Flying in the Face of Catholicism

by Thomas A. Droleskey

 

March 18, 2005. That is the new date upon which Judge George Greer has ruled that Michael Schiavo may once again remove the tubes administering food and water to his wife, Mrs. Terri Schindler-Schiavo, who suffered some kind of episode fifteen years ago this very day that damaged her brain and has left her dependent upon others to care for her. Three weeks. Three more weeks. Three more weeks of prayer to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart that the further legal and political efforts of Terri's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, may bear fruit and might result in the saving of this victim-soul's life from an unjust and immoral execution by starvation and dehydration under the cover of an illicit law.

The new deadline for Mrs. Schiavo's execution makes it important once again to stress how those seeking to save Mrs. Schiavo from a cruel execution by starvation and dehydration have been betrayed consistently by the Catholic bishops of the State of Florida. A statement on Mrs. Schiavo's situation was issued by the Florida Catholic Conference on February 15, 2005. The statement flies in the face of Catholicism. The statement of the Florida Catholic Conference ignores entirely Pope John Paul II's March 20, 2004, reiteration of the simple Catholic moral principle, deduced from the Fifth Commandment and the precepts of the natural law that flow therefrom, that it is not permissible to remove food and water from patients who are said to be in a "vegetative state," a phrase that the Holy Father said quite correctly does not conform to an actual medial diagnosis. There is not one reference in the February 15, 2005, statement of the Florida Catholic Conference to the Pope's March 20, 2004, address to an international congress, "Life-Sustaining Treatments and the Vegetative State: Scientific Advances and Ethical Dilemmas," that took place in Rome, Italy. Not one. Zero. Zip. Zilch. While the Pope's statement is couched in conciliarspeak ("solidarity," "deontology") and fails to address the matter of redemptive suffering, it is a stinging repudiation of the heretical moral theology known as proportionalism, popularized by Father Richard McCormick, S.J., of Georgetown University, that contends that a preponderance of good motives and extenuating circumstances can make an objectively immoral act licit to perform.

To understand the extent to which the statement issued by the Florida Catholic Conference is at odds with the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church concerning the removal of food and water from patients who cannot feed themselves, it is important to reproduce that statement and to then examine it paragraph-by-paragraph, comparing it with the Pope's 2004 address, which can be found en toto on the EWTN and Vatican websites.

This is the statement issued by the Florida Catholic Conference on February 15, 2005:

The case of Terri Schiavo is clearly a tragic one that has occupied concern of many people both within and beyond Florida. Bishop Robert Lynch of the Diocese of St. Petersburg and the Bishops of the Florida Catholic Conference have issued several statements as the case has unfolded. These can be viewed in their entirety on the front page of Florida Catholic Conference website, www.flacathconf.org.

At this juncture, we wish to reiterate several themes from those statements:

1. Lament Confusion as to Her Condition

We lament that there remains – in the eyes of many – confusion as to Terri Schiavo’s actual condition and prospects for her treatment. We have continually requested that parties involved seek greater resolution in this regard.

2. Presumption for Nutrition and Hydration

The Catholic community begins discussions regarding the withdrawal and withholding of artificial nutrition and hydration with a presumption in favor of their provision. However, when the burdens exceed the benefits of providing them, they may be withdrawn or withheld. We note that what is too burdensome for one person may not be too burdensome for another.

3. Need for Health Care Advance Directives

That Terri Schiavo left no written instructions as to whom should make such decisions in her absence (a healthcare surrogate), or what criteria ought to be used to make such determinations has contributed to the difficulty of this case. This is not rare. Studies indicate that approximately 20% of adults have completed such tools. We urge all adults to utilize written directives, and we offer a Catholic Declaration on Life and Death, which can be found on the website.

4. Need for Ethical Decision-making

It is also important to note that such health care surrogates and medical directions can never “trump” or override appropriate moral considerations. In this regard, Catholic teaching notes that the proxy may not deliberately cause a patient’s death or refuse ordinary and normal treatment, even if he or she believes a patient would have made such a decision.

5. Presume Best Intentions

We urge people to refrain from excessive rhetoric and misguided zeal, against which Pope Pius XI cautioned. There are many unanswered questions in this case, and it is necessary to presume upon the best intentions of all involved until shown otherwise.

6. Opposition to Euthanasia

We oppose euthanasia. While withdrawal of Terri Schiavo’s nutrition and hydration will lead to her death, if this is being done because its provision would be too burdensome for her, it could be acceptable. If it is being done to intentionally cause her death, this would be wrong.

7. Join in Prayer for Terri Schiavo and Family

We continue to ask all people of good will to join us in prayer for Terri Schiavo, whose spiritual needs are being met by clergy of the Diocese of St. Petersburg, and for all involved in this difficult case, especially her husband, parents and siblings.

It is important to examine this statement in its particulars:

We lament that there remains – in the eyes of many – confusion as to Terri Schiavo’s actual condition and prospects for her treatment. We have continually requested that parties involved seek greater resolution in this regard.

What confusion? Mrs. Schiavo is a brain-damaged woman who has an immortal soul created in the image and likeness of the Blessed Trinity and redeemed by the shedding of the Most Precious Blood of the God-Man, Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, on the wood of the Holy Cross. What do her prospects for recovery have to do with her absolute right to the provision of food and water? Pope John Paul II dismissed the diagnosis of "permanent vegetative state," indicating that the condition of a brain-damaged individual does not in the slightest detract from his or her right to nutrition and hydration:

In particular, the term permanent vegetative state has been coined to indicate the condition of those patients whose "vegetative state" continues for over a year. Actually, there is no different diagnosis that corresponds to such a definition, but only a conventional prognostic judgment, relative to the fact that the recovery of patients, statistically speaking, is ever more difficult as the condition of vegetative state is prolonged in time.

However, we must neither forget nor underestimate that there are well-documented cases of at least partial recovery even after many years; we can thus state that medical science, up until now, is still unable to predict with certainty who among patients in this condition will recover and who will not.

3. Faced with patients in similar clinical conditions, there are some who cast doubt on the persistence of the "human quality" itself, almost as if the adjective "vegetative" (whose use is now solidly established), which symbolically describes a clinical state, could or should be instead applied to the sick as such, actually demeaning their value and personal dignity. In this sense, it must be noted that this term, even when confined to the clinical context, is certainly not the most felicitous when applied to human beings.

In opposition to such trends of thought, I feel the duty to reaffirm strongly that the intrinsic value and personal dignity of every human being do not change, no matter what the concrete circumstances of his or her life. A man, even if seriously ill or disabled in the exercise of his highest functions, is and always will be a man , and he will never become a "vegetable" or an "animal".

Even our brothers and sisters who find themselves in the clinical condition of a "vegetative state" retain their human dignity in all its fullness. The loving gaze of God the Father continues to fall upon them, acknowledging them as his sons and daughters, especially in need of help.

The most problematic part of the statement issued by the Florida Catholic Conference is in its second paragraph:

The Catholic community begins discussions regarding the withdrawal and withholding of artificial nutrition and hydration with a presumption in favor of their provision. However, when the burdens exceed the benefits of providing them, they may be withdrawn or withheld. We note that what is too burdensome for one person may not be too burdensome for another.

There are no "discussions" to be had regarding the withdrawal and the withholding of food and water, no matter how they are delivered. Catholics, who understand that the graces won for them on the wood of the Holy Cross by Our Lord are always sufficient to bear whatever crosses they are asked to bear and that there is no cross we are asked to bear that is the equal of what one of our least venial sins caused Him to suffer in His Sacred Humanity on that infamous gibbet, do not consider the cross of another to be a "burden." We do not need to be pressed into service as was Simon of Cyrene with his sons Rufus and Alexander. We give love, imitating the love of the Divine Redeemer. We give support, following the example of Our Lady, who stood so valiantly by the foot of her Divine Son's Holy Cross as she watched the horror that our sins inflicted on Him, suffering the piercing of her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart by the sword of sorrow that Simeon had prophesied in the Temple at the moment of her purification. None of us suffers as our sins deserve. Not one of our sorrows in caring for another can be compared to the suffering of Our Lady during her Son's Passion and Death. Where is there any reference to this at all in any of the statements issued by the Florida Catholic Conference or by the Most Reverend Robert N. Lynch, the Bishop of Saint Petersburg, Florida? To the extent that there are financial burdens imposed by the provision of long-term care, as Pope John Paul II noted in his March 20, 2004, address, the Church herself has the obligation to provide assistance to assure that such care will continue without interruption.

Pope John Paul II spoke directly to the subject discussed in the second paragraph of the Florida Catholic Conference's statement of February 15, 2005:

4. Medical doctors and health-care personnel, society and the Church have moral duties toward these persons from which they cannot exempt themselves without lessening the demands both of professional ethics and human and Christian solidarity.

The sick person in a vegetative state, awaiting recovery or a natural end, still has the right to basic health care (nutrition, hydration, cleanliness, warmth, etc.), and to the prevention of complications related to his confinement to bed. He also has the right to appropriate rehabilitative care and to be monitored for clinical signs of eventual recovery.

I should like particularly to underline how the administration of water and food, even when provided by artificial means, always represents a natural means of preserving life, not a medical act. Its use, furthermore, should be considered, in principle, ordinary and proportionate , and as such morally obligatory, insofar as and until it is seen to have attained its proper finality, which in the present case consists in providing nourishment to the patient and alleviation of his suffering.

The obligation to provide the "normal care due to the sick in such cases" (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Iura et Bona , p. IV) includes, in fact, the use of nutrition and hydration (cf. Pontifical Council "Cor Unum", Dans le Cadre , 2, 4, 4; Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers, Charter of Health Care Workers , n. 120). The evaluation of probabilities, founded on waning hopes for recovery when the vegetative state is prolonged beyond a year, cannot ethically justify the cessation or interruption of minimal care for the patient, including nutrition and hydration. Death by starvation or dehydration is, in fact, the only possible outcome as a result of their withdrawal. In this sense it ends up becoming, if done knowingly and willingly, true and proper euthanasia by omission.

In this regard, I recall what I wrote in the Encyclical Evangelium Vitae , making it clear that "by euthanasia in the true and proper sense must be understood an action or omission which by its very nature and intention brings about death, with the purpose of eliminating all pain"; such an act is always "a serious violation of the law of God , since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person" (n. 65).

Besides, the moral principle is well known, according to which even the simple doubt of being in the presence of a living person already imposes the obligation of full respect and of abstaining from any act that aims at anticipating the person's death.

There you have it, my friends. "The evaluation of probabilities, founded on waning hopes for recovery when the vegetative state is prolonged beyond a year, cannot ethically justify the cessation or interruption of minimal care for the patient, including nutrition and hydration. Death by starvation or dehydration is, in fact, the only possible outcome as a result of their withdraw. In this sense it ends up becoming, if done knowingly and willingly, true and proper euthanasia by omission." This statement of Pope John Paul II's is completely at odds with the assertion of the Florida Catholic Conference that "when the burdens exceed the benefits of providing them, they may be withdrawn or withheld. We note that what is too burdensome for one person may not be too burdensome for another." As noted above, the bearing of one's cross is not deemed to be a burden beyond one's capacity to carry, unless, that is, Our Lord did not really mean it when He said, "My yoke is sweet and My burden is light."

Paragraphs three and four of the Florida Catholic Conference's February 15, 2005, statement proceed from the false premise that it is permissible to remove food and water:

That Terri Schiavo left no written instructions as to whom should make such decisions in her absence (a healthcare surrogate), or what criteria ought to be used to make such determinations has contributed to the difficulty of this case. This is not rare. Studies indicate that approximately 20% of adults have completed such tools. We urge all adults to utilize written directives, and we offer a Catholic Declaration on Life and Death, which can be found on the website.

It is also important to note that such health care surrogates and medical directions can never “trump” or override appropriate moral considerations. In this regard, Catholic teaching notes that the proxy may not deliberately cause a patient’s death or refuse ordinary and normal treatment, even if he or she believes a patient would have made such a decision.

We do need "living wills." Catholics should be well-instructed by their shepherds as to what constitutes the morality of given acts, which is one of the reason that the Church, in the glories of the Tradition that, sadly, has been consigned to the memory hole by the ethos of conciliarism that has such a hold on the Holy Father himself, had a annual cycle of preaching. Priests were supposed to review the basics of the Faith, including the meaning of the Ten Commandments as entrusted to and explicated by Holy Mother Church, thus equipping their parishioners with the ability think and to act as Catholics. It is supposed to be part of the sensus fidei that any act that has as its only immediate end the death of an innocent human being is always and in all circumstances wrong no matter any and all subjective considerations.

The statement by the Florida Catholic Conference urges Catholics to provide "written directives" in one paragraph but admits that such directives can never "trump appropriate moral considerations." Herein lies the rub, however: the use of the phrase "ordinary and normal treatment," implying that the provision of food and water by means of tubes is somehow extraordinary and abnormal, something that the Pope specifically rejected in his March 20, 2004, statement.

Paragraph 5 of the February 15, 2005, statement issued by the Florida Catholic Conference states:

We urge people to refrain from excessive rhetoric and misguided zeal, against which Pope Pius XI cautioned. There are many unanswered questions in this case, and it is necessary to presume upon the best intentions of all involved until shown otherwise.

Misguided zeal? An innocent woman has been threatened with a cruel execution by means of starvation and dehydration as a result of the efforts of her faithless, adulterous husband, a man who has father children with another woman as his wife remained in need of his physical presence at her bedside. This woman, Terri Schindler-Schiavo has loving parents and friends who want to care for her. Why does not Michael Schiavo simply turn guardianship of the wife who he considers to be a burden over to the human beings who want to provide her the love that they would provide to the Divine Redeemer Himself? Misguided zeal? Not at all. Simply a clear statement of the facts.

In a similar vein, it is not a misguided zeal to denounce in the clearest possible terms the casuistry of the flawed moral theology underlying the statements of Bishop Robert Lynch and the Florida Catholic Conference. It is our clear duty as members of the Catholic Church to call our shepherds to correction when they assert things that are contrary to the Deposit of Faith. It cannot be be the case the Renato Cardinal Martino, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, who has called for Terri Schindler-Schiavo's life to be spared in absolute terms, and the Florida Catholic Conference are both correct. Time will tell, though, whether the pressure of the American hierarchy will force Cardinal Martino to reverse himself and to "nuance" his position as happened last year concerning the controversy over the administration of Holy Communion to pro-abortion politicians. For the time being, however, Cardinal Martino and the Florida Catholic Conference are at odds. It remains to be seen whether Cardinal Martino will continue to reaffirm Mrs. Schiavo's absolute right to food and water, no matter how they are administered, or whether the Florida Catholic Conference will admit that its February 15, 2005, statement flies in the face of the Catholic Faith.

Paragraph 6 of the statement issued by the Florida Catholic Conference states:

We oppose euthanasia. While withdrawal of Terri Schiavo’s nutrition and hydration will lead to her death, if this is being done because its provision would be too burdensome for her, it could be acceptable. If it is being done to intentionally cause her death, this would be wrong.

Once again, there is no justification for the withdrawal of food and water, as noted above. Pope John Paul II noted:

Considerations about the "quality of life", often actually dictated by psychological, social and economic pressures, cannot take precedence over general principles.

First of all, no evaluation of costs can outweigh the value of the fundamental good which we are trying to protect, that of human life. Moreover, to admit that decisions regarding man's life can be based on the external acknowledgment of its quality, is the same as acknowledging that increasing and decreasing levels of quality of life, and therefore of human dignity, can be attributed from an external perspective to any subject, thus introducing into social relations a discriminatory and eugenic principle.

Moreover, it is not possible to rule out a priori that the withdrawal of nutrition and hydration, as reported by authoritative studies, is the source of considerable suffering for the sick person, even if we can see only the reactions at the level of the autonomic nervous system or of gestures. Modern clinical neurophysiology and neuro-imaging techniques, in fact, seem to point to the lasting quality in these patients of elementary forms of communication and analysis of stimuli.

The February 15, 2005, statement of the Florida Catholic Conference is completely at odds with Catholic moral teaching. It is humanistic and naturalistic, disregarding the supernatural dimensions of redemptive suffering and the sufficiency of the graces won for us by Our Lord on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday to bear whatever crosses we are asked to bear, doing so without complaint as we offer all of our sufferings lovingly to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. This does not mean that Pope John Paul II's March 20, 2004, statement, couched in his trademark personalism favored by the Lublin University at which he taught for some years, is the best and most succinct summary that could be given on the subject. The Pope could have simply reiterated Catholic moral teaching and left it at that, elevating his discussion with a reminder of the necessity of redemptive suffering (which he has done in other contexts on other occasions, to be sure). Minimally, though, the Pope left no question at all in his March 20, 2004, statement concerning the immorality of the removal of food and water, something that the Florida Catholic Conference said quite positively could in fact be done in the case of Mrs. Terri Schinlder-Schiavo.

Once again, it is very telling that the February 15, 2005, statement of the Florida Catholic Conference nowhere mentions the Pope's March 20, 2004, address. Bishop Robert N. Lynch has nowhere and at no time acknowledged the Pope's March 20, 2004, address, just as he ignored entirely this Holy Father's consistent exhortations in behalf of solemn Eucharistic Adoration when he, Bishop Lynch, issued an edict nearly five years ago to ban all periods of solemn Eucharistic Exposition and Adoration in the parishes of the Diocese of Saint Petersburg except on one occasion annually. As I have noted before, it is the Holy Father himself who appointed Bishop Lynch to the See of Saint Petersburg. It is the Holy Father who has refused to remove him, thus permitting him to deconstruct Catholic teaching and to hide behind the obfuscations and misrepresentations of the Florida Catholic Conference as one of his own sheep faces an immoral execution under the cover of an illicit law. The tragedy of this whole situation has been compounded by the toleration of theological dissent of the highest order while at the same time those who cleave uncompromisingly to the authentic Tradition of the Catholic Church are deemed to be schismatic, disloyal, disobedient.

Just as the graces won for us by Our Lord on the wood of the Holy Cross are sufficient to meet the personal crosses we are asked to bear in our own daily lives, so, too, are they sufficient to deal with the larger crisis in the life of the Church at present. We must continue to pray to Our Lady that Terri Schinlder-Schiavo's life will be spared; and we must continue to pray that the errors of Russia, which are those of Modernity in the world and Modernism in the Church, that have brought us to the point of bishops issuing letters in contradiction of the Fifth Commandment, will find a foe in some pope who is courageous and faithful enough to actually consecrate Russia with all of the bishops of the world to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. While we continue to plant seeds in the meantime until this is done, we nevertheless tremble at what Our Lady told Sister Lucia: that entire nations will be annihilated (that is, brought to nothing) if the Consecration of Russia was not done before she, Sister Lucia died. The fact that Successors of the Apostles can actually justify the removal of food and water reminds us that a more generalized chastisement cannot be too far off.

Telephone calls placed to officials in the Diocese of Saint Petersburg and at the Florida Catholic Conference have gone unanswered.

Our Lady, Help of Christians, pray for Terri Schindler-Schiavo.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for Pope John Paul II, especially as he suffers at present.

Saints Jude, Rita, and Philomena, pray for us in these times when more and more "impossible" cases are in need of your loving intervention.