A Canadian Archbishop has signalled that his priests will not anoint anyone seeking death by assisted suicide.
According to Canadian Catholic News, Archbishop Terrence Prendergast of Ottowa, a person seeking assisted suicide ““lacks the proper disposition for the anointing of the sick”, and added: “Asking your priest to be present to something that is in direct contradiction to our Catholic values is not fair to the pastor.
“Of course a pastor will try and dissuade a patient from requesting suicide and will pray with them and their family, but asking him to be present is in effect asking him to condone a serious sin.”
Withholding the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, the Archbishop said, was intended to be a pastoral means of helping a patient realise the seriousness of the decision they are making.
“The rite is for people who are gravely ill or labour under the burden of years and it contains the forgiveness of sins as part of the rite, in either form,” he said. “But we cannot be forgiven pre-emptively for something we are going to do, like ask for assisted suicide when suicide is a grave sin.”
In February 2015, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that adults suffering untreatable pain have the right to end their life with a physician’s help. The court argued that the sanctity of life also included the “passage into death” in reaching its judgement. Since then, religious leaders and pro-life physicians have campaigned to halt the introduction nationwide of assisted suicide.
Archbishop Prendergast’s comments come in the wake of a statement from the Catholic Bishops of Alberta for World Day of the Sick, in which they denounced assisted suicide as “morally wrong” and stressed that “no Catholic may advocate for, or participate in any way, whether by act or omission, in the intentional killing of another human being either by assisted suicide or euthanasia”.
