We should recognise the quality of debate on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill that has just taken place in the House of Commons and thank our MP’s for their respectful, informed and sincere consideration of this Bill.
However, the decision to legalise assisted suicide exposes a deeper loss in society: a loss of meaning. Before a world where all human efforts to manufacture meaning prove increasingly futile, despair reigns and death cloaked in the rags of “compassion ” is presented as a moral response. Our culture is starved of meaning and hope.
A nation’s laws have a pedagogical effect and shape the moral conscience of a society. Those who voted “aye” today no longer consider human life to have an incalculable value and intrinsic meaning that requires, not only safeguards and protections from harm, but the establishment of an agency of hope that affirms that human value does not depend on the merely extrinsic and conditional but is rooted in transcendent meaning.
We are all diminished by today’s judgement. The ideological engine that has driven assisted suicide advocacy is a radical notion of autonomy that further frays the healthy bonds of society. It will be especially the weakest and least articulate in our society whose value is now thrown into doubt. They will become particularly vulnerable and prey to the culture of death. God help them and we must too.
While this is a moment of profound disappointment, it is not the time to despair but to find meaning in the Cross. There is found not only the victory over sin and death, but deliverance from futility and despair. Christ is our meaning. He is the way, the truth and the life.
Those who unashamedly bear the name Christian are called to preach Christ crucified with renewed vigour and urgency. He is the hope who saves. He “has also explained to us what “life” means: “this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (Jn 17:3). Life in its true sense is not something that we have exclusively in or from ourselves: it is a relationship. And life in its totality is a relationship with him who is the source of life. If we are in relation with him who does not die, who is Life itself and Love itself, then we are in life. Then we “live”.” (Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI)
