leads to the judgement by God that souls so disposed to act should not merely be subject to that Law, but should reign alongside of the Lawgiver. If indeed a man in a position of authority wherein he must judge according to the laws of the jurisdiction entrusted to him, instead committed an injustice, higher laws within the state and the highest laws of the Church defended victims of encroaching tyranny. And, of course, the final tribunal before God Almighty rights any wrongs tolerated by the meek upon the earth. Individuals, kingdoms, and the Universal Church were once in agreement that justice was definable, discernible, and desirable for all in all cases - perfected in the mercy manifested on the Cross at Calvary.

Well over a half of a millennium ago, untold numbers of Catholics rejected this truth. They decided that Our Lord speaking through His Vicar, the Pope, the heir of St. Peter, was inadequate to render each his due, citing the all too evident personal shortcomings of various vicars as their primary evidence. Lutherans and Anglicans and Encyclopedists and Jacobins and Americans and Russians and assorted secularists of every stripe abandoned the notion that anyone but man is the judge of man. In the place of God man was placed. The God-Man was ordered to give way to man as god.

Very few men have had the privilege of exercising their authority as gods, but for those who have been so favored - by fate? by merit? by chance? - there have been countless opportunities for them to demonstrate their superiority to what was accomplished by God Incarnate among men. It must never be forgotten that those who most would see man as God forcefully reject men acting in their own right in their own lives as sovereign gods. To paraphrase Orwell, some gods are more equal than others. Pantheons are such cluttered and messy things. Just read Homer.
Realizing this, the Third Reich sought to enshrine a master race as the inheritors of the earth. Nothing of the meek was involved in that. Hitler and his henchmen endeavored to cleanse not only Germany, but as much of the earth as possible of the undesirable, unfit, and undeserving from the possibility of enjoying a thousand-year reign. This should not have come as a surprise to anyone - megalomaniacs are never shy. Adolph Hitler published his ideas decades before he was able to implement them. It is not as if he did not try to tell everyone what he was about. It is just that most of the men in a position to stop him did not listen to him.

But many gave heed to him who thought that they could benefit from him. Thus, Hitler was popularly elected. The Nazi government had diplomatic relations with Great Britain, France, Austria, Poland, Russia, Italy, and even the United States of America. Luminaries such as Lindbergh, Edward VIII, and Petain were able to find common ground with the ideology of the little corporal. It is often forgotten, alas, amongst the votaries of political correctness, that both Pius XI and Pius XII were publicly, vehemently, and unequivocally - and in writing - opposed to the goals of the Axis Powers - and communism, too.

Democratic suffrage propelled Hitler to power. The apparatus of an advanced nation-state was given over to his policies. An ancient cultural patrimony was utilized to propagate a futuristic fantasy of the place of the Aryan in the world to the world. Most of the world stood aside as all of this was done. And every bit of it was done according to the laws of due process within the sovereign government housed in Berlin.

Jews were not dispossessed overnight. Laws were passed. Children of Abraham appealed. They lost, and lost their goods. Other laws were passed. The Chosen People protested. They were denied, and in that denial were denied rights as citizens. Yet more laws were passed. The sons and daughters of Sion lamented. None heard them as they succumbed to the gas and then were consumed in flames.

By the way, Jews attempting to escape by sea were turned back on the high seas by American naval vessels in the name of American neutrality. The lend-lease policy of the Roosevelt administration along with the goading toward war by that regime of the Japanese Empire indicates on which side American “neutral” sympathies lay; and the number of Jewish refugees accepted on American or any other shores reveals on which side of the “final solution” the Allied Powers were during the War. Yalta should disabuse anyone of the notion that either Wilson’s or Roosevelt’s policies were successful at making the world safe for democracy. The income tax, the Federal Reserve system, and the welfare state should alert even the most somnambulistic that aught but outright totalitarianism under the banner of democracy as the Trojan horse for socialism was their goal.

”There was never a more industrious inquiry than in the Schiavo case, into the matter of rights formal and inchoate,” says Mr. Buckley. Granted. Much like the months of deliberation that went into the final draft of the American Constitution that resulted in the designation of blacks as 3/5 of a person each for the purposes of proportional representation in the national legislature, and zero percent of a person for the purposes of human rights to due process, property, and life. Years of debate preceded the revocation of that deliberative decision before the sovereign majesty of the United States declared war on its own citizens (who were strict constructionists in regard to constitutional interpretation on the subject of slavery), notwithstanding the absolute absence in the Constitution bestowing such power on the federal government. That same sovereignty in the ensuing decades, in the name of the betterment of the same aggrieved men supposedly aided by the usurpation by the federal government of states’ rights, then determined that men who once were 3/5 of a man sometimes and nothing of a man at other times, should be treated as separate but equal men at yet other times. Inquiry in the United States has mandated that some men should be part men, no men, and part-time men; dispossession, indignity, and death were the result of that inquiry.

Similar inquiries have gone into the question of sodomy. From the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah until the 1960’s, adherents to the law of God have adopted in the laws of men an absolute prohibition on such unnatural acts. Continued inquiry absent appeal to the law of God has resulted in that abomination migrating from a capital offense, to a disgusting perversion, to a tolerated eccentricity, to a lauded lifestyle, to a protected right in civil law. Not only are sodomite unions now sought, but innumerable other combinations of men and women and even children are now advocated before judges. The refusal to prosecute men guilty of statutory rape of girls is setting the stage for the violation of children by adults of the same sex. Encouraging children in the vice of sodomy and self-abuse gives the unmistakable message that children are competent to act on carnal impulses. Many will aver that children are then able to consent to unnatural bonds with adults. Lawrence vs. Texas, the states of Massachusetts and California, and the sex education policies of the United States Department of Education make it abundantly clear that the answer to the inquiry, “May people engage in whatever carnal practices they wish?” is a resounding yes when the answerer is the federal government, a state government, or we the people of the United States of America, resulting in lifeless manifestations of lust, whose purveyors and addicts would pretend to themselves is the more noble virtue of love.

Of course, it is not considered polite to point out the self-contradictory posture of those who insist that children may commit murder of the unborn, but that children who commit murder of victims free of the womb are not culpable in their crimes and thus are not deserving of capital punishment. The overwhelming experience and assumption of mankind in society has been that certain crimes are punishable by death. In many human societies, one of those capital crimes was the abortion of a child. Centuries upon centuries of human history testify to the fact that in law, in social mores, and in practically every expression of faith, child murder is an abomination before man and God. Concurrently, the state and society had a vested interest and the power and the authority to mete out the supreme sanction to those guilty of many different offenses, including in utero infanticide. A millennia-long inquiry by virtually the whole of mankind has found no right of individuals to kill the innocent, and a strict duty on the part of governments to execute certain criminals. Americans have seen fit to overturn that ruling.

What the Nazis and the Americans have in common is hubris, pride, and an overweening esteem of self. Several concrete manifestations of this shared national trait are borne out in the practices of both societies. Longstanding legal precedents are easily set aside. Members of the society heretofore considered guilty of no crime are dispossessed of property and status under cover of law. And large classes of individuals are designated as non-persons, who may be relocated, enslaved, and executed without recourse to any authority above the state imposing the designation on them.

Nazi redistribution of populations in the name of “Lebensraum” was anticipated by decades in the American government’s relocation of millions of Indians in the name of “Manifest Destiny”. Hitler’s mercurial interpretations of treaties had antecedents in American interactions with the Spanish, the Mexicans, and the aforementioned Indian tribes. German factories during the War were staffed by countless men, women, and children forced to labor under the harshest conditions; black Africans fared no better under the rules spelled out by the Framers of the American Constitution. Medical experiments by Nazis on uninformed “patients” have their parallel in the U.S. Army’s LSD experiments on soldiers, the University of Iowa’s experiments in which healthy orphans were induced to stutter, and the government-funded experiments in Alabama in which syphilitic black men were not treated so as to determine the effects of the disease on human beings. And, of course, the six million or more Jews, Catholics, Gypsies, sodomites, dissenters, POW’s, cripples and other Nazi victims are dwarfed by the well over 50 million infants slaughtered since the United States embraced the devil’s rule in Roe v. Wade.

Keep in mind that Hitler broke no German laws. Slavery was not unconstitutional when Lincoln went to war on the South. German courts did not prevent the theft of citizens’ property, nor did American courts intervene when Americans of Japanese descent were robbed of their property and incarcerated on the West Coast during the War. Yes, the Holocaust was a travesty revealing the evil that can lurk in men’s souls. At least most Germans today are contrite about their nation’s gory past. Roe v. Wade is defended in this nation as “the law of the land” even by those elected officials who claim to be opposed to it. Just following orders - from the Constitution, from the people, from the party line - is the supreme law of the land. God’s Law is no law in America. Far from a national sense of remorse at the ongoing slaughter in our midst, there are parades each year celebrating a woman’s “right” to choose.

Judicial inquiry lacking direction from the supreme Judge, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, results in nothing but the caprice of strong men inflicted on weaker men. Death sentences for innocents are horribly common under such rule. Americans may have repented the repugnant period of slavery at this nation’s founding, but they learned nothing from the devastating experience. The full power of the American government has deemed it legal to kill babies for profit, to kill babies for convenience, to kill babies for research, to kill babies for compassion, and to kill babies for nothing. Yes, Mr. Buckley, this is a nation whose history very much can be described in terms equally applicable to the Nazis and Adolph Hitler.

The courts are no protection from this tyranny, as the Supreme Court rulings on sodomy, abortion, and capital punishment demonstrate. Politicians provide no leadership, except in the rush toward perdition which their every law in the moral sphere hastens. The people are part victim and part culprit in this - as the saying goes, a democracy gets the government it deserves. Lamentations about the ill state of things are not matched with action to change them, except to exchange the foul status quo for a yet bleaker future.

Blacks, Indians, and Irish have suffered the indignity of legal oppression in this country in the past. Infants in wombs bear that burden today. Terri Schiavo is the most well known of tomorrow’s second-class citizens, the people whom compassionate people wish to kill to make them feel better. “Them” feeling better can not be someone like Mrs. Schiavo, because, as we are being told by her sensitive executioners, she will not feel the pain of her slow starvation, which begs the question of why she is being slain to end her suffering if she can not feel the suffering. No, the “them” who want to feel better are they who do not want to be bothered with the expense, the emotional trauma, and the moral responsibility attendant to caring for the helpless.

There is little room in the American psyche for the inconvenience of enduring the demands of the weak and the ill. The America of tomorrow will insist on removing the human obstacles to the happiness of the strong and healthy. The young, the well, the wealthy will determine who is worthy of continuing to receive the benefits of membership in the master race. Pulled feeding tubes, morphine, saline solutions, carbon monoxide canisters, and guns in the night are the final solution awaiting application to the problem of pain. When that problem is finally solved, there will be plenty of lebensraum for the victors.

Where We Are Going: Therapeutic Poison Prescribed by Dr. Death in the Nether Regions of the State of Denial

And that future is now.

For at least the last thirty years, medical staffs in The Netherlands have been euthanizing patients. There have been revelations that not every one of the “procedures” was done with the permission of the subject. Others have confessed that family members of the deceased were not always informed before the fact, either. In the year just ended, still more statements have been made that children from birth to twelve years old have been spared the burden of life, sometimes with their parents’ acquiescence, sometimes not. It can not be known just how many, but the majority of these activities was done in a period when such was illegal in Holland. No prosecutions were sought after the acts were publicly acknowledged. The actual result has been the legalizing of more euthanasia, the demand for more liberal applications of euthanasia, and the admission that some illegal acts of euthanasia continue with the hope that making them more widely known will lead to them being legalized as well.

Oregon voters approved legislation in the 1990’s permitting assisted suicide (accomplices to murder are guilty of murder; accomplices to self-murder are not guilty of suicide, but of murder). Many legal challenges are pending, but hundreds have availed themselves of the opportunity to pursue life, liberty, and happiness through an early entrance to the grave. Courts in the state of Oregon must wrestle with the question of whether assisted suicide laws are constitutional, who benefits from them, how they are to be enforced, what restrictions should be placed, and what remedies ought to be applied where abuse occurs.

(Imagine the Kafkaesque scene of a “wrongful life” lawsuit finding in favor or a “victim” who survived an assisted suicide gone wrong. Perhaps the plaintiff will receive monetary damages and the right to have the procedure repeated by another doctor at the expense of the defendant, with the defendant ordered to pay damages to his estate and survivors when the plaintiff is successfully deceased. If enough of this were to happen, malpractice insurance rates for doctors incompetent in the deadly arts would skyrocket. At some point some doctors might begin to refuse to try to kill their patients for fear of accidentally preserving life. Congress might become involved, passing legislation encouraging medical schools to subsidize more students willing to specialize in elective morbidity, and insurance reform might follow quickly after so as to make suicide affordable, safe, and rare.)

Already years have elapsed as the litigation works its way through the system. Many more years of debate, both at the state and federal levels, will be necessary before a provisionally final determination is made, for, of course, should some assisted suicide be deemed legal, far more will be demanded. In the meantime, while the legalists work their magic, death is reducing the number of house calls it must make and is accepting walk-in clients.

There is, however, one fewer minion of mortality available to make suicide more readily available. Dr. Jack Kevorkian was forced to refrain from his, ahem, medical practice, although none of his patients complained, indeed, none of his patients survived. If only he had waited a while to establish himself in Oregon rather than in Michigan. Pioneers often do not survive long enough to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Midgets are left to broaden the trails that the giants blazed as clerks and bureaucrats seize the bounty won by visionaries.

Dr. Kevorkian is a case study in the inconsistency, nay, the insanity surrounding the non-principles applied by those who maintain that the right to life has a corollary right to death. (There is a bizarre irony involved in a world filled with the indignity of the high life defined as reality tv, gangsta culture, and laboring for cruelly taxed, inflation-ravaged wages that at the same time is so set on seeking some kind of dignity in choosing to escape said life.) Some jurisdictions say that lives may be actively eliminated, sometimes with, sometimes without permission from patients or family members. Some jurisdictions say that active elimination of life is illegal, but that starving someone to death does not constitute active murder. Still more jurisdictions say that coherent, conscious, calm people may not elect to end whatever suffering they find unbearable, but that the same persons if unconscious might be permitted to die if they had placed such a directive in writing or made mention of it to a close family member.

Dr. Kevorkian was incarcerated even though no one disputes that his patients sought his services. Michael Schiavo, the husband of Terri Schiavo, stands to gain monetarily from his wife’s death without any threat of legal investigation into the circumstances surrounding her debilitating injury or any possibility of sanctions for pursuing her death with the aid of hospital personnel. Doctors in Oregon can do exactly what Dr. Kevorkian did and far from being jailed will receive their fees. If a husband in Michael Schiavo’s situation were to do the same thing at home, i.e., to refuse her food and drink, he would be tried for murder. And Florida, where the Schiavos live, still has the death penalty.

In this horrible instance, however, it is not the doctors or the husband or even the judges who face the sentence of death. Instead, it is a woman convicted of no crime, given no trial, and unable to mount any kind of defense. Hardened murderers on death row have received more pleas from the population at large to have their lives spared than Mrs. Schiavo is now receiving in the court of public opinion. A surprisingly large, vocal, and intense reaction has been aired, printed, and uploaded insisting that Mrs. Schiavo’s life be ended. Or maybe such should not be considered surprising in the land of abortion on demand.

Many who support her murder believe that Mr. Schiavo’s statement that such would be her wish is sufficient grounds to proceed with the gruesome, week-long or longer ordeal that is death by starvation and dehydration. This brings into bright contrast the lack of principles involved in jurisprudence and philosophical discourse on the matter. If Mrs. Schiavo’s wishes to die are sufficient to have her actively euthanized by neglect, then Dr. Kevorkian’s patients acted reasonably and he provided a compassionate service, for which prosecution should be unthinkable. On the other hand, some who are repelled by the prospect of conscious persons choosing to die propose that it is the very debilitation involved in Mrs. Schiavo’s state that makes it appropriate for her to be put out of her misery, with less sensitivity than is given to animals not in no-kill shelters.

What is being ignored is the question of just who determines how severe suffering must be before the state permits euthanasia and/or assisted suicide. Some are adamant that psychological suffering is every bit as debilitating as physical suffering. What one woman finds endurable, the next man might find excruciating. Thus, there should be an absolute right for individuals to make this decision on their own or with whatever counsel they deem necessary. The Netherlands is far down this road, Dr. Kevorkian walked it until the confused legal system put a stop to him, and Oregon is taking its first steps in that direction.

Minors and the incapacitated, then, would have such decisions made by their caretakers. Mrs. Schiavo is in the care of her husband. He insists that she would ask to die were she able to speak. There is no written proof of this, no corroborating witness.

Advocates for dignity by death argue that the government has no place in this conversation, that there is no overriding public interest in somehow ensuring that death is not inflicted on the unwilling. Dr. Peter Singer of Princeton University is at the vanguard of a group of extremists of this ilk who claim that parents have the right to kill children from conception until the age of reason or even later. Those incapacitated by age, illness, or injury would be eliminated at the discretion of their able-bodied caregivers. The Netherlands offers the example of children up to the onset of puberty being euthanized on the authority of doctors who did not consult parents or other family members.

The rational progression of the irrational premise that the will to die is a legitimate urge to carry out, is that the will to kill usurps the will to life. It is a fact, not speculation, that where euthanasia is permitted in the name of voluntarily ending suffering, eventually euthanasia is committed involuntarily in the name of compassion. Not only is this morally reprehensible, it can mask outright murder posing as disinterested obedience to the wishes of a loved one. If the state can not regulate the circumstances obliging citizens to refrain from murdering the innocent with the innocents’ consent, then citizens will come to demand the murder of innocents lacking that consent. The law is intended to ferret out murderers, not to condone or conceal murder.

But, of course, this dynamic will lead to the government taking an active part in deciding which innocents will live and which will die. Instances where an indigent is reliant on healthcare from the government might well result in bureaucrats sensitive to red ink determining that the quality of life of a comatose bag lady is sufficiently lacking to warrant her starvation, regardless of whether or not a feeding tube is in use. The federal government will probably weather the firestorm of outrage from disclosures that such goings on in the name of the people have been perpetrated far better than HMO’s have fared when taken to the public woodshed for their bureaucrats withholding healthcare from customers. A wealthy man whose family can not agree on whether or not to “pull his plug” might well have the government intervene on the side of death in anticipation of the tax revenues forthcoming upon his demise. Lest any demur that such extreme cases are not fair game for a sober argument, remember that there is nothing in the lack of principles involved in the demand for euthanasia that can prevent such occurrences. The record of the City of Chicago’s management of public housing, the State of New Jersey in its foster care program for children, and the federal government in its handling of the debacle in Vietnam prove that public policy is not always in the hands of the competent and its failures cost billions of dollars and scores of thousands of lives.

Furthermore, hard experience in The Netherlands shows that not all of the suitors of the Grim Reaper are acting benignly in the name of the severely ill and aged. Anecdotal accounts in the United States indicate that severely injured persons have organs “harvested” before death in order to facilitate transplants, and that babies delivered with deformities or other medical problems are allowed to die without further medical attention. A brave new world of euthanasia by government fiat is not only not farfetched, there is nothing in the current direction of the infernal debate to suggest that it is far off.

Very near at hand is the extension of the right to commit self-murder extended to minors. It is irrational to campaign to make abortion available to minors and then claim that minors are as competent as any adult to take the lives of their children but are incompetent to take their own lives as may adults. It is equally irrational to assert that the juvenile mind competent to kill her baby, kill himself, or kill another, suffers from inadequate maturity to be held accountable for his actions when tried in a capital case. But as the Supreme Court has reversed itself on matters of race relations, abortion, and sodomy - and capital punishment! - any number of times, it is all too likely that the demand for compassionate self-murder will overcome squeamishness about executing children. There is likely still enough consistency and logic at large in society that eventually the recognized rights of children to kill themselves or their children will be balanced by the responsibility to be killed if they kill whomever the government still protects from murder, few though those souls are fast becoming. At present the government’s efforts to stave off early death see the most success in preserving inmates on death row. The unborn, the weak, and the old get far fewer and briefer appeals.

For those mortified at the prospect of so much mortality stalking the land, there is one other voice to be heard on this subject, one other will to be expressed on the matter of life. Before man descends any further into this maelstrom fueled by a passion for death, he should give heed to the Author of Life: Thou shalt not kill. - Exodus 20:13 Choose therefore life that both thou and thy seed may live. - Deuteronomy 32:20 The thief cometh not, but for to steal and to kill and to destroy. I am come that they may have life and may have it more abundantly. - St. John 10:10

In all the legalese, tugging at heartstrings, and appeals to compromise, few are asking the simple question of how starving Mrs. Terri Schiavo conforms to not killing, choosing life, and increasing life. Every will except the divine will has been consulted. Every law except the divine law is invoked. It does not matter what the federal government, the Florida government, the Schiavos, or Bishop Lynch want. God wants life, not death. Demands for the death of Terri Schiavo come from those who, witting or no, place themselves on this issue on the side opposing God.

Where God Is: Justice Lives in His Kingdom

Nietzsche proclaimed, “God is dead!” Some wag once put that imbecility on the front of a t-shirt, with an attribution to its deceased author. On its back he inscribed the legend, “Nietzsche is dead! - God” Nietzsche now knows far better that God has always known better. The problem with the men who have inherited the insane Nietzschean nihilism is that they have taken their master’s “God is dead”, and have gone further, living according to the rule, “Death is God!”

Death rules the thoughts and lives of modern men. Fear of death impels science and medicine. Denial of death informs health and nutrition. Fascination with death suffuses entertainment and culture. Exploitation of death warps politics, foreign policy, and various business practices. And worship of death is revealed in the disdain moderns have for living a truly full life.

For life is not just pleasure and convenience. The height of unreality self-inflicted by modern man is his refusal to feel pain. All is escape. But his inability to avoid discovering the undiscover’d country incites him to rage. Like a spoiled child at play, when he sees he can not win, he pouts, throws a tantrum, breaks his favorite toys, and quits.

There is a twisted paradox to this frantic flight from the senses. Self-mutilation, sodomite men intentionally attempting to attract the AIDS virus, so-called “extreme” sports, a variety of disgustingly sophomoric “reality” tv shows, and the vicious culture surrounding much of rock music betray a terror of being numb among a large fragment of the population. In a desperate effort to feel something other than the nothing that their empty lives offer them, people are doing increasingly dangerous, even suicidal, things in order to convince themselves that they are alive. So much of daily activity in the modern world is deadening that the deadly serves as one of the few reminders that death has not yet arrived.

In a world bereft of God, death becomes first and final cause. Biologists are certain that life exists for no reason other than to not be dead. Psychologists opine that all is about sex and sex is about rejecting mortality - futilely. Tyrants consistently err by sending victims to death in the foolish belief that all men fear death as much as they. Aged and ill people seek death as the only fate that can spare them the pain - physical, emotional, spiritual - of the fate of confronting imminent death - physical, emotional, spiritual. When death becomes all that one thinks about, then death has won its victory. People fixated on not dying will never learn to live.

God sees things differently. He is the God of the living, not of the dead. In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life; and man became a living soul. God created man to be alive. Man’s destiny is not meant to be death. Man’s sin introduced death into the mix, but both the sin and the death are against the will of God. It is also God’s will to save man from, not to hasten him toward, death.

Through the Cross of His Son Jesus Christ, God the Father has established His will to create a new Heaven and a new earth on the Last Day. All of time leads to and flows from Good Friday in obedience to God’s intention that all is to be in conformity with that ultimate reality. Nothing of what man does in life on earth is to be disharmonious with his divinely willed goal of life in Heaven. God sent His Son who died on the Cross to make this possible, that men need not die forever but rather live forever. All that is necessary for this has been accomplished by Christ crucified. Everything that man needs in life, on earth and in Heaven, is offered by the Son of God on the Cross.

Thus, if man is to avoid eternal death, he must do all that he can to cooperate with this divine gift. He must do nothing that thwarts life and emphasizes death. A far healthier paradox lives in the fact that a life so lived fears no loss of this life, intent as it is on the life that can not be lost. Faith in Christ crucified and the eternal life He brings results in forgetfulness of the ephemeral state of natural life beset by sin and allows an immersion in the joy that comes with the supernatural life of grace. Respice finem taken to heart will mean that a man will forget himself, his fears, and his sins, and instead remember that God has made him to live with Him forever. Death is an end but not the end for the faithful soul. After the end that is death, the saint experiences the end of death and the beginning of unending life.

Terri Schiavo is in the grip of a legal system, a husband, and a local bishop who are thoroughly in the clutches of the death-obsessed mores of modernity. They are not trying to “let her die”. No, they are trying to kill her. These fiends do not say, “What a pity that she might die,” but bellow, “What a waste that she’s alive!”

Mrs. Schiavo’s feeding tube is no more optional on the moral plane for those responsible for her wellbeing than a mother’s breast is for her newborn, the shakes sipped through straws for a man recovering from jaw surgery, the pureed vegetables served to a toothless nonagenarian, the absence of peanuts in the diet of those allergic to them, or the IV drip attached to a teenager recovering from an auto accident. All men receive food and water from intermediary sources. No one is self-sufficient when it comes to the basic needs of nutrition and hydration. Hence, the supreme law of charity requires that a person in more need receives more, not less, care from those able to provide it.

Fundamentally, folks, no one can feed himself. This is not merely a matter of feeding tubes or flatware or pizza delivery. Each and all of us are dependent on God’s creation in which the sun shines, the rain falls, the seed grows, the tree bears, and the ewe lambs without man’s ability on his own to bring such startling phenomena about. Even where men cooperate with God in the sowing or the shearing or the weeding, they still are operating within a dynamic whose primary workings are a mystery to the human mind. To a greater or lesser extent, each man is dependent on all men for daily sustenance; to an infinite degree, mankind is dependent on God.

It is God who feeds us. It is God who sustains us in being. It is God who gives us life. If we are not to forfeit that life, we must acknowledge that our lives are His to begin with. Attempting to keep one’s life for oneself results in the eternal death of the self. Far worse is the lot of the soul who attempts to take his life himself. Neither by omission nor by commission is a man free to destroy what God has created. We are not our own. We belong to God. Suicide and murder are attempts to steal life from God. They always fail. No one who seizes life, his own or another’s, will be able to retain possession of that life. The thief cometh not, but for to steal and to kill and to destroy. I am come that they may have life and may have it more abundantly…And I shall give them life everlasting: and they shall not perish for ever. And no man shall pluck them out of my hand. That which my Father hath given me is greater than all: and no one can snatch them out of the hand of the Father. God is the Author of all life; any who reject His claim will gain not life, but death.

Which, unfortunately, seems to be all that modern Americans are interested in these days.

The dying person has certain rights. Death asserted as a right is a perversion, particularly in the context of a society that denies the right to life to so many. Death is a curse resulting from sin. No one should pursue a curse as a goal for himself or for another. Anyone successful in attaining such an accursed goal is guilty of heinous sin and thus subject to the severest punishment.

Rights for the dying entail how they are to preserve their lives until they die. Such rights are a matter of the manner in which they will continue to live, not die, until God wills them Home to Him. Ours is not to choose the time or the circumstances of the end of life. We are to employ our free will in determining the nature of the life which God at a time and under circumstances of His choosing will judge worthy of eternal destruction or eternal preservation.

As a person dies, he has the right to all the medical care he needs to preserve life, to attend to his duties, and to receive the Sacraments from the Church. He is not bound to receive more than is minimally necessary to satisfy these obligations, but he must ask for and be given at least that minimum. His caregivers have a moral obligation to do all that they are able materially, technically, emotionally, and spiritually to provide for the dying in keeping with charity, especially as it is expressed on the Cross.

Where a dying person has attended to the needs of his soul, reached peace with all of the members of his family that he is able, and has exhausted what reasonable medical professionals explain are the means to recovery, then he is free to forego further medical treatment. It is vitally important to understand that medical treatment is distinct from nutrition, comfort, and compassion. The dying are no more to be starved and dehydrated than they are to be tortured or ignored. Ignoring the need for food and drink is to torture the dying.

It is a sick thought to suggest that the dying are to be subjected to the slow and excruciating death of starvation and dehydration in the name of ending their suffering. Such becomes a prolongation and increasing of suffering, certainly temporally and if it is willed by the patient, then eternally as well. If it is willed by others, the easing of their suffering on earth will be but a postponement of suffering from which there is no escape in hell.
Those things medical science and techniques offer that replace rather than assist the ordinary functions of the human body can be foregone when they are incapable of restoring the body to health. The purpose of the medical arts is to seek health. When the skills of man prove futile in that effort, none is required to continue their use.

Food and water are not medicine. They are indeed necessary for health, but that is because they are necessary for life, and a dead body is never a healthy body. Medicine can not work without food and water, but food and water are not medicine. Food and water are doing their job so long as life continues by their use. The fact that they of themselves can not make the injured whole, the old young, or the ill healthy does not mean that they have failed. The measure of whether or not to feed someone is not how energetic he becomes by so doing, but whether or not the intake of food and water sustains life. Only when either medicine or food and water cease to be efficacious in the attainment of their proper goals may they be withdrawn.

God’s will is not that death be the means to avoid suffering, but that suffering is the means of avoiding eternal death. Calvary was not a suicide, nor was it euthanasia. It is the humble obedience to the will of God, receiving whatever comes in keeping with His will, not in reaction to demands of the senses, external coercion, or hateful willfulness. One is not permitted to decide how and when to die, but how to live until the hour of death. Selfless acceptance of the Cross is God’s will for His children faithful to the example of His Son, who being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man. He humbled Himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the Cross.

Eating and drinking are unique among human activities. They are reflections of the divine will for man’s ultimate beatitude. On the Altar of the Cross, Christ spread out the food and drink of His Body and Blood in order to nourish His Flock that they might avoid a death wherein no hunger is sated, no thirst is quenched, and no suffering ceases. The Life gained and given on the Cross bestows on the faithful a sustenance wherein hunger, not satisfaction, ends. God’s Life grants a fulfillment where thirst, not quenching, is exhausted.

Eating and drinking are a cooperative venture between God, His creation, each man, and all men. Unlike angels, who need no material sustenance, and unlike animals and plants, that have no will to exert in seeking sustenance, man is called to cooperate with God in the care of the bounty of the earth, to cooperate with the natural order God has willed for creation, and to cooperate with his fellows in cultivating and distributing the fruits of God’s grace, nature’s largesse, and man’s toil. In this activity, man’s natural and supernatural essence is brought into play. He must receive the grace of humility to acknowledge his absolute dependence on God. He must use his innate reason to bring forth from the soil, the sea, and the countryside the material necessities for human existence. And he must act on the virtue of charity by which the overwhelming excess of nature is to be shared with all mankind, none burdened with too much, none plagued by too little.

Sowing and harvesting are apt metaphors for God’s work among men. He offers man the privilege of accomplishing the divine will. He includes man in the fruits of a labor which man does not merit nor can he effect on his own. He expresses a wondrous mystery wherein the supernatural and the natural are brought together within the heart of man by way of the hands of man submitting to God and ruling over nature. God gives man satisfaction both in the hopes running high when the seed is sown and in the pleasant toil that comes with those hopes brought to fruition. When the harvest is complete, it becomes the basis for further hope and greater joy in the plantings and yields yet to be. Rest is possible, labor is rewarded, and peace reigns within and without man’s soul.

The wedding feast is a fitting description of Christ’s Kingdom. Union occurs between bodies and souls. Bounty is shared joyfully and fearlessly. Fruitfulness is celebrated for the blessings of the past and the promise of the future. Humility is received by the groom and authority is acknowledged by the bride. The wedding feast flows from all that has gone before and is meant to be a harbinger of what is to come. It provides a symbol of the life that is to be shared henceforth permanently.

Christ’s Cross, the labor of the vineyard, the joy of the harvest, and the bliss of the wedding feast are intimately united in the Mass. The seeds of faith are sown in the lessons and the Gospel, and brought to fruit in the Credo. Thanksgiving for the harvest is rendered in the Offertory. Angelic ecstasies are heard in the Sanctus. And the consummation of all of it occurs in the immolation of the Lamb who, under the forms of Bread and Wine, makes Himself the food and drink by which His Bride is made a Mother, Her many children become the sons of His Father, and His Spirit is poured forth so that death is thrown down and the Kingdom of Life begins His reign on earth as it is in Heaven.

Willingness and even eagerness to pull the feeding tube from Terri Schiavo is a microcosm of man’s wholesale refusal to eat the Bread of Life offered in the Mass of the Catholic Church. Mankind is far more dependent on the real Food and real Drink of the Body and Blood of Christ than any patient in an ICU requires the aid of various apparatuses for physical nourishment. The body starved of food and water dies in time; the soul deprived of Christ’s Body and Blood dies forever. The faithlessness of apostates, heretics, schismatics, pagans, and atheists betray a death wish on the part of most men. They are committing spiritual suicide. It is no surprise that so many of them are now insisting on the “right” to manifest that spiritual reality in law, in medicine, and in fact.

Men capable of denying their need for God and their obligation to obey Him surely will not stop at killing babies, the sick, and the old. It is a short step from that depravity to the desire to kill oneself. Understandably, many have come to loathe the world that the sins of man have wrought; their wish to flee it in death is frightfully reasonable - wholly unfaithful, but horribly logical. Man’s descent into moral depravity has been likened to a slippery slope. Some have described the accelerating fall as a luge. Before long it will be evident even to the most self-deluded that man has indeed leapt over a cliff.

That cliff was first approached by the revolt of the protestants. Enlightenment error, freemasonry, modernism, communism, and secularism have propelled the majority of the world far out over the abyss. There is only one means to arrest this second fall of man: Jesus Christ and Him Crucified. The only way He offers is His Cross. The only avenue to the Cross is the Mass of the Catholic Church. Rejection of the Catholic Church is rejection of Her Lord; rejection of Jesus Christ is rejection of salvation; rejection of salvation is a suicide in which starvation for the Bread of Life is inflicted on the soul and the soul is subjected to dehydration by not quenching her thirst for the font of Living Water that flows alongside the flood of the Precious Blood. That suicide begins in this life on earth, but will have no end in its final perdition.

Conclusion: This Extraordinary Elimination of the Ordinary

Death on demand is the modern American way of life. Euthanasia is now poised to take its place next to assisted suicide and abortion in an unholy trinity of despair. To kill someone out of a perverse sense of compassion, to kill oneself to escape pain, to kill a baby to be free of responsibility are acts that deny faith in the Providence of God, they betray an utter dearth of hope in the promises of His Son to save His lost sheep, and they are an attack on the charity with which the Holy Ghost vivified us at conception and renewed and perfected in us through Baptism. It matters not what kind of legal jargon is applied, the avalanche of empty platitudes mouthed, the protestations of a desire to be humane, there is no way to explain away the fact that killing a human being convicted of no crime is an offense against God Himself and shares no part in the Lord’s clear desire that life be our lot and the gift from Him that we share with each other. The culture of death reflects no will except that which is in conflict with, denial of, and disobedience to the will of God. Killing innocent people is not a loving action that has a source in Heaven. Killing innocent people is a despicable activity spawned in hell.

Cain and Judas are the progenitors of the breed of men who would do murder. Sodom and Gomorrah offer precedent for the principles by which the laws of the United States are applied in the realm of morals. Babel’s curse remains in full force as the self-contradictory denizens of death attempt to make sense of each other’s irrational, capricious, and self-serving insistence that life may be thwarted before conception or birth; prematurely eradicated in sickness or age; and all in the name of living a good life, of living free, and of having a high quality of life. The god moloch marches through the land promising happiness to the living founded on his bloodlust for babes purchasing parents’ pleasures, wives winning peace of minds for their husbands by widowing them, and children celebrating the loss of parents as a liberty for all in the family. Babylon laid low in its whoredom is a veritable virgin queen compared to the harlot that is America butchering her children for profit, devouring her youths for pleasure, and massacring her elderly in rank indifference.

This nation has lost the will to live. Husbands and wives contracept their marriages into sterility. Sodomites by definition pursue a barren lust incapable of generativity. Young people are drugged, both by prescription and by pusher, into a state of catatonia to relieve themselves of the pain come from a meaningless existence, precariously begun when the prophylactic failed, and likely to end when the feeding tube is yanked. Employment, entertainment, education, politics, and new-age self-made religions are diversions from distractions from dementia. The frenetic pace of images on the various screens - computer, tv, movie - that rule our lives is matched by the rate of change within jobs, marriages, and what is considered morally licit. For the souls subject to this reign of terror, death has become not a terror nor an agony nor an enemy, but a release and a relief.

Simplicity is gone from among us. A man and woman wedding in the midst of divine love to raise up children for the divine glory is a foreign concept. Friends spending time with each rather than being entertained by third parties or machines is an alien activity. Citizens laboring for the common good by first being individually good is an unimaginable premise for the body politic. Loving our neighbor as ourselves regardless of ethnicity, social status, or condition of health is not sufficient to prevent us from killing that neighbor - or the self - when self-love demands.

Does a man love himself who kills himself? Does a husband love his wife who watches her slowly die, not because of illness or injury, but from the lack of simple food and water? Does a society know anything of love that lobbies, legislates, and litigates in order to ensure that its members may die whenever, however, and whyever they please?

There is something profoundly wrong when food and water are deemed an extraordinary offer to make to a fellow human being, rich or poor, friend or stranger, strong or sick. Alas! this is to be expected among a people who find it extraordinary to assert that the state is the servant of its citizens, that the sanctity of marriage and the home must be inviolate, and that the laws of God and the love of God must reign supreme in every homeland and in every hearth and in every heart. We have come to a pass in which to be decent means to deal death. Oppression is now defined not as the claim to know what is better for the neighbor by way of laws that advance one’s self interest, but to know what is good for all according to an absolute Law whose benefits include but are not limited to oneself. The burden of proof in human justice is shifting from an assumption in favor of life to the presumption that inflicting death is doing someone a favor.

Inability to do anything to help someone does not translate into permission to hurt that person. The impossibility of a cure does not allow for the aggravation of the condition. Having no means to restore perfect health does not absolve from the obligation to maintain what health remains. Doing no harm does not mean doing nothing. Despair has no place in healthcare, in jurisprudence, or in the heart of a human being with faith in God who must provide for someone he loves.

God calls us into existence. He sustains us in being. He wills us for life. We are made in the image and likeness of God. Our whole hearts, minds, souls, and strengths given to God in love must reflect the divine bias toward life. Men who deny this obligation are themselves destined for eternal death, but already have dead hearts of stone while in this life on earth. Death comes to us all, but life comes after for those whose hearts beat in time with the Sacred Heart of Jesus whose infinite love bestows eternal life.

Choose therefore life that both thou and thy seed may live.

Father Smith, Sacerdos vagus
26 March 2005: Holy Saturday

I thank Father Smith for the incisive and thoroughly Catholic commentary that he has permitted me to post on this site. Father Smith is one of the most gifted priests in the Church at this time. He sees the nature of our ecclesiastical and civil problems very clearly, understanding that we must seek to escape, as far as is possible, from the harmful influences of a culture that is manifestly hostile to the Faith and thus injurious to the salvation of individual souls and to the right ordering of men in their civil affairs.

Father Smith is simply a Catholic. He is presenting Catholic truth. He knows that there is no secular or religiously indifferentist solution to the problems that face us. He knows that we cannot fight secularism and all of the evils engendered thereby with secularism. With can only fight secularism with Catholicism. The people of Our Lady Help of Christians Church in Garden Grove, California, are very privileged to have priests such as Father Patrick Perez as their pastor and Fathers Smith and Sretenovic serving them at this time. Each of these priests is devoted to the restoration of the Social Reign of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen.

William F. Buckley, Jr., does not believe in the establishment of the Social Reign of Christ the King. He believes that a Catholic can dissent from such things as the Church's absolute prohibition against the use of contraception and remain a Catholic in good standing. He is a dissenter on this issue himself. He does not see the Catholic Faith as the only basis for personal happiness and all social order, domestically and internationally. He would do well to read Father Smith's essay above and to accept the Catholic wisdom contained therein.

Mr. Buckley would also do well to consider the words of Pope Leo XIII, found in Sapientiae Christianae, issued in 1890, about how the social evils of Modernity are to be combatted:

The chief elements of this duty consist in professing openly and unflinchingly the Catholic doctrine, and in propagating it to the utmost of our power. For, as is often said, with the greatest truth, there is nothing so hurtful to Christian wisdom as that it should not be known, since it possesses, when loyally received, inherent power to drive away error. So soon as Catholic truth is apprehended by a simple and unprejudiced soul, reason yields assent. Now, faith, as a virtue, is a great boon of divine grace and goodness; nevertheless, the objects themselves to which faith is to be applied are scarcely known in any other way than through the hearing. "How shall they believe Him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? Faith then cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ." Since, then, faith is necessary for salvation, it follows that the word of Christ must be preached. The office, indeed, of preaching, that is, of teaching, lies by divine right in the province of the pastors, namely, of the bishops whom "the Holy Spirit has placed to rule the Church of God.'' It belongs, above all, to the Roman Pontiff, vicar of Jesus Christ, established as head of the universal Church, teacher of all that pertains to morals and faith.

No one, however, must entertain the notion that private individuals are prevented from taking some active part in this duty of teaching, especially those on whom God has bestowed gifts of mind with the strong wish of rendering themselves useful. These, so often as circumstances demand, may take upon themselves, not, indeed, the office of the pastor, but the task of communicating to others what they have themselves received, becoming, as it were, living echoes of their masters in the faith. Such co-operation on the part of the laity has seemed to the Fathers of the Vatican Council so opportune and fruitful of good that they thought well to invite it. "All faithful Christians, but those chiefly who are in a prominent position, or engaged in teaching, we entreat, by the compassion of Jesus Christ, and enjoin by the authority of the same God and Savior, that they bring aid to ward off and eliminate these errors from holy Church, and contribute their zealous help in spreading abroad the light of undefiled faith.''[16] Let each one, therefore, bear in mind that he both can and should, so far as may be, preach the Catholic faith by the authority of his example, and by open and constant profession of the obligations it imposes. In respect, consequently, to the duties that bind us to God and the Church, it should be borne earnestly in mind that in propagating Christian truth and warding off errors the zeal of the laity should, as far as possible, be brought actively into play.

The afterword I appended yesterday to my Easter reflection pretty much sums up some of the major objections being raised to defending Terri Schindler-Schiavo's life by a few prominent Catholics. I will have another commentary on this whole tragedy if, as seems likely right now, Mrs. Schiavo is to die from the death sentence that has been imposed upon her by Judge George Greer. Our prayers, though, must remain with Mrs. Schiavo and her parents and siblings.

There is an effort underway to contact Pope John Paul II so that an appeal for Mrs. Schiavo's life may be made in his name. Although the Pope was unable to speak yesterday while giving his Easter blessing to the crowd assembled in Saint Peter's Square, he is evidently mentally alert. Mr. Stephen M. O'Brien of Staten Island, New York, is thus requesting the following be done:

On January 28, 1999, Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan commuted the death sentence of Darrell J. Mease at the request of Pope John Paul II, who had personally interceded for the condemned man by name:

http://www.outcrybookreview.com/Pope1.htm

If the Pope can intercede for a condemned criminal by name, why shouldn't we beg him to do the same for an innocent woman who is being murdered by the corrupt judicial system of a post-Christian society?

As far as I'm concerned, this argument is unanswerable and overcomes all objections. Consequently, I've made the decision to implore all Catholics to inundate the Vatican with messages asking the Holy Father to implore President Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush to send federal marshals and the National Guard to the death hospice to take Terri into protective custody. Once she's in protective custody, her feeding tube can be restored.

All Catholics should flood the Vatican with e-mails and faxes. Those who aren't shy should be willing to spend money on long-distance telephone calls. Even if an e-mail or fax is sent to the office of one of the cardinals, it should be addressed to the Pope. All messages should begin with this salutation: "Your Holiness:" If a message is sent to a cardinal's office, the first line should be "TO POPE JOHN PAUL II."

T he only Vatican e-mail addresses that appear to be operational at this time are these:

john_paul_ii@vatican.va
PcJustPax@JustPeace.va

The second e-mail address is especially good because it belongs to Cardinal Renato Martino, the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Cardinal Martino issued a magnificent condemnation of Terri's approaching execution. I believe we can be confident that he will see that the Pope is informed of what I hope will be a deluge of e-mails reaching his office.

Let's get the tsunami rolling across the Atlantic! Terri is dying!

Keep and spread the Faith.

Indeed. Once again, folks, Terri Schindler-Schiavo's case is making headlines because she has relatives who want to save her life. Far more common are the people who are being starved and dehydrated to death because no one in their family objects at all. Pope John Paul II condemned all of this on March 20, 2004. There is no wiggle room for anyone who says he is a Catholic and takes the Faith seriously. One can never take any action which has as its only end the death of an innocent human being. Anyone who says otherwise is doing the bidding of the one who hate both bodies and souls and wants to cast both into Gehenna.

Our Lady, Queen of Mercy, pray for us.

Please see Father Smith's own open letter to Pope John Paul II, Father Smith's Open Letter to Pope John Paul II.


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Do No Harm!