President Napolitano asks for a calm and in-depth discussion of ideas on the topic of the so-called 'end of life', and this is what we all hope for to give a structured basis to any legislative interventions, which without well-founded investigations and competent research could add problems rather than solve them . For some years it seems to me that there has been a desire to reduce the debate to a clash between factions, based on a priori choices. (...)

 

Thank you for this beautiful and heartfelt reflection, dear and kind friend. And thank you also for the stern yet serene reminder to the protagonists of our political scene and of the public debate on the issues of "end of life" to demonstrate their ability to deal with such a delicate matter without ideology. (...) These years of outsized words pronounced by many parties and immoderate hymns to "self-determination" (which is not even a negative concept for me, as long as it is not absolutized and transformed into an inhuman instrument of "perfectionism" , the ideology according to which only people without defects deserve life) were also marked by a sidereal distance between the affirmations of the partisans of euthanasia and suicide administered by the State and attention to the lives of the severely disabled and the terminally ill and their generous and, often, too lonely families. As if the real issue to be resolved, which you rightly underlined, were not precisely this: responding to expectations of life, care and alleviation/annihilation of suffering. Expectations of so many of us, who ask the civil community of which we are all part not to be abandoned and mistreated in terms of therapies and palliative care, that is, not to be considered a "burden" and - I shudder to write this - a "spending center" to cut. The real urgency, moral and health, is this. I am happy that you too realize how the Catholic Church says it and testifies to it effectively, staying one step ahead of many others, despite the fact that even here some of the self-proclaimed "enlightened" people (secular and not only) persist in telling the sad tale of "Catholics who want to force us to suffer" and someone else among certain vehement "defenders of values" (Catholics and others) unfortunately lends itself to this terrible polemical game with tones unbearably similar to those of the other party.