End run around the bishops

Catholics in dissent of Church teaching and episcopal authority have tried this for decades. A group of them published something in a Jesuit journal in February taking issue with the pope’s teaching on caring for cognitively impaired patients. They’re concerned the bishops are about to reaffirm that teaching and strengthen it…..the teaching that people deserve food and water.

Now, as the USCCB is about to open its biannual meeting, a group of Catholic scholars has published a response to that “consortium” of bioethics directors at Jesuit universities.

This is worth reading in full.

A few snips…

[The consortium’s] aim is to influence the American bishops against amending the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERDs) to bring the directives in line with the March 2004 teaching of Pope John Paul II on….the so-called persistent vegetative state (PVS).

In particular…

Directive 58 of the ERDs states that “there should be a presumption in favor of providing nutrition and ­hydration to all patients … as long as this is of sufficient benefit to ­outweigh the burdens involved to the patient.”(3) The reference to burdens to the patient is interpreted by the ­Consortium in light of the preceding directive, no. 57, which states that persons “may forgo extraordinary or disproportionate means of preserving life” and that “disproportionate means are those that in the patient’s judgment do not offer a reasonable hope of benefit or entail an excessive burden, or impose excessive expense on the family or the ­community.”(

The Consortium concludes that a legitimate ground for deciding to forgo food and water according to the ERDs is excessive expense to the patient, family, or community. But this is not the case. ­Directive 58 speaks only of burdens “to the patient.” It says ­nothing about broadening this to match the language about ­burdens on family and society found in directive 57.

Why not? Because the chief burden on family and society is cost—not necessarily cost of the feeding per se, but the total cost of caring for a person in a helpless state. But if this is the burden to be avoided, are we not intending the patient’s death by removing food and water?

Yes, to make clear the ulterior motive.

The consortium claims that the practice of giving food and water is now considered to be “medical treatment”.

But, the scholars assert in their reply that “this misses the point of the papal teaching.” The Pope’s comment, they say, “is not a judgment about the ­­complexity of health care procedures. … Feeding disabled people is not a ­medical ­treatment, even though a medical procedure may be ­required. It is a form of care owed to all persons, including patients in a PVS.”

The scholars point out that when the current edition of the ERDs were released in 2001, the bishops presumed the need for giving food and water to all patients, but they did not include an explicit teaching on PVS because the question had not yet been settled by the Magisterium. But now that the Pope has drawn out this teaching, they say, the directives should be made more explicit.

“While the authors of this document,” the scholars say, “believe that the ERDs are in basic compliance with John Paul II’s teaching that is necessary to provide nutrition and hydration to all patients who are not imminently dying, this misinterpretation of the ERDs by the Consortium leads us to believe that perhaps some revision would be beneficial.”

Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition Canada, has applauded the scholars for their defense of life, calling their work “an excellent defense of the reality that to directly and intentionally dehydrate a person to death, who is not otherwise dying, is ‘slow’ euthanasia.”

He warns that the acceptance of this practice could easily lead to even graver forms of euthanasia. “If we continue to turn a blind eye to the intentional dehydration of people who are not otherwise dying (slow euthanasia),” he says, “the result will be a strong demand for the legalization of death by injection.

Alex was on ‘America’s Lifeline’ Saturday, with this compelling argument.