c. 1999 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ A Vatican task force on the”Dignity of the Dying”Monday (March 8) rejected both euthanasia and so-called”heroic measures”to prolong life, but called on doctors to do everything possible to relieve the physical and mental pain of those near death.

In its most detailed declaration to date on the issues involved in end-of-life issues, the Pontifical Academy for Life summarized the findings of a yearlong study by the multidisciplinary task force, which included biologists, psychologists, doctors, philosophers, theologians and legal experts. Members of the task force presented papers at the academy’s fifth general assembly at the Vatican Feb. 24-27.

The study is rooted in the Roman Catholic teaching that”human life is sacred and inviolable in every phase and situation. “A human being must never lose his dignity in any physical, psychiatric or relational situation in which he might find himself,”the new document said.”Therefore, every dying person deserves and needs the unconditional respect due to every human person.” The report ruled out mercy killing in any form and for any reason and rejected”with force and absolute conviction”any recourse to”actions or omissions aimed at procuring the death of a person in order to avoid suffering and pain.””We ask legislators and leaders of governments and international institutions to exclude the legalization or depenalization of the practice of euthanasia or assistance at suicide,”it said.”The legal acceptance of the voluntary killing of one member of society by another member overturns at its roots one of the fundamental principles of co-existence in society.” The task force warned that such laws also could weaken patients’ faith in medicine and”open the way to every sort of abuses and injustices, especially against the weakest.” It said that no treatment that might relieve suffering should be withheld from patients and especially not for economic reasons. But the declaration expressed strong opposition to measures to prolong a patient’s life beyond its inevitable course.”When the doctor is aware that it is no longer possible to impede the death of the patient and that the only result of intensive therapeutic treatment would be to add suffering to suffering, he must recognize the limits of medical science and of his personal intervention and accept the inevitability and ineluctability of death,”it said.”The task of the doctor and other medical workers must, therefore, continue in the attentive and effective application of so-called proportionate therapy and palliative care,”it said.”The control of pain and the human, psychological and spiritual accompanying of patients are the duties of doctors and medical personnel, and they are just as noble and essential as therapeutic interventions.” The declaration also underlined the importance of family members to the dying and said that by gathering at the bedside, they might help to relieve the patient’s pain.”The dying must not be deprived of the comforting presence of family members and of their loving assistance, their precious and diversified human aid,”it said.

It sharply criticized modern, secular thinking that considers death to be essentially meaningless and impersonal.”In today’s culture,”it said,”especially that of the more developed countries, there are present, alongside authentic values of solidarity and of love of life, currents of thought and practical actions, fruit and symptom of ideological and practical secularism, that tend to influence society in a sense that is hedonistic, oriented toward efficiency and technocratic. Death, lacking a hope of heaven, is felt to be without meaning and is rejected by the conscience and hidden from public life.” Instead, the report said, death should be seen as a part of the”culture of life, which also assumes the reality of the finite and natural limitations of earthly life. Only thus will it be possible to keep death from being reduced to a merely clinical event and deprived of its personal and social dimension.” Pope John Paul II established the Pontifical Academy for Life in 1994 to study”the principal problems of biomedicine and law relative to the promotion and defense of life.”Its members are scientists committed to church teachings in their fields.

DEA END POLK