Category: ChristianityCatholic

Canada Catholic head: ‘Unjust’ to force doctors on assisted suicide

The Gobe and Mail

Ethan Lou

TORONTO — Reuters.  The head of Canada’s biggest Catholic group opposed the country’s pending doctor-assisted suicide legislation in a statement to be read at 225 Toronto churches on Sunday, saying it was “unjust” to force doctors to act against their conscience.

“It is unjust to force people to act against their conscience in order to be allowed to practice as a physician,” Cardinal Thomas Collins, head of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto, said in the text of his statement.

Canada’s Supreme Court struck down a ban on assisted suicide in 2015 and gave lawmakers a year to come up with legislation to regulate the practice.

The newly elected Liberal government was given a four-month extension this year to a develop a national law for the practice, under which doctors opposed to assisted suicide have to recommend someone willing to perform it. . . [Full text]

 

Doctor affiliated with Catholic hospital speaks out against assisted-death ban

  The Globe and Mail

Laura Kane

A doctor affiliated with a Catholic hospital in a small British Columbia community says the facility’s likely ban on assisted-dying is a violation of terminally ill patients’ charter rights.

Dr. Jonathan Reggler said St. Joseph’s General Hospital is the only hospital in the Comox Valley and as a Catholic facility it generally forbids doctors from helping patients die, although a formal policy has not yet been adopted.

Reggler said terminally ill patients in hospital who want a doctor’s help to die will either be denied that right or have to be moved 50 kilometres to the nearest hospital in Campbell River. . . [Full text]

 

Canada’s largest Catholic archdiocese mobilizing against assisted-dying law

The Globe and Mail

Affain Chowdhry

Canada’s largest Catholic archdiocese is mobilizing its members to pressure federal politicians tasked with shaping new doctor-assisted dying legislation by June to protect vulnerable groups and to exempt doctors, nurses and Catholic hospitals from having to provide those services because it goes against their religious beliefs.

Cardinal Thomas Collins, the Archbishop of Toronto, used a sermon on Sunday at St. Paul’s Basilica in downtown Toronto to argue that forcing Catholic doctors to refer patients to medically assisted dying services was a “violation of conscience” and amounted to religious discrimination. . . [Full text]

 

Hotel-Dieu, Hospice hope to avoid providing doctor-assisted death

Windsor Star

Brian Cross

Those seeking to escape the agony of incurable illnesses will have the legal right to choose doctor-assisted suicide as of June 6, but two publicly funded institutions that care for the region’s dying hope they won’t be forced to allow it within their walls.

Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare runs the area’s only in-hospital palliative care unit, where five, six or seven deaths a week is not unusual. As a faith-based Catholic hospital, it does not believe it should participate in physician-assisted suicide, said CEO Janice Kaffer.

The Hospice of Windsor and Essex County has a policy opposing physician-assisted suicide, citing a “respect for the dignity and sanctity of human life,” and asserting that it’s not part of palliative care. It provides palliative care to hundreds of area patients in their homes, as well as in its hospice residences in Windsor and Leamington. Its philosophy is if someone’s pain and symptoms can be well managed, they don’t need to resort to a physician-assisted death. CEO Carol Derbyshire said Canada’s hospices are trying to convince the government to let them to opt out. . . [Full text]

 

Canada’s Catholic hospitals in a tough spot on assisted death

Globe and Mail

Sean Fine

It started with a Supreme Court ruling that government could not criminalize doctor-assisted death. Now, a parliamentary committee is recommending that all publicly funded health-care institutions provide the service, and major Catholic hospitals such as St. Paul’s in Vancouver and St. Joseph’s in Hamilton are drawing a line in the sand against it.

Canada is being thrust into its biggest religious-freedom debate since Quebec’s proposed charter of values three years ago would have banned the wearing of turbans, kippahs and hijabs by government employees.

Is the committee recommending one kind of unconstitutional act replace another? Or are religious institutions failing to live up to their obligations in the public sphere?

At the heart of the committee’s recommendations was a kind of contradiction: Doctors should have the freedom of conscience not to have to provide assisted death, the committee said. But institutions should not have the same freedom of conscience. . . [Full Text]