Compassion endures. It does not kill!

We must rise up against the state-sanctioned suicide bill

Bishop Edward B. Scharfenberger

“So you could not keep watch with me for one hour?” (Mt 26:50)

Compassion endures. It abides, even with the suffering and dying. Rather than an “it” or a transaction, it is a relationship. A person who is suffering or dying has a name. He or she is more than their diagnosis, more than their pain. Everyone who cares for them is also more than a health care “provider,” more than a nurse or a physician. The “patient” — or suffering one — is a person, whose dignity and identity is not diminished by what or how he or she suffers and may even be ennobled by it and the compassion — or co-suffering of the caregiver, how long and how “patiently” he or she endures.

By contrast, a non-compassionate and dangerous legislative act (see page 6), is on the verge of passing in the Assembly of New York State! Non-compassionate, because it kills the caregiver-patient relationship, reducing it to a transaction. Dangerous, because it kills the person suffering, bordering on genocidal as it spreads to ever-expanding “classes” of suffering people, as regulations dictate. Unless we rise up against it. 

Selective killing. Does it matter whether it is “elective,” said to be “self-chosen,” as opposed to “imposed” or “assisted” by another? It is still killing. Killing a human being is homicide. What is being voted on in the Assembly of New York State is whether another kind of homicide will become legal. If it becomes law, then another form of genocide — or killing according to kind or class — will creep into our social fabric, further eroding respect for the dignity of all human life, whatever stage or condition it is living through.

What has led us to this treacherous precipice? Hardly a leap of faith, or any hope in the rationality and creativity of human relationships. Those who market this “final solution” under the label of compassion want to tug at our heartstrings. Their intent may be sincere: to enable human beings in pain to find freedom from that pain — unburdened by legal consequences — by means of terminating their lives, with some help. Have they consulted their consciences or thought this through? Has unawareness or even indifference to the mystery of human suffering contributed to this life-aborting proposition?

During his first pastoral visit, to the island of Lampedusa, in July 2013, Pope Francis said: “In this world of globalization we have fallen into a globalization of indifference. We are accustomed to the suffering of others, it doesn’t concern us, it’s none of our business.” So now, instead of taking more seriously the depth and meaning of the suffering — physical, emotional and spiritual — we contrive to snuff it out by canceling the sufferers. Cut off from our sphere of concern, they depart from our company. What then becomes of our own humanity? Compassion means suffering with a person in pain, not dispatching them.

It may seem shocking to compare so-called “assisted suicide” to the mass killings of a Hitler or Stalin, but the same demonic logic used by tyrants to rid the world of troublesome people remains. It is only one more way of branding or labeling “inconvenient” people for extinction because their designated class of being human is not acceptable. It might be an ethnic, racial or religious label — Uyghur or Hutu, black or white, Jew, Christian or Muslim. It might be a particular gestational period of human development, born or unborn, or a medical diagnostic category — terminal or incurable. The human life is “assigned” a disvaluation. Does it really matter who performs the assignation? A life is “deemed” not worth living, not worth the effort to accompany or to pay for or to bear with lovingly.

Whenever a human being, or a classified number of human beings (who assigns the class?) falls within an ever-expanding, legally unprotected shadow, the value of all lives is diminished, and human society becomes more inhumane. Whatever label, class or category the dehumanization falls under, it legitimizes the denial and attempt to take away or “snuff out” the inherent, inalienable value of a life acquired at conception just by being human. This is more than a religious or faith-based issue. At no point in the trajectory of human life from conception to natural death does a human being become other than — humanly speaking! — what it was from its inception, regardless of what “happens” to it along the way. The Hamletian “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” acquired or inflicted by abuse, illness, addiction or some other kinds of bondage do not alter a person’s humanity. Must our response to suffering be one of personal denial or indifference or disguised by socially sanitized forms of denial or indifference, euphemized as “death with dignity” or “medical aid in dying”? It is still homicide. Other states may jump off the cliff. Must New York join the herd — instead of leading with our motto: Excelsior ?

I hope we take time to ask ourselves what kind of world we want to leave for our children. If the best we can do to form them morally is to teach them that a person’s life burdens seem too difficult to bear, we abandon not only the person, but any concern or responsibility to at least make an effort to bear some of those burdens ourselves. It is almost universally regarded as a fundamental human activity to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and give drink to the thirsty. Such hungers and needs extend beyond the merely corporal and include spiritual, social and emotional accompaniment. In doing what we say, suffering persons are connected to us. We are a part of them as well. Their lives enrich and help define all our lives. To cancel them out deprives us of their humanizing presence, too.

Has, dare I suggest, a “contraceptive mentality” come home to roost at other extremities of our lives as well? Prophetically, Pope Saint Paul VI, addressing the UN General Assembly (October 4, 1964) said: “You must strive to multiply bread so that it suffices for the tables of mankind, and not rather favor an artificial control of birth, which would be irrational, in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life.” Can we allow ourselves to hear the rationality of that warning? Or has our practice now so deafened our ears — and consciences — that we would celebrate the artificial killing of a human life as something that brings such life — and other lives in a so-called “civilized” society — “dignity?” May God forgive us if we mess this up. Our children may not. When they turn the tables on us “compassionately” in our own hour of suffering, it would only be what we taught them.