VATICAN - WORDS OF DOCTRINE: Rev. Nicola Bux and Rev. Salvatore Vitiello -
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - The sad and well known case of Eluana Englaro has yet to be "closed", even now that the earthly life of the woman has ended. The question is still open because still open are the wounds it inflicted on consciences and, above all, still to be assessed are the juridical consequences which a precedent such as this may have for Italy's legislation and not only its legislation.
The overall impression is that nothing was left to chance and that everything followed an unsettling "orchestration of death" the purpose of which was to introduce, in practice if not yet in law, decriminalization for a person who kills another person, causing him or her to die of hunger and thirst.
Beyond any political debate, it is necessary to reaffirm, with the Holy Father Benedict XVI, that, " The true measure of humanity is essentially determined in relationship to suffering and to the sufferer. This holds true both for the individual and for society. A society unable to accept its suffering members and incapable of helping to share their suffering and to bear it inwardly through "com-passion" is a cruel and inhuman society. Yet society cannot accept its suffering members and support them in their trials unless individuals are capable of doing so themselves; moreover, the individual cannot accept another's suffering unless he personally is able to find meaning in suffering, a path of purification and growth in maturity, a journey of hope. Indeed, to accept the "other" who suffers, means that I take up his suffering in such a way that it becomes mine also. Because it has now become a shared suffering, though, in which another person is present, this suffering is penetrated by the light of love. The Latin word con-solatio, "consolation", expresses this beautifully. It suggests being with the other in his solitude, so that it ceases to be solitude. Furthermore, the capacity to accept suffering for the sake of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately more important than truth and justice, then the power of the stronger prevails, then violence and untruth reign supreme. Truth and justice must stand above my comfort and physical well-being, or else my life itself becomes a lie. In the end, even the "yes" to love is a source of suffering, because love always requires expropriations of my "I", in which I allow myself to be pruned and wounded. Love simply cannot exist without this painful renunciation of myself, for otherwise it becomes pure selfishness and thereby ceases to be love. " (Spe Salvi n. 38).
Nothing is more 'secular' than com-passion, exclusive to no one and which all can experience measured with one's degree of rationality, of love and of civilization, and nothing is more Christian, in its origin, historical and theological!
The Englaro case has, according to some, exposed the ethical orientation of our most Catholic Italy. If there was any drifting, in reality and numbers, the drift was not of the people or the nation which, on the contrary, clearly demonstrated a stance for life and for compassion. The drifting was not among the people, it involved a few deadly minority elite groups determined to impose their own desperate vision of life, or better, of death, on public opinion and on the country! Our people are capable of embracing suffering, capable of bearing it with dignity, revealing in this way the measure of our civilization.
(Agenzia Fides 19/2/2009; righe 40, parole 583)
