New Vatican document rejects ‘disproportionate intervention’ to prolong life
August 09, 2024
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CWN Editor's Note: A new document from the Pontifical Academy for Life, entitled A Small Lexicon on End of Life, has renewed debate on withholding food and water from comatose patients.
The new document reaffirms the Church’s opposition to assisted suicide and euthanasia. But the Lexicon also echoes the 2024 statement from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas Infinita, in arguing against “disproportionate intervention.”
More specifically, the Lexicon says that medical workers are “required to respect the will of the patient who refuses them with a conscious and informed decision, even expressed in advance in anticipation of the possible loss of the ability express oneself and choose.”
In an interview with Vatican News, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, insisted that the Lexicon simply confirms the consistent teaching of the Church. He recalled that in 1956, Pope Pius XII said that medical treatments should be excluded if they involve “excessive burden or significant physical discomfort” for a patient nearing death.
If the patient is comatose or otherwise unable to judge for himself whether he wants aggressive treatment, the Lexicon says that “an extra dose of wisdom is needed, because today the temptation to insist on treatments that produce powerful effects on the body, but which sometimes do not benefit the integral good of the person, is more insidious.” When death is inevitable, the Lexicon cautions against “therapeutic stubbornness,” a “reductive” approach to illness “which ends up focusing on individual functions of the organism rather than the overall good of the person.”
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