Fr. Shenan J. Boquet: True Mercy in the Final Moments of Life

“Even when not motivated by a selfish refusal to be burdened with the life of someone who is suffering, euthanasia must be called a false mercy, and indeed a disturbing ‘perversion’ of mercy. True ‘compassion’ leads to sharing another’s pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear.”

-Pope St. John Paul II, Evangelium vitae, no. 66

Any pro-lifer who has spent any significant time and effort investigating the topic of euthanasia and assisted suicide will quickly be disturbed by a characteristic that unites some of the leading pro-euthanasia activists. They seem to have a bizarre fascination with death and to even take a strange, sometimes exquisite, pleasure in promoting death as a “solution” to people’s problems.

Take the example of “Dr. Death,” Jack Kevorkian. This American doctor and activist spent eight years in prison after being convicted of the murder of a man suffering from Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Although the man had requested Kevorkian’s assistance in dying, the law prohibited euthanasia. Kevorkian himself invited the prosecution by having the euthanasia filmed and publicly broadcast with the explicit goal of overturning the laws against euthanasia. …