News Item: : UK's Latest Appalling Threat to the Vulnerable
(Category: Torch of The Faith News)
Posted by admin
Saturday 18 August 2018 - 13:42:11

A procession of souls being taken in wheelchairs through the domain at Lourdes; demonstrating that one does not eradicate suffering by eradicating those who suffer. Human suffering finds its deepest answer in the Cross of Christ, in His promise of the Resurrection and in the truly Christian charity which flows from those central mysteries of our Faith.

Just a couple of weeks ago, we lamented the fact that the UK's Supreme Court had made it possible for British doctors to withdraw life-sustaining nutritional supplies from patients suffering from permanent vegetative state (PVS) or minimially conscious state (MCS), without even needing to apply anymore to the Court of Protection, provided that they had the ''permission'' of a patient's family.

In response to that dire rejection of God's Law and human dignity, I posted an article which reiterated the truth that food, nutrition and oxygen are not extra medical treatments, but the ethical bare minimum of care which has to be given to patients who are suffering.

At the conclusion to that article, I reflected that all British people were now in danger from such enforced euthanasia. This is because none of us ever knows whether such a threat may be forced upon us in a society which has rejected God and His Holy Law.

It is, as Evangelium Vitae so clearly teaches, ''We have to go to the heart of the tragedy being experienced by modern man: the eclipse of the sense of God and man, typical of a social and cultural climate dominated by secularism, which, with its ubiquitous tentacles, succeeds at times in putting Christian communities themselves to the test. Those who allow themselves to be influenced by this climate easily fall into a sad vicious circle: when the sense of God is lost, there is also a tendency to lose the sense of man'' (EV 21).

Such existential danger to human life in the UK, has only increased dramatically this week, with the news that the British Medical Association (BMA) has now proposed new ''guidelines'', recommending that doctors be allowed to also withdraw tubes supplying food and water to those who cannot feed themselves - even in cases where such persons could live for many years with the right level of care and support.

In a disgracefully callous-sounding section of their proposals, and according to a report in the Catholic Herald, the BMA has proposed that this ''authority'' (!) to end the lives of those near death, or in vegetative or minimally conscious states, be extended to also include ''the much larger group of patients who have multiple co-morbidities, frailty, or degenerative neurological conditions.''

These are later spelled out in the proposals as including advanced dementia, Parkinson's or Huntington's disease and potentially stroke patients and others with brain injuries described as ''rapidly progressing''.

These ''proposals'' are evil in their very essence, but to families caring for vulnerable loved ones, their gravity hits home with particular force.

What a truly horrible country we are becoming!

Although such proposals for what is essentially a ''licence to kill'' may seem so extreme as to remain unlikely, and it is heartening to see a number of doctors already standing up to reject them, the fact that they are being put forward at all by the BMA is a very disturbing development indeed.

As Catholics we would suggest that mounting a robust defence of vulnerable human life against these gathering threats would be a key and immediate task facing the Bishops of England and Wales.

Alas, it appears from the active involvement of some, and from the strange silence of others, that ''Queering the Church'' is much more in their line...

St. Joseph, Patron of a Happy and Holy Death - pray for us! 

St. Camillus de Lellis - pray for us!           

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This news item is from Torch of The Faith
( http://www.torchofthefaith.com/news.php?extend.1762 )