Euthanasia: The Apparent Good

“The culture of death is voracious. Once it begins to feed, it is never satiated; the categories of the killable are never finally enough.”- Wesley J. Smith

Exactly 109 years ago, the Great War was still raging, while the Anzac troops were looking forward to eventually returning to their homes. One of the Seers, Lucia, asked Our Lady in Fatima whether She would grant some of the requests entrusted to her by the people. The Virgin Mary replied:

“They must amend their lives and ask forgiveness for their sins.”

Looking sad, she added:

“Do not offend the Lord our God anymore, because He is already so much offended!”

{If the people amend, the war will be over, and if they do not amend their ways, the world will come to an end.}

Correcting someone is a duty of love towards our neighbour. (Mt 18:15)

The Almighty does send punishment as a means of encouraging repentance, and there is ample precedent for this in history and Sacred Scripture. (Gen 6:1–8; Gen 19:1–29; Ex 9:27; Dt 32:4; Ps 7:13–16; Is 10:1–13; Mk 13:1–2; Rom 3:3–8; Rev 8:1–13; Rev 9:1–21)

Therefore, God can use either people or the forces of nature when evil goes too far, when it is no longer merely human weakness and becomes prevalent.

For all those in the Land Down Under who have, perhaps accidentally, somehow forgotten, it must be clearly stated that assisted suicide is in direct contradiction to the foundational moral teaching communicated by God in the Fifth Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill’ (Ex 20:13).

Assisted Dying in Australia

In August, the Northern Territory legalised voluntary assisted dying, thus making VAD legal across every Australian state and territory for the first time. Almost all parliamentarians backed the bill, though several amendments were turned down during the debate.

Marie-Clare Boothby, the NT Attorney-General and a strong advocate of euthanasia, said: “This is a deeply personal issue for many Territorians, and it goes to the heart of many of our core values as a Territory – certainty, compassion, and the freedom to choose.”

More than three decades ago, its initial bill was overturned by the Commonwealth, hindering the development of the Culture of Death.

Years went by, and the legalisation of voluntary assisted dying in Australia happened quickly. Victoria became the first state to pass VAD legislation in 2017, with the law taking effect in 2019. Other states followed soon after, with Western Australia, Tasmania, South Australia, Queensland, and New South Wales introducing their own schemes between 2019 and 2021.

The Australian nation is in great turmoil, and those who should provide us with moral leadership are either completely silent or dithering as they assess the political landscape in the hope of making the most of any crisis for partisan gain.

In 2023, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who identifies as Catholic, said in an interview with Neil Mitchell: “I support voluntary assisted dying, but with very strict conditions to make sure that appropriate protections are in place.”

In July 2026, the Labor Party, Australia’s ruling party, endorsed the removal of federal restrictions on teleconsultations for the approval of euthanasia and changed its constitution to give members of parliament a conscience vote on future voluntary assisted dying legislation, which reduced costs and expanded access to this practice in the Land Down Under.

In an interview with The Catholic Weekly on tele-health assessments, Dr Joanne Wright, a psychiatrist practising in Sydney, indicated the presence of ambient coercion, especially when money is involved. “Asking the patient ‘Are you being coerced?’ is clearly a very blunt instrument and likely to miss coercion and situations of emotional and financial abuse. We know that such abuse is common in the Australian population. […] Further, given the way coercive control can restrict a person’s autonomy and deny their personhood, self-reports of controlling behaviour are likely to underestimate the true prevalence.” she said.

More than 7,200 people have been euthanised since it became legal in Victoria in June 2019, which makes many Catholics in this beautiful country deeply concerned. As stated by Alisdair Hungerford-Morgan, chief executive of Right To Life, “Euthanasia deaths in Victoria have risen by 400% in five years and they rose by nearly 60% in the last year alone.”

One does not have to peer into a crystal ball to see that this number will continue to increase every year. According to a survey published by The Australian, deaths through VAD now account for an estimated two to three per cent of all deaths nationally.

Equally alarming is the way it turns doctors and nurses who take part in these legally sanctioned deaths from healers into agents of death, running directly counter to the “do no harm” principle of the Hippocratic Oath that has shaped medical ethics in Western societies for more than 2,000 years. 

The Voice of the Church

The Catholic Church maintains her stance that euthanasia is “gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator” (CCC 2324).

Decades ago, Pope John Paul II warned that this would happen. In 1993, in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, he wrote:

“…the root of modern totalitarianism is to be found in the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person who, as the visible image of the invisible God, is therefore by his very nature the subject of rights which no one may violate: no individual, group, class, nation or State.”

As early as 2024, Bishop Charles Gauci of Darwin expressed grave concern about voluntary assisted dying, describing it as the opening of Pandora’s box.

 Speaking to Vatican News, the Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, OP, outlined the areas in which the Church must step in:

“We are by far the biggest providers of alternatives to euthanasia, of palliative care for people towards the end of life, of good pastoral care, respite care for the families who are caring for the dying and the elderly,” 

When Queensland was leading the way on VAD, the Bishop of Townsville, Tim Harris, said:

“This is nothing to be proud of and is more of an indictment of the system that has been set up to facilitate such a horror as state-sanctioned suicide.” (Rom 14:7–8).

Bishop Daniel Meagher, the delegate for the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference’s euthanasia taskforce, said in an interview with The Catholic Weekly Sydney:

“We will use all means at our disposal to promote an understanding of the goodness, dignity and sacredness of human life and how to trust in the loving presence of God in all the ups and downs of life.”

Killing for Love

On the night of 15 July 1924, a revolver shot rang out in one of the wards of a Paris hospital. The nurse who rushed to the scene found Stanisława Umińska kneeling beside the bed of the patient, Jan Żyznowski, holding a pistol in her hand. 

Stanisława was arrested and brought before a French court, and the trial was reported in newspapers across Europe. 

The deliberations of the tribunal lasted just five minutes, and Stanisława was acquitted. The judge was said to have told her: 

“Please return to Poland and tell them that we in France have a heart.” 

“A woman who was capable of such an act, tragic though it was, freeing the man she loved from cruel suffering, cannot be treated by the court as an ordinary murderer,” Liberté wrote.

Public opinion also absolved her, calling her the “angel of death.” This case, however, had tragic social consequences, contributing to a growing sense that human life was of ever-decreasing value in the eyes of others. (1 Cor 5:6–8) Almost immediately, other high-profile killings followed. In one such instance, a compassionate woman killed her sister because she was ill. 

They had been together for well over a year, and Stanisława was utterly devoted to Jan — he had become the centre of her world. Then it was discovered that he was suffering from liver cancer. Jan travelled to Paris, where he underwent radium treatment. As his condition worsened, Stanisława kept vigil at his bedside day and night. She gave him injections of morphine, which brought relief only for a brief time.

Years later, Stanisława recalled that when she had placed the gun against Żyznowski’s head, she heard a voice in her heart saying, “Do not kill.”

She was tormented by remorse.

In her memoirs, she wrote:

“I repeat: I had no right to do it. Jan did not tell me to; he only asked me once before, in Warsaw… He was so strong, so steadfast, and besides, he did not know that there was no hope left for him. He loved life and hated death. I wanted to spare him the knowledge that he was going to die. Or perhaps I wanted to spare myself, afraid that I would be unable to bear witnessing such inhuman suffering… […] Today I know that Jan is saved and that I am his breath and that my being alive is his salvation. But I also know that, by doing what I did then, I harmed society. Has it forgiven me?… And I ask once more: Does my whole life testify that it was not permitted?”

After returning to Poland, Stanisława made several attempts to return to her profession as a theatre actress, but all her efforts proved futile. She began looking for a place for herself in a religious congregation so that she could, at least in some way, make amends to God for what she had done. 

In 1927, with the consent of Mother Wincenta Jaroszewska, OSBSam, she was accepted into the Association of the “Samaritans”, which, in 1932, became the Congregation of the Benedictine Samaritan Sisters of the Cross of Christ, in which she spent 50 years of her life.

In secular life, Stanisława had played twenty distinguished roles on the stage of the Polish Theatre in Warsaw. She was regarded as one of the foremost Polish actresses after the Great War and was expected to enjoy a lengthy career, not only nationally but also internationally.

Yet, in 1936, Stanisława took her final vows and adopted the religious name Benigna.

For twenty years, she served as mother superior in various religious houses. She ran a home for morally wayward girls aged between fifteen and twenty in Henryków, then a small settlement on the outskirts of Warsaw.

On one occasion, she took the girls to one of the best tailors in the capital and had the latest fashionable suits made for them. This gesture truly won their hearts.

“I did not know that the soul matures through suffering,” she confessed.

During the German occupation, Stanisława was involved in establishing an underground theatre there, run in the true spirit of Christ, which attracted more than 2,000 spectators. The best-known production was Pastorałka (Christmas carol), first presented in 1942. 

Thanks to her active efforts, twenty performances were subsequently mounted in collaboration with the eminent theatre director Leon Schiller. Had the Gestapo discovered what was taking place, she could have been sent to Auschwitz immediately.

She also helped to hide girls of Jewish origin, thirteen of whom survived the war.

“No one has the right to take a life at any stage, whether it is abortion or euthanasia. We have no right to interrupt the course of life that God has ordained for a person. Let us not take this burden upon ourselves,” one of the Benedictine sisters said.

“Her life clearly showed how God’s grace can transform a person,” said the Benedictine Sister Anuncjata Zdunek.

Sr Benigna died on Christmas Day in 1977, at the age of seventy-six.

The Unrecognised Gift

There is a sociocultural tendency to “conceal death.” In Western societies strongly focused on material prosperity, death can come to be regarded as devoid of meaning. Rather than confronting the questions it raises, some people therefore see an earlier and painless death as a way of avoiding them. The so-called “culture of well-being” can make it difficult to recognise any meaning in the suffering, physical decline and dependence that may accompany a person in the final stages of life.

This difficulty becomes even more pronounced within a form of humanism that leaves no room for transcendence, and it may ultimately reflect a diminished confidence in the inherent worth of human life and of the individual person.

Not only atheists but also many Christians, including Catholics, often ask: How can a merciful God permit suffering, the death of innocent children, or the slaughter of millions in the German Nazi concentration camps?

Here we encounter what might be called the paradox of suffering. On the one hand, God does not desire our suffering; on the other, because of sin and the tragic consequences of original sin, suffering can become, paradoxically, one of the means through which humanity is healed and transformed. It is precisely this tension that makes the problem of suffering so difficult to comprehend.

One cannot, in a short reflection such as this, present the many holy men and women of the Church who have wrestled with this question throughout the centuries.

Saint Pope John Paul II was well acquainted with suffering. He perceived the experience of suffering as a mysterious opportunity given to us by God, a unique chance to identify ourselves with his saving work of redemption.

His 1984 Apostolic Letter “Salvifici Doloris” clearly expounds the dignity and the salvific power of physical and mental pain. “Suffering, as it were, contains a special call to the virtue which man must exercise on his own part. And this is the virtue of perseverance in bearing whatever disturbs and causes harm. In doing this, the individual unleashes hope, which maintains in him the conviction that suffering will not get the better of him, that it will not deprive him of his dignity as a human being, a dignity linked to awareness of the meaning of life.”

On one occasion, the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta (+1947), recorded in her writings these words of the Lord:

“My child, you have anticipated my love; this is my Will: that all those who love Me be crucified with Me.” On another occasion, Jesus laments that the gifts of love which, in the form of suffering brought to people, make them conform to Him are received with curses, and that some even consider taking their own lives.

On 30 May 1987, the contemporary Polish mystic Alicja Lenczewska (+2012) noted in her journal: “Suffering is neither punishment nor evil. It is the sign of my special love and of a call to intimacy with Me. You should rejoice in suffering because it purifies and enriches your soul.”

What a great responsibility we take upon ourselves before God when we take away from Him the opportunity to bring such a person to conversion in their final hour of life. (Lk 23:42)

Conclusion

The legacy of Pope John Paul II’s suffering and death reinforces our Catholic understanding that a patient can never be a problem to be solved but is a person to be loved and respected. Thus, in no way can the Catholic response to suffering be abandonment. It demands rejecting every judgement that an unconscious, disabled, elderly, or dying person is no longer worth sustaining. It also requires recognising that some medical interventions may become ineffective, burdensome, or disproportionate. 

For Australians seeking to understand where this dangerous mindset may lead in the context of assisted suicide, Canada offers an appalling example from overseas.

Many people, especially older people, suffer from a complex array of worsening problems: deafness, poor eyesight, fatigue, difficulty walking, as well as shrinking financial resources, a shrinking social network, and the loss of social skills. These non-life-threatening ailments and diseases have a negative impact on quality of life; therefore, other specialists or social workers must be consulted. All it takes is a little human love, and such a person wants to live.

The Church permits the use of all morally acceptable means capable of alleviating the pain of the person who is suffering and diminishing the distress of family members caring for them.

If a patient experiences unbearable and persistent pain, then one should also resort to supernatural means: offering Holy Mass, Adoration, prayer, and meditation on the Passion of Christ.

As St Gemma Galgani meditated on the Passion of Jesus Christ, she drew all her consolation from it.

“To meditate on Thy Passion, O Jesus, has always been a great relief to holy souls.”

Sometimes love and compassion do not consist in protecting a loved one from pain, but in remaining with them until the very end.

Saint Mary McKillop and Saint John Paul II, orate pro nobis!

+++

Editor Note: For additional reading, please see Doctors, Mercy & the Taking of Life: The Euthanasia Debate, posted on the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Other excellent resources include the National Catholic Bioethics Center and contributions by Reverend Doctor Gregory Webster, a permanent deacon and Catholic Journal author, who regularly writes on issues related to bioethics.