Nobody is abandoned
Message for the next World Day of the Sick
“In the generous and loving welcome of every human life, especially the weak and sick, the Christian expresses an important aspect of his own evangelical testimony, following the example of Christ, who bent down to man's material and spiritual sufferings to heal them” .
Benedict XVI writes this in the Message for the 11th World Day of the Sick - scheduled for 17,19 February, on the theme: “Get up and go; your faith has saved you" (Lk XNUMX) - focuses on the "sacraments of healing", that is, on the sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation, and on that of the Anointing of the Sick, which have their "natural fulfillment" in 'Eucharist.
One way ticket
Excerpts, regarding the "murder of consent"
by Marco Travaglio
I don't want to talk about Lucio Magri, who I haven't met and would never dream of judging... I just know that I wouldn't organize a little party while waiting for the phone call from the Swiss clinic announcing my passing. (...)
But I stop here, because I would like to depersonalize Magri's gesture, what is called with horrendous hypocrisy "assisted suicide" and instead should be called by its real name: "Consenting Murder". Magri was not terminally ill, nor in an irreversible vegetative coma kept artificially alive by a machine: he was physically healthy and intact, even if depressed. (...)
So I would like to talk about it only from the points of view that we all have in common: the logical, the legal, the ethical and the practical.
Welcome, "baby seven billion"
of Father Federico Lombardi
Dear baby seven billion! I don't know if you are a girl or a boy, if you are Indian or Chinese, born in a metropolis or in a village, or if instead you were not born in the pampas or under an igloo, or in a small remote island, or fleeing under a tent. I don't know if you are healthy or sick or disabled. I don't know if both your parents are hugging you or just your mother. I don't know if they will say that you and your peers are too many or too few. Today this doesn't matter to me.
This world you come to is a little complicated and not hospitable to everyone. We weren't that good at preparing it well for you. The leaders of the richest and most powerful peoples are around a table agonizing over how to move forward without causing further disasters, and we too are wondering about your tomorrow.
But today I want to tell you that you are unique and different from everyone else, that you are a wonderful gift, that you are a miracle, that your spirit will live forever, and therefore you are welcome. We wish you that when you smile someone will respond to your smile and when you cry someone will caress you. May you go to school and not go hungry. May someone wisely answer your questions and encourage you in your initiatives and in assuming your responsibilities. May you love others, grow, work and live with your family, with many friends, in a people and in a world that is free and at peace. May you understand that your life has full meaning beyond death.
Because you were born for this. Your Creator and Father made you for this. We will do our part to make this possible; get busy, because your future will also depend on you and it will be your turn to welcome baby eight billion.
Editorial of Vatican Radio, 5/11/2011
We have moved from the right to the "duty" to die
Interview with Luciano Eusebi
More than a thousand people will be killed in Belgium by 2011 because this is their will. By the end of the year, more than a thousand patients will have undergone euthanasia.
«A sign – states Luciano Eusebi, full professor at the Faculty of Law at the Catholic University of Milan interviewed by ilSussidiario.net – that the predicted euthanasia drift has occurred in the country; in certain cases, death has turned into a sort of automatism."
The news was reported by the Belgian newspaper "Le soir". According to the newspaper, the prediction was arrived at starting from a simple consideration: since January 2011, 85 people a year have died a "sweet death". These are predominantly men (54 percent) and people aged between 60 and 79 years. The majority - 80 percent - are affected by a tumor which, in 92 percent of cases, will lead to their death, even in the short term. Finally, 52 percent of euthanasia administrations are carried out at home or in some nursing homes for the elderly. «The data - explains Eusebi - indicates how the reasons for the "no", which we have always tried to support towards euthanasia, were justified. We have always been worried, in fact, that everything could be resolved, ultimately, in a sort of "scrapping" of the weak subjects".
Eusebi goes into specifics: «The attention to proportionate therapeutic treatments and to avoiding extremist ones is acceptable». But exceeding this threshold generates serious consequences; «It leads to considering weak subjects as ballast. It is no coincidence that psychological research underlines how the so-called "right to die" transforms, both with respect to the patient and his family, into a psychological pressure to free the social context from the weight of his condition. This trend makes the transition from consensual to automatic euthanasia possible."
One wonders whether such a risk has been averted in Italy. «The law on the end of life – reflects Eusebi – gives importance to possible advance declarations, of course; but within the context of a judgment that remains based on the responsibility of the doctor and on an evaluation of the proportionality of the therapies. Those who expected a law that would undermine the legal principles in force on the impracticability of a doctor-patient relationship aimed at death were disappointed. The law, therefore, should protect us, at least in its theoretical statements, from drifts like the Belgian one."
But the law is not enough. «These trends, in practice, must be contained in an educational and cultural dimension; and, even more, support for family contexts. By helping the family we avoid tendencies of abandonment, because this constitutes the first dimension of welcome where conditions of existential precariousness exist."
For terminally ill patients and their loved ones, some fundamental supports already exist: «We have networks of hospices and palliative care centers where the patient can be followed, freeing him from suffering and allowing him, even in advanced disease conditions, to maintain a capacity for reflection and dialogue. All of this isn't even exceptionally expensive. However, it is obvious that this is a commitment to society."
According to the professor, however, there are no alibis: «the resources are there. A welcoming society is possible." But, preliminarily, a reflection is necessary: «What model of democracy and civil coexistence do we intend to adopt? The one in which the person counts for his material efficiency so, when this is no longer recoverable, his very existence loses meaning; or the one according to which the person is worth as such, and not for what he is capable of doing?
Commitment to offering quality of life to the years
by Graziella Fons
You don't die because you have lost your memory, but you die when you feel alone, orphaned of loved ones, without friends, without a purpose for living
Today, many of us, in too many sectors of public life, are navigating by sight: school, unemployment, young people and, last but not least, the elderly. We think about them by playing everything on the pension platform, on the ever-increasing number of elderly people and the financial repercussions for healthcare costs, but we don't worry about the fact that for elderly people there is a dramatic reduction in the quality of life .
It is not enough to give years to life, thus prolonging old age, but it is urgent to worry about giving life to years.
With him no one felt like an orphan
Blessed John Paul II
The new Blessed lived for God, gave himself completely to Him to serve the Church in man and gave himself as a sacrificial offering
by Graziella Fons
«A world that does not resemble itself continually dies, a world made not of colors, but of buzzes». They are two verses from "Profile of a Cyrenean" that Karol Wojtyla wrote in 1958, four months before becoming bishop of Krakow. It was a Via Crucis whose protagonist was Simon of Cyrene, the farmer who, returning from the fields, was called by the soldiers to help Jesus on the road to Calvary. For the future pontiff, Simon represents contemporary man who, alongside Jesus, becomes a traveling companion in helping and rescuing others in difficulty. There are fourteen characters that the Cyrenean is called to help. They are all our contemporaries. We begin with the melancholic. The schizophrenic, an actor, a girl disappointed in love, children, two workers, an intellectual, an emotional man, a strong-willed man, a blind man, to whom the two initial verses refer. A pilgrimage with Jesus in the ocean of human suffering.
Between doubts and fixed points
of p. Donato Cauzzo
The debate is currently underway on the bill regarding "Advance Treatment Declarations" (DAT), which will give the possibility of expressing one's wishes in writing regarding the health treatments to be accepted or refused in the event of future loss of consciousness. The confrontation between representatives of different ethical and political camps becomes more lively every day. But at the same time, a certain disorientation is also growing: some are asking for the text to be rewritten, others consider it useless, either because it is too restrictive of individual freedom, or on the contrary because it is dangerous.
It seems to me that the main doubts concern three issues.
Is a law really necessary, or wasn't it better to regulate ourselves as we have done so far?
A love stronger than evil
by Vito Viganò
The modern world, sophisticated in technical progress, is willingly accused of having impoverished its humanity with an exasperated pleasure materialism, with an exclusive space reserved for individual careerism and selfishness, with an indifferent detachment for those who suffer, are struggling or are hungry. It is generally said that values have been lost, a worrying regression. You have to wonder if it's really true. In fact, it is the news of sad facts that have the most resonance and confirm the symptoms of human degradation. Those that testify to the value of today's humanity slip away rather unnoticed, as if they were obvious, due.
Manuela, shortly after turning sixty, began to have balance problems and difficulty moving. Doctors diagnose a degenerative disease of the cerebellum, with an unfortunate, despairing prognosis. She cannot be cured and the prospect is a gradual reduction of motor capacity until the blocking of some vital function, with death. Manuela thus becomes, although still reasonably well, a terminal patient, with the expectation of a deterioration in her physical condition that may last a few years.
I believe in an endless future
With courage, with hands full of works of mercy
by Gianni Gennari
Still on the “Creed”. After the Resurrection the Ascension of the Lord Jesus "to the right hand of the Father". Last time on the "mission", which is precisely the first consequence of the Ascension: the Lord Jesus, Son of God, God himself and son of Mary, crucified, dead and resurrected, makes his disciples, witnesses of his resurrection, "see" also his return to the Father, manifested in the appropriate way of his time: God "in the highest". Here therefore: "What we have seen with our eyes", to recall the text of the First Letter of Saint John, is enriched by the last actual "vision". it is the image, told by themselves, of the "ascent" to Heaven of Him who at the same moment entrusts them, through the angelic voice, the mission of the announcement: "What are you doing with your eyes towards heaven? Go and announce..."
God's bet is played in the "existential peripheries"
by Gianni Gennari
The task of the mission is born in us with baptism and is realized in different ways, but the essence is the same for everyone. The commitment of the mission with Pope Francis resonates with different tones, but the message is ancient: "Go into all the world".
In the previous meeting we read in the "he descended into Hell" the mystery of salvation in the dead and risen Christ offered to all men from always and forever. However, this does not mean that everything is only a thing of God. For those who have received them, therefore for us, Baptism and Confirmation are the basis of the Christian mission. Salvation, as much as it depends on God, is offered in a mysterious way to the freedom of all men, of all times and places, by the infinite mercy of God's grace...