End of life, the Vatican opens to a “space for the search for mediations on the legislative level”
No to euthanasia, yes to palliative care but also a “space for the search for mediation on the legislative level”. It is the position of the Pontifical Academy for Life expressed in a vademecum entitled “Small lexicon of the end of life”.
“Freedom therefore always implies the need to be responsible for life: in myself and in the other, indissolubly. A perspective that certainly does not coincide with an individualistic conception, which tends to reduce it to the solitude of absolute self-determination and gives in to the will to power of self-love, without regard for the vulnerability to which it exposes the affections of the other. We are all radically related”, writes Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, in the introduction to the document, motivating the reasons for its publication. “We do not dispose of ourselves in the void of every bond”, “this is how we humans live: until the end”, Monsignor Paglia begins, “in addressing the themes evoked by the individual words, this lexicon takes into account the pluralist and democratic context of the societies in which the debate takes place, especially when it enters the legal field”.
“The different moral languages are not at all incommunicable and untranslatable, as some maintain; the effort that each person makes to understand the reasons of the other and to accept dialogue with those who think differently, favors and, favors the comparison and an at least partial sharing of the valid reasons in favor of one or the other choice”.
“Open and respectful discussion leads to a public dialogue capable of positively influencing political decisions as well.showing how mediations between different positions are not necessarily destined to take the poor guise of a compromise to the downside or a negotiation for an exchange of political favors”, he adds.
In the document, in summary, a clear rejection of euthanasia is proposed, as well as of therapeutic obstinacy, the relaunch of palliative care and of “advance treatment directives”, the so-called living will, the need to find, in democratic and pluralistic societies, “an acceptable point of mediation between different positions” regarding assisted suicide, and the possibility of withholding nutrition and hydration from patients at the end of their lives.
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