As much as this result scares me, we need to pray for him! A lot!!

Somehow it might help.. who knows...

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Dear Heike...

I stopped watching the news and buying a newspaper for the past three days, and I watched a marathon of HOUSE all day and all night, rather than have to listen to an election coverage that was not going to turn out the way I had prayed so hard and hoped that it could.

I did not confirm the news until I turned on my PC this morning to start on my Forum tasks and it became inevitable to see something about it!

God knows I would not have had the fortitude to survive today without becoming a psychological wreck, were it not that I had the Holy Father's catechesis to listen to on Vatican Radio and to translate.

We can only echo what the Holy Father has said in his congratulatory message.

TERESA

CALIFORNIA CELEBRATES MARRIAGE DEFINITION VOTE

Arizona and Florida Join in Banning Gay Marriage

LOS ANGELES, California, NOV. 5, 2008 (Zenit.org).- The archbishop of Los Angeles says the California vote banning gay marriages was the result of "an unprecedented coalition" that "understood the importance of maintaining the bedrock institution of marriage."

Cardinal Roger Mahony affirmed this today in a statement to the Catholic community and others who supported Proposition 8, which amends the California State Constitution to include a definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman.

"The passage of Proposition 8 was the result of an unprecedented coalition of many faith communities and other citizens who understood the importance of maintaining the bedrock institution of marriage," Cardinal Mahony wrote.

Quoting the book of Genesis as God's plan for the human family, he added: "Our collective efforts in the support of Proposition 8 have centered solely around preserving God's plan that marriage between one man and one woman is to be that unchanging reality through which their mutual love becomes fruitful through bringing forth children to continue the human family.

"The raising, formation and education of these children is destined by God to take place within a traditional family of one father and one mother."

The cardinal noted that Proposition 8 is a positive vote. Rather than pitting itself against any social group, it seeks to preserve God's plan "for people living upon this earth throughout time," he said. The prelate exhorted people to enliven the new constitutional definition with continuing support for marriage and families.

Elsewhere

The Arizona Catholic Conference also issued a statement to voters "of all faiths and walks of life" who joined together to approve their Proposition 102, which will also place a definition of marriage in the state constitution. "We are especially grateful to have seen the tremendous response of Catholics who rallied around the bishops' efforts to pass this measure," a conference statement said.

That state's ban was momentous because in 2006, Arizonans became the only group to reject a marriage amendment. With Tuesday's vote, that previous rejection was overturned, bringing to 30 the number of states that protect marriage in their Constitutions. Marriage amendments thus have a perfect 30 out of 30 record.

Florida also approved an amendment which will ban gay marriages. That vote was notable because it required 60% approval, and got 62%.

California's move was marked as the most monumental, in the face of over 18,000 gay marriages that have been performed there since May. This amendment, which gained 52% of the vote, will override the Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriages then.

Funds for the campaign for and against this proposition reached a record high for any social issue in U.S. history, generating $73 million from all states and several foreign countries.

Around the Union

In the referendums of others states, various life and family issues were put to the vote. Arkansas voted in favor of a ban on unmarried couples serving as adoptive or foster parents.

Washington voters approved a measure to allow assisted suicide, modeled after Oregon's "Death with Dignity" law. It will permit terminally ill patients to obtain lethal prescriptions to administer to themselves.

In South Dakota, a modified anti-abortion referendum gained 45% of the vote, not enough to pass. After losing in 2006, this total ban was modified to allow abortion in cases of rape, incest and serious health threats to the mother. Pro-lifers were disappointed to see that even these modifications did not bring the referendum to pass.

U.S. Election Results

I am working hard to come to grips with the outcome of the election. I noticed the following article today in the Italian edition of the Osservatore Romano. Since I don't understand Italian well enough to translate the article, I am going to post it here as it is in hopes that Teresa will see it and translate it. From what I can make of it, using my high school Latin and Pimsleur's Italian, Level I, it seems to be complimentary of America and hopeful for the future.


Una scelta che unisce (A Choice that Unites, I think)


di Giuseppe Fiorentino
Osservatore Romano
Nov. 5, 2008

Alla fine il cambiamento si è realizzato. Lo slogan che ha accompagnato l'intera campagna elettorale di Barack Obama ha trovato la sua espressione nel risultato elettorale concretizzatosi nella notte appena trascorsa. L'America - come ha sottolineato il presidente eletto nel suo discorso di vittoria pronunciato a Chicago - è davvero il Paese dove tutto può accadere. L'America è davvero il Paese della nuova frontiera, anzi di una frontiera sempre nuova e dinamica, capace di superare fratture e divisioni che solo fino a poco tempo fa potevano apparire insanabili.

Gli Stati Uniti - e non è la prima volta che accade - sono stati a loro modo capaci di indicare una nuova strada al resto del mondo. Verranno usati decine di roboanti aggettivi per la vittoria di Obama. La sua elezione verrà paragonata, forse anche a ragione, a eventi come la caduta del Muro di Berlino. Ma oltre ogni retorica, il dato significativo riguarda la scelta della più grande potenza mondiale che ha deciso di essere guidata dal politico che ha saputo dimostrarsi più convincente. Di un candidato che ha saputo guadagnarsi la stima di un elettorato bisognoso di nuova fiducia, soprattutto in una veloce ripresa economica. E in questo frangente poco importava che si trattasse di un politico di colore.

Una scelta molto pragmatica, quindi, la cui portata non può essere comunicata da retoriche affermazioni di parte. Alcuni hanno già letto nel risultato elettorale di ieri la fine della "rivoluzione neocon" avviata da Ronald Reagan e maturata negli otto anni di amministrazione Bush. Certo, il desiderio di cambiamento era palpabile. Ma non necessariamente l'elezione di Obama deve essere analizzata come contraria a qualcosa o a qualcuno. Anche perché - come ha evidenziato il presidente eletto - non è questo il momento delle rivendicazioni. È invece il tempo dell'unità e della coesione: "Siamo gli Stati Uniti d'America", ha detto Obama, richiamando tutti a uno sforzo comune per superare le difficoltà del presente. Non saranno tutte rose e fiori. Obama ne è di certo ben consapevole. Grandi sfide - politiche, sociali, economiche, morali - lo attendono. A cominciare dalla necessità di conquistare consenso in quegli Stati dell'Unione dove più forte è la presenza dei conservatori. Ciò sarà anche possibile grazie all'impeccabile accoglienza dell'esito del voto da parte di McCain, che, con esemplare senso dello Stato, ha definito l'eletto "il mio presidente". Con il sostegno popolare Obama potrà affrontare le grandi questioni interne e internazionali.


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11/9/08

Sorry - I did not get to see this post until now. My work on the Forum is bound to get more erratic than ever because of personal circumstances...

Let me explain why I chose not to translate the above piece as I normally would have done for significant editorial commentary in OR.

I felt that the Pope's letter to Obama, augmented by Father Lombardi's, soon after the results were known - and which I posted promptly in NEWS ABOUT BENEDICT from the original Vatican Radio report - said everything that needs to be said about the matter in this Forum.

Far better than the above editorial commentary which contains the usual platitudes - that one can read, hear and see everywhere else - and which I found rather hypocritical and CYA, considering that the day before, on 11/4/08 (that is, the day of the elections itself), the OR's front-page editorial commentary by the same writer was a lengthy one entitled 'The certainty of the polls, the unknown about the vote' - and the burden of it was all the reasons why the polls could be wrong and McCain could still win.

I did not translate it because 1) I felt it was unrealistic wishful thinking and 2) a bit too partisan to run in OR, 3) which added nothing to one's knowledge or insight; and 4) most importantly, it really has nothing to do with Pope Benedict himself. As far as this Forum is concerned, American politics are a sideshow.

Similarly, I chose not to translate the Monday-morning quarterbacking commentary above, that came out the following day.

P.S. Sorry - the first commentary came out in the 11/5/08 issue (which comes out 6 p.m. of the previous day, 11/4/08, New York time, i.e., before the polls closed. So that first editorial commentary was written the day of the election, 11/4/08. Which makes the writer's thesis sound even more like wishful thinking. If the OR deadline for the 11/5/08 issue had been just 4 hours later, he would have saved himself the embarrassment...

TERESA

Pray for these little ones. They are going to need our prayers more than ever now, on both sides of the Atlantic.

By Daniela Petroff
ASSOCIATED PRESS

8:04 a.m. November 5, 2008

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI sent Barack Obama a personal note Wednesday, saying he would pray for God's blessings on the American people and on the new president-elect after his historic victory.

Benedict's spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told journalists that Obama will receive the message later in the day when it is relayed through the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.


Advertisement
Lombardi declined to release the text of the message, calling the note a personal one. But he did speak of its contents, without quoting from it at length.

The message calls the U.S. presidential victory a historic occasion, and offers warm wishes to Obama, his wife and family, Lombardi said.

“The pope expresses the wish that the blessing of God will support him (Obama) and the American people so that with all people of good will, a world of peace, solidarity and justice can be built,” the spokesman said.

The message assures Obama of his prayers so that God will assist him in his great responsibilities for American and the world, Lombardi said.

The Vatican clearly has differences with some of Obama's positions, such as his support of legalized abortion. On the other hand the Vatican, like Obama, opposed the Iraq war.

Normal Vatican protocol is to send a telegram of congratulations on inauguration day, but the Vatican decided to join the many wishes pouring in from around the world immediately after the Democrat's victory in Tuesday's U.S. election, Lombardi said.

Earlier, Lombardi told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that the Vatican said it hoped Obama would work to promote peace and justice in the world.

“All of us are hoping that Obama will be able to meet the expectations and hopes directed at him,” said Lombardi.

The Vatican hopes the man elected to be the United States' first black president would “work for the cause of rights and justice, finding suitable ways to promote peace in the world, fostering people's development and dignity while respecting essential human and spiritual values,” the Vatican spokesman said.

“Faithful are praying so that God may enlighten him and give him a hand in his huge responsibility, so that he will govern well,” Lombardi said.

A very Christian message, circumspect and sensible. What else could the Holy Father have said? I am sure he is praying, praying......

Babies Perfect and Imperfect

by Amy Julia Becker
First Things
November 2008

Our daughter was born at 5:22 p.m. on December 30, 2005. Two hours later, a nurse called my husband out of the room. When he returned, he took my hand and said, “They think Penny has Down syndrome.” As this news began to make its way into my consciousness, we heard shouts from the room next door. Another child had been born. “She’s perfect!” someone exclaimed about that other baby. “She’s perfect!”

Once we found out that Penny had Down syndrome, we had a hard time celebrating her birth. We didn’t open the bottle of champagne perched by my bedside. We were afraid to call our friends and family. We didn’t shout, “She’s perfect.”

In fact, those words haunted me. The medical language used for Down syndrome implies a special brand of imperfection: “disabled,” as if Penny were a defective piece of machinery that had been turned off; “retarded,” with all its connotations of stupid and subhuman; “abnormal,” like a cancerous growth. I found no comfort in these terms.

My faith didn’t help much either. Without even knowing it, my mind held a theological grid, a mental chart of how the universe worked. The only thing that chart told me about Down syndrome—the presence of an extra chromosome in every cell of Penny’s body—was that it was a manifestation of sin in the world. By that, I don’t mean I thought Down syndrome was immoral, but I did think that, because the entire cosmos was out of whack, bad things happened. Bad things, like malaria, and hurricanes, and extra chromosomes. And if having an extra chromosome was on par with disease and destruction and other things that are not of God, what did that say about our daughter?

My theology, at first, seemed to affirm the medical language. It seemed that, even by God’s standards, Penny was in another category of human being altogether—not merely “fallen,” like the rest of us, but defective, a mistake. And yet even in those early, dark hours of her life, Penny’s presence—her sweet face and tiny hands and warm body—knocked against my grid, jostled my presuppositions about human wholeness and human sin. I started to understand that Penny was a gift, a precious human being, a child with much to offer.

I began to reconsider my own theological presuppositions. And I wondered—Was Down syndrome a product of cosmic disorder? What did it mean for Penny, extra chromosome and all, to be created in the image of God? Could Down syndrome have existed in the Garden of Eden? Would Penny have Down syndrome in heaven? In other words, was Down syndrome a part of God’s good creation, or was it evidence of creation gone awry?

I wasn’t the only one asking these questions. Amos Yong’s Theology and Down Syndrome, Thomas Reynolds’ Vulnerable Communion, and Hans Reinders’ Receiving the Gift of Friendship have all been published within the last year, and all consider theological questions surrounding both physical and mental disability. Together these writers provide a nuanced understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to anticipate a fully redeemed and restored, perfected humanity.

Before I read these books, and before Penny was in my life, I thought of perfection in largely individualistic and physical terms, as if one day God’s redeeming work would make us all little superheroes—strong, beautiful, intelligent, and incapable of making mistakes. These authors, however, recognize the full and even exemplary humanity of the individuals our culture calls disabled. They recognize the significance, both here and now and for all eternity, of “the least of these.” Yong explains, “The world, as created, is contingent, limited, and finite (as opposed to the divine infinitude). Yet contingency, limitedness, and finitude are not essentially evil, even if the human experience of suffering (and evil) is sometimes derived from these realities.”

In other words, from the moment of creation, human beings have been needy and dependent creatures. The initial sin of Adam and Eve was to attempt to become like God instead of accepting their inherent limitedness as humans. Rather than trusting God to direct and guide them within their natural limits, they tried to become autonomous individuals. As Reynolds writes, “Neediness, vulnerability, or lack of ability is not a flaw detracting from an otherwise pure and complete human nature. Rather, it is testimony to the fact that our nature involves receiving our existence from each other.” To think of the first humans in terms of dependence, need, and vulnerability makes me wonder whether Adam could have stubbed his toe, or whether he ever asked Eve for a backrub to relieve his sore muscles after a long day’s work. It helps me realize that human limitations didn’t arise when sin entered the world. Limitations existed already. It was brokenness—both within the moral and the natural order—that came with sin.

Just as Adam’s and Eve’s limitations constitute one aspect of their humanity, the life, death, and resurrection of Christ provide a portrait of humanity that includes vulnerability, weakness, and powerlessness. Scriptural references to Christ’s power in weakness abound: Think of the hymn in Philippians 2, or the image from Revelation of the saints worshiping “the lamb that was slain.” According to Yong, since Jesus experienced bodily disfigurement on the cross, “this Christologically defined imago Dei would thus be inclusive rather than exclusive of the human experience of disability.”

Reynolds makes a similar point: “His resurrected body continues to bear his scars as a sign of God’s solidarity with humanity. . . . It suggests that disability indicates not a flawed humanity but a full humanity.” It is true, and significant, that Christ comes to us in weakness, with limits, and with needs, and yet I wouldn’t claim Jesus is “the disabled God.” Christ’s physical suffering is imposed on him by humans, whereas disability often refers to congenital and genetically based physical problems. Moreover, he does not remain in this incapacitated state. The resurrected Christ bears his scars, but he does not retain his wounds.

Yong and Reynolds both go too far in arguing the solidarity of Christ’s suffering and human disability. And yet, the images of both Adam and Christ as limited and vulnerable allow us to conceive humanity in different terms from those I had on hand when I found out Penny had Down syndrome. At first, I could only see her extra chromosome as evidence of imperfection, as a series of limitations that were different and worse than my own human limits. I didn’t conceive of limits—hers or mine—as potentially good: gifts from God that enable each of us to admit our creatureliness, our need for one another, our need for God’s grace.

Early on, I had asked my mother whether she thought Down syndrome happened because of sin in the world. She responded gently, “The only evidence of sin I see is in how the world reacts to Penny.” I began to understand what she meant—that Penny is no more or less human than I am, no more or less born in sin, no more or less blessed, no more or less in need of redemption. When I think of Penny’s life to come only in terms of being fixed or healed, I miss the point of what it means for God to redeem and heal each and every one of us.

I have been asking the wrong questions all along. We know that heaven involves seeing God face to face. We know it involves love. We know it involves participation in community, in the body of Christ, within a multiplicity of gifts and abilities. We also know that, even once we are fully redeemed, our humanity includes limitations and dependence on one another. We don’t know what those limits will look like. We don’t know whether all of us will have good vision or be able to run marathons without feeling tired or be able to solve quadratic equations. Yong goes so far as to say, “I further speculate that people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, such as those with Down syndrome or triplicate chromosome 21—will also retain their phenotypical features in their resurrection bodies. . . . Thus, the redemption of those with Down syndrome, for example, would consist not in some magical fix of the twenty-first chromosome but in the recognition of their central roles in the communion of saints and in the divine scheme of things.”

With all that said, we also know that God promises to make us whole. So when the prophet Isaiah writes of a future when the blind will be healed, or when Jesus heals the paralytic, or when the author of Revelation envisions the new heaven and the new earth without any pain, I have to wonder where healing fits in my new understanding of Down syndrome and other disabilities. All three of the recent books imply that when we conceive of healing simply as miraculous cures for abnormal states of being—blindness, deafness, cognitive delays—we miss the point. They do not see the transformation of every physical limitation as a guarantee, or even as necessary for fulfilling our human potential, and they construe healing in a holistic sense, as the inclusion of all people, regardless of bodily or mental function, in communion with God.

I can’t say what Penny’s redemption will look like, and I trust that God’s promise to make each one of us whole will include physical transformation. But part of the point is to remind ourselves about the full humanity of those with Down syndrome in this world. It took a lot of thought and prayer for me to agree with what my mother understood as soon as Penny was born: The evidence of sin is in our response to her, not in her extra chromosome.

For a long time, I was looking for answers to questions that were hardly worth asking, and I was trying to recreate my daughter according to a cultural standard of normalcy rather than according to a biblical understanding of full human life. We are created in the image of God, recipients of divine love and grace, and we bear the responsibility and privilege of extending love into the world here and now, and forever more.

Two and a half years after Penny was born, I don’t think of her as defective, or retarded, or abnormal. I think back to that first evening of her life, when I cringed at the words about the baby next door: “She’s perfect!” I still wouldn’t call Penny perfect. I wouldn’t call any human being, besides Jesus, perfect. I am well aware that Penny needs healing and redemption through Christ, as do I. And Penny’s nature, I hope and pray, will be redeemed through Christ as she becomes the whole person she was created to be. I suspect Penny’s whole person will include three twenty-first chromosomes, but only because any aspect of that extra chromosome causing separation—physical, emotional, relational—will be overcome.

Just recently, we started reading a book about Jesus together. We read the story of Jesus blessing the little children. Penny was fascinated. At the end, I told her that Jesus loves her just like he loves the little children in the story. And I asked her if she knows that she can talk to Jesus. Without hesitation, she nodded her head, folded her hands, and said, “Pray.” Now that I know what to look for, I glimpse perfection in Penny’s life nearly every day.

Amy Julia Becker, a master-of-divinity candidate at Princeton Theological Seminary, is a writer and mother in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Her first book, Penelope Ayers, will be published this fall.

The bottom line is whether one upholds the culture of life, or the opposite.

I did not post the immediate reports that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, right after the US presidential elections, decided to drop the question of what to do about pro-abortion politicians from the agenda of their meeting next week.

What happened? All the bishoply balls suddenly retracted back into habitual hiding?

I was shocked, considering that for the first time in decades, a significant nuimber among them had decided to speak up clearly about the clear doctrinal duty of all Catholics, politicans or not, to uphold the sanctity of life at every stage, hurrah, hurrah! Now this! And now what?


Obama and the Bishops
By Richard John Neuhaus

Friday, November 7, 2008, 8:16 AM


In a few days, the American bishops of the Catholic Church will be holding their annual fall meeting in Baltimore. High on the agenda is how Catholic bishops can better communicate Catholic teaching on social justice both in the Church and in the public square.

It is understood that the priority issue of social justice is the protection of innocent human life — from the entrance gates of life to the exit gates, and at every step along life’s way. The most massive and brutal violation of justice is the killing of millions of children in the womb.

In recent months, an unusually large number of bishops have been assertive, articulate, and even bold, in their public affirmation of the demands of moral reason and the Church’s teaching. Some estimate the number of such bishops to be over a hundred.

Critics of these bishops, including Catholic fronts for the Obama campaign, claim that bishops have only spoken out because prominent Democrats stepped on their toes by egregiously misrepresenting Catholic teaching. Why only? It is the most particular duty of bishops to see that the authentic teaching of the Church is safeguarded and honestly communicated.

Not all bishops covered themselves with honor in the doing of their duty. Ignoring their further duty to protect the integrity of the Eucharist and defend against the faithful’s being led into confusion, temptation, and sin by skandolon, some bishops issued statements explaining why they had no intention of addressing the problem of public figures who claim they are Catholics in good standing despite their consistent rejection of the Church’s teaching on the defense of innocent human lives.

Some such bishops took the position that publicly doing or saying anything that addressed that very public problem would be viewed as controversial, condemned as politically partisan, and misconstrued by those hostile to the Church. Therefore, they explained, they were doing and saying nothing except to say why they were doing and saying nothing.

Such calculated timidity falls embarrassingly short of the apostolic zeal exemplified by the apostles whose successors the bishops are. Fortunately, these timorous shepherds seem to be in the minority among the bishops.

Others seem to have taken to heart in this Pauline Year the counsel of Paul to Timothy: “Fight the good fight . . . I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths. As for you, always be steady, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.”

After the election, some Catholics with itching ears who are manifestly embarrassed by the Church’s being out of step with the new world of “the change we’ve been waiting for” have gleefully pointed out that the assertiveness of the bishops had little political effect. In the presidential and other races, Catholics voted for pro-abortion candidates.

So what? It is not the business of bishops to win political races. It is the business of bishops to defend and teach the faith, including the Church’s moral doctrine. One hopes they will keep that firmly in mind in their Baltimore meeting.

The reading for Mass on the day following the election was Philippians 2, in which St. Paul prays that the faithful “may be blameless and innocent children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world.”

That is as pertinent now as it was in the first century, and will be until our Lord returns in glory. It is the business of bishops to help equip the faithful to let the splendor of moral truth shine through their life and witness as lights in the world.

If, on occasion, that coincides with political success, it is to be viewed as an unexpected, albeit welcome, bonus.

It is a grievous degradation of their pastoral office, as well as a political delusion, for bishops to see themselves as managers of the Catholic voting bloc.

Earlier this year, the bishops issued “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.” It was, as I wrote at the time, a fine statement in almost every respect. But its elaborate attention to nuance and painstaking distinctions made it a virtual invitation for the Catholic flaks of Obama to turn it upside down and inside out. The statement was regularly invoked to justify voting for the most extreme proponent of the unlimited abortion license in American presidential history.

That unintended invitation to distort, eagerly seized upon by those with a mind to do so, was especially evident in the statement’s treatment of a “proportionate” reason to support pro-abortion candidates. The bishops must do better next time.

To be sure, any statement must be carefully reasoned, as Catholic moral theology is carefully reasoned. Yet an episcopal statement is not an invitation to an academic seminar but, above all, a call to faithfulness. The task is to offer a firm, unambiguous, and, as much as possible, a persuasive case on the basis of revelation and clear reason.

The events of these months have once again exposed deeper problems in the leadership of the bishops, although certainly not of the bishops alone.

To cite an obvious instance, only 25 to 35 percent (depending on whose data you believe) of the 68 million Catholics in this country regularly attend Mass. That means that, except for a few bishops who have larger media access, bishops are being heard by only a minority of their people.

Moreover, many parish pastors and priests are embarrassingly eager to avoid controversy, and others are openly disdainful of the Church’s teaching and/or its implications for public justice. Some bishops are tremulously intimidated by their presbyterates. Such bishops and priests need to read again, and with soul-searching prayer, Paul’s counsel to Timothy.

There are deeper problems. In the last four decades, following the pattern of American Protestantism, many, perhaps most, Catholics view the Church in terms of consumption rather than obligation. The Church is there to supply their spiritual needs as they define those needs, not to tell them what to believe or do.

This runs very deep both sociologically and psychologically. It is part of the “success” of American Catholics in becoming just like everybody else.

Bishops and all of us need to catch the vision of John Paul II that the Church imposes nothing, she only proposes. But what she proposes she believes is the truth, and because human beings are hard-wired for the truth, the truth imposes. And truth obliges.

It is not easy to communicate this understanding in our time, as it has not been easy in any time. In the twentieth century, the motto of the ecumenical movement was “Let the Church be the Church.” The motto was sometimes betrayed by that movement, but it should be courageously embraced by the bishops meeting in Baltimore.

The bishops must set aside public relations and political calculations, and be prepared to surrender themselves anew to the task for which they were ordained, to uncompromisingly defend and communicate the faith once delivered to the saints.

Which brings me, finally, to another and related matter that will surely be discussed in Baltimore and deserves to be on the agenda. The Campaign for Human Development (CHD) is an annual collection in parishes, usually on one of the last two Sundays in November. It used to be called the Catholic Campaign for Human Development but the Catholic was dropped, which is just as well since it has nothing to do with Catholicism, except that Catholics are asked to pay for it.

Some bishops no longer allow the CHD collection in their dioceses, and more should not allow it. In fact, CHD, misbegotten in concept and corrupt in practice, should, at long last, be terminated.

Ten years ago, CHD was exposed as using the Catholic Church as a milk cow to fund organizations that frequently were actively working against the Church’s mission, especially in their support of pro-abortion activities and politicians.

Now it turns out that CHD has long been a major funder of ACORN, a national community agitation organization in support of leftist causes, including the abortion license. ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is under criminal investigation in several states.

In the last decade CHD gave ACORN well over seven million dollars, including more than a million in the past year. It is acknowledged that ACORN, with which Sen. Obama had a close connection over the years, was a major player in his presidential campaign.

The bishops say they are investigating the connection between CHD and ACORN. They say they are worried that it might jeopardize the Church’s tax-exemption. No mention is made of abusing the trust of the Catholic faithful.

What most Catholics don’t know, and what would likely astonish them, is that CHD very explicitly does not fund Catholic institutions and apostolates that work with the poor. Part of the thinking when it was established in the ideological climate of the 1960s is that Catholic concern for the poor would not be perceived as credible if CHD funded Catholic organizations. Yes, that’s bizarre, but the history of CHD is bizarre.

The bishops could really help poor people by promptly shutting down CHD and giving any remaining funds to, for instance, Catholic inner-city schools. In any event, if there is a collection at your parish this month, I suggest that you can return the envelope empty—and perhaps with a note of explanation—without the slightest moral hesitation.

After this week’s elections, we must brace ourselves for very difficult times, keeping in mind that difficult times can be bracing. As for the meeting of bishops next week: Let the Church be the Church, and let bishops be bishops.

OK, this is one apology I am more than happy to make, and thank God! It appears the USCCB was the victim of some media misreporting (see above report).


Bishops will not skip debate
on abortion and politics
What will really happen this week at the USCCB meeting




Cardinal George and Bishop Gerald Kicanas (left), president and VP, respectively of the USCCB.


Baltimore, Nov 9, 2008 (CNA) - Since the election of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States, several Catholic commentators have speculated on how the original agenda of the annual Fall General Assembly of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) will change.

According to bishops involved in the organization of the three-day meeting, which starts this Monday, the agenda, including a public discussion of abortion and politics, is fully on track.

Speculation that the agenda might change came late last week when several prominent Catholic commentators argued that the bishops had "lost authority" by speaking out strongly against Catholics voting for pro-abortion politicians, like Sen. Barack Obama and other mostly Democratic candidates, who were elected to office last Tuesday.

On Friday, Religion News Service reported that the USCCB “has scuttled plans to discuss abortion and politics next week in Baltimore,” citing the bishops' spokeswoman, Sister Mary Ann Walsh. RNS also quoted Sister Walsh saying that the agenda had yet to be finalized.

Moreover, according to the National Catholic Reporter's John Allen Jr., “some analysts, especially those of a more liberal bent, are spinning the election of Barak Obama as a ‘repudiation’ of what they see as an overly strident and partisan tone from the bishops, especially on abortion. A few ardently pro-life Catholics, meanwhile, actually believe that what they call ‘silence and treachery’ from the bishops on abortion helped pave the way for Obama’s success.”

On Friday, Peter Steinfels argued in his regular New York Times column that "anyone constructing a list of the big losers on Tuesday would probably include the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops."

Steinfels served as editor of “Commonweal” magazine before landing a job at The New York Times in 1988 and still frequently contributes to the magazine that he and his wife, former editor Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, have helped shape since 1964.

During the election season, Commonweal's blog openly wooed Catholics to vote for Obama and harshly criticized bishops who took a strong stand on life and family issues.

Steinfels supported his assertion that the bishops were “defeated” on the grounds that nominal Catholics voted 52 percent to 45 percent for Obama.

“Will that fact be candidly addressed when the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops meets next week in Baltimore?,” he asked, suggesting that the bishops should “change strategy.”

A similar suggestion was made by Fr. Thomas Reese S.J. of Georgetown University in an article published by the Dallas Morning News on Sunday.

Quoting the same figure of nominal Catholics voting for Obama, Reese said that “Episcopal authority took a major hit during the election,” and argued that “(the) division between the vocal, partisan bishops and the silent, nonpartisan bishops will be a major issue at the Baltimore meeting.”

“This argument," Reese continued, “will take place behind closed doors lest the bishops scandalize the faithful with their divisions.”

Reese also came up with his own list of proposals, which would essentially require the bishops to remain silent about the evil of abortion and concentrate on practical political engagement for “reducing abortions,” as promised by Barack Obama.

“Why am I not surprised?" joked one bishop about Reese’s comments, speaking on a condition of anonymity to CNA.

"Fr. Reese is a mainstream media darling, but the truth is that he has very little knowledge of what goes 0n (in the episcopate) and far less influence,” he added.

Another bishop who requested anonymity, confirmed to CNA that the bishops will not drop the issue of abortion or hold the conversation behind closed doors. On the contrary, they will discuss it on no less than three occasions: “in our regional groups, in executive session, and in the public session.”

The sessions open to the media will take place on Monday, November 10, from 9:00 a.m. to mid-afternoon, and Tuesday, November 11, from 9:00 a.m. until mid-afternoon. The rest of the meeting will be for breakout sessions, executive sessions, and prayer and reflection.

Archbishop John Vlazny of Portland entered into greater details of how the USCCB meeting will proceed.

“At this year’s fall assembly we bishops will hear an address from our President, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago. We shall also elect a USCCB secretary and chairs-elect of the Committees on National Collections, Cultural Diversity, Doctrine, Pro-Life Activities and Communications. In addition we will vote on the revised Grail Psalter for use in the United States, the translation of the Proper of the Seasons and the Order for the Blessing of a Child in a Womb.”

In this weekend’s column on the Catholic Sentinel, Archbishop Vlazny also revealed that the bishops will also “hear a report from Bishop Gerald Kicanas about the work of our Priority Task Forces. These priorities are strengthening marriage, faith formation and sacramental practice, life and dignity of the human persons, cultural diversity in the church, and promoting vocations to priesthood and religious life.”

Archbishop Vlazny is himself a member of the task force on the faith formation and sacramental practice.

“We plan to set aside time to discuss practical and pastoral implications of political support for abortion, an issue that remains problematic for us and our people,” he confirmed.

“The mission of our Conference calls all of us bishops to act collaboratively and consistently on the important issues which confront the church and society. Furthermore it helps us foster communion with the church in other nations under the leadership of the Holy Father,” Archbishop Vlazny said.

Bishop Robert Vasa of Baker, Oregon, also offered a different vision on how to interpret the current circumstances from a Catholic perspective.

“In our present political climate it would be very easy to somehow link our courage and hopefulness to the outcome of political endeavors. It would be easy to position our hope in some kind of political strategy and call for greater courage in fostering that particular strategy.”

“The fact that whatever kind of kingdom we manage to build here will always be an imperfect kingdom helps us keep our focus on that in which and for which we ultimately hope, a kingdom of God in eternity,” he said.


Cardinal George to society:
Don’t ask Catholics to check
their beliefs at the door






Baltimore, Nov 10, 2008 (CNA)- Mons. Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago, and President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), lamented Monday the fact that Catholics cannot be considered “full partners” in public life unless they put aside “fundamental Catholic teachings” on abortion and other beliefs about a “just moral and political order.”

Praising the social advancement that allows a man like Barack Obama to become President, the cardinal said we must pray he succeeds in his task and remember that Catholics “who took our social doctrine to heart” in combating racism can feel vindicated by his accomplishment.

According to the cardinal, Obama was not asked to renounce his racial heritage to become President. He contrasted this with President John F. Kennedy, who effectively “was asked to promise that his Catholic faith would not influence his perspective and decisions as President a generation ago.”

That debate continues, the cardinal claimed, in the words of those who “reject universal moral propositions that have been espoused by the human race throughout history, with the excuse that they are part of Catholic moral teaching.”

Decrying the fact that some Catholics must put aside Catholic teachings in order to be considered full partners in American life, Cardinal George singled out the issue of Catholic opposition to abortion.

“The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice… common ground cannot be found by destroying the common good,” he said to sustained applause from the bishops.

Cardinal George described attitudes that demand Catholics be silent about their beliefs as “hubris that has isolated our country politically and now economically.” This blinding pride “is heard, but not usually recognized, in moral arguments based simply and solely on individual moral autonomy,” he said.

Addressing the issue of how the Church fits into society, the cardinal president said, “The Church and her life and teaching do not fit easily into the prior narratives that shape our public discussions,” adding that those who impose their own agenda on the Church, whether left- or right-wing, “betray the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Cardinal George also seemed to encourage the way that scores of bishops spoke out in defense of the faith prior to the presidential election.

“As we all know, the Church was born without episcopal conferences, as she was born without parishes and without dioceses, although all these structures have been helpful pastorally throughout the centuries,” he said.

“The Church was born only with shepherds, with apostolic pastors, whose relationship to their people keeps them one with Christ, from whom comes authority to govern the church,” he remarked.

Cardinal George also had some words for Catholic politicians who were the particular focus of the debate over the Church’s acceptance in the public square.

“We respect you and we love you, and we pray that the Catholic faith will shape your decisions so that our communion may be full.”

Saying the bishops face “enormous challenges,” he joked that bishops at their consecration should be given “not crosiers but mops!”

Questions at bishops' press conference
focus on U.S. election results
By Chaz Muth and Patricia Zapor



BALTIMORE. Nov. 10 (CNS) -- The sizable victory of President-elect Barack Obama in winning the White House became the central subject of the Nov. 10 press conference during the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' fall general assembly in Baltimore.

"It's 1932 revisited," said Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago, president of the USCCB, referring to the election in which Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt overwhelmingly defeated Republican incumbent President Herbert Hoover following the 1929 stock market crash that contributed to the Great Depression. "The American voters have turned to another party."

Though Obama's support for keeping abortion legal is contrary to church teachings, Cardinal George acknowledged a majority of U.S. voters who identify themselves as Catholics voted for the incoming president.

He also agreed that the economic crisis trumped just about every issue important to the bishops, including abortion, immigration reform and the war in Iraq.

The big surprise in the election, however, was that many people who supported Obama also voted in favor of a same-sex marriage ban in California, Arizona and Florida, said Archbishop George H. Niederauer of San Francisco.

"They did not see this as a conservative/liberal issue," Archbishop Niederauer said. "They saw it as a natural law issue."

The infusion of new voters in this election warrants study by the bishops on how the electorate selected candidates and ballot questions, he said.

Jesuit Father Tom Reese, a senior fellow at Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University in Washington, asked whether the bishops would support an approach supported by some Catholic backers of Obama to focus on reducing abortions by providing better social services and addressing poverty. The bishops said that would be possible if the programs met certain criteria.

Some pro-life Catholics who supported Obama said they did so out of the belief that an abortion-fighting strategy based primarily on overturning Roe v. Wade was not likely to succeed anytime soon. Therefore, they said, they were supporting the idea of reducing abortions by improving services to poor women, and finding ways of working toward that goal with those who support keeping abortion legal.

Cardinal George said the bishops would support programs to improve social welfare in general. But, he said, "it's still to be proven what the connection is between poverty and abortion."

He said "social isolation" certainly could be one factor that might lead some women to seek abortions, so working "to be sure no one is isolated" would be one outreach effort to support.

Archbishop Niederauer said "both/and" would be his preferred approach, working to change a legal system that cannot protect the most vulnerable in society, as well as aiding women facing an unwanted pregnancy.

Niederauer is the one who has kept his head straight in this news confrence account! The Church has always taken the 'et-et' approach - do things that are good equally, not one to the exclusion of the other.

It is strange no one asked - or that this report does not touch - aboutthe future of stem-cell research in the United States, considering that Obama's advisers started the week off by announcing that the new president, as soon as he takes office, will overturn a number of Bush executive acts, including Bush's ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell (ESC) research and for international aid programs that promote abortion.

For people who pride themselves in being not just 'with it' but 'ahead of things', the Obama people have obviously chosen not to look at the overwhelming evidence of success in clinical trials adult stem-cell uses for therapeutic purposes that make human ESC unnecessary, especially since clinical trials on the little that has emerged from ESC so far have been failures.

Vatican lends Parthenon Marbles
fragment to Greece
By Daniel Flynn



Here's a news item I completely missed when it first appeared.


ATHENS, Nov. 5 (Reuters) – The Vatican returned a small fragment of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece on Wednesday on a one-year loan, fuelling calls for the British Museum to hand back its own priceless sculptures from the ancient temple.

The loan of the fragment, one of three in the Vatican Museum's vast collection of antiquities, follows a request for its return by Greece's late Orthodox Archbishop Christopoulos at a meeting with Pope Benedict in 2006.

In recent years Greece has stepped up its campaign to recover large sections of the frieze removed from the Parthenon in 1801 by Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin and British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

The Vatican's fragment of the frieze, measuring 24 by 25 cm, depicts the head of a man carrying a tray. Just over a month ago Italy handed over a small section of the Parthenon Marbles housed in a museum in Palermo, Sicily.

"This is a very important event," said Greek Culture Minister Michalis Liapis. "It should be an example to follow for the return of the Parthenon Marbles."

The Elgin Marbles comprise roughly half the 160 meter (yard) frieze which adorned the temple of Athena on the Acropolis, completed in 432 BC as the crowning glory of Athens' Golden Age.

They were bought by the British government in 1816 from the bankrupt Elgin, and given to the British Museum "in perpetuity."

The British Museum has refused to return the treasures, which it says were acquired by Elgin through a legitimate contract with the Ottoman Empire that then ruled Greece.

It also said its marbles were in better condition than those left behind, which suffered from the Athens pollution.

Greece says the completion of a 100-million-euro museum at the foot of the Acropolis, which will open to the public next year, means the time is ripe for their return.

Sweden, Germany and Italy have returned pieces taken from the Acropolis, but many artifacts remain in collections in Denmark, Germany, Austria and France, archaeologists say.

Giandomenico Spinola, head of the Vatican Museum's classical antiquities department, said it was too early to say whether the loan of the piece would be renewed after one year or whether it could be extended to other pieces in the museum's collection.

"All the artifacts in the museum belong to the Pope, only he can make a decision," Spinola told Reuters.

A DAY TO SAY 'THANK YOU'

TO THE WAR VETERANS OF THE UNITED STATES
WHO HAVE DONE FAR MORE GOOD FOR THE WORLD
THAN THE INCIDENTAL HARM THEY MAY HAVE CAUSED.



With thanks to Father Z for this beautiful graphic.


LET US PRAY FOR ALL THE MEN AND WOMEN
WHO FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT FOR JUST CAUSES.

ALL YOU CAFETERIA CATHOLICS:
HERE'S WHAT YOU VOTED FOR,
AMONG OTHER THINGS


From Rocco Palmo's

November 11, 2008


O'BRIEN ON 'FOCA'

After writing two columns on the elections that were widely praised for their mix of balance and conviction, our host for this week's events -- Baltimore's Archbishop Edwin O'Brien -- has rolled out a final reflection, this time on the proposed Freedom of Choice Act, which President-elect Obama has pledged to sign.

Slated to run in Thursday's edition of the Premier See's Catholic Review, here's your sneak peek:

---

The election last week of Senator Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States was, indeed, a historic day for our nation. His election as the first African-American to hold the office of president is a significant step forward for a country that continues to heal from the wounds inflicted by the sin of racism. And the response I have witnessed in the past week clearly indicates how meaningful this historic moment is for so many people--most especially our sisters and brothers in the African-American community.

Now that the extended and divisive campaign is over, we rejoice that the President-elect has accepted the challenge of unifying a country divided not in its desire for a better America, but in its belief in what will truly make America better. While early exit polling indicated that the economy was the paramount concern of six out of every 10 Americans, we must not lose sight of the ongoing struggle our country faces in achieving genuine respect for the freedom and dignity of every human life.

On the day after the election, the nation’s Catholic bishops issued a statement congratulating the president-elect and urging him to defend the weak and heal divisions.

“Our country is confronting many uncertainties,” we bishops said. “We pray that you will use the powers of your office to meet them with a special concern to defend the most vulnerable among us and heal the divisions in our country and our world. We stand ready to work with you in defense and support of the life and dignity of every human person.”

As faithful citizens, our duty to remain actively engaged in the political process does not end at the voting booth. It is equally important that we continue to claim our legitimate role in the public square by urging those whom we have elected as our leaders to uphold values we believe are fundamental to the common good. We pray there will be many issues upon which we can work in wholehearted unity with our country’s new administration and members of Congress. But today I urge all Catholics—those who voted for our president-elect and those who did not—to respond to President-elect Obama’s promise in his November 4 acceptance speech: “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.”

Of particular concern to Catholics and others seeking to promote a culture of life, is Senator Obama’s public commitment to passing the Freedom of Choice Act. It is critically important that we voice our early and grave concerns to our elected officials regarding this uncompromising legislation, which is currently pending before Congress. To do so, and to learn more information, I encourage you to visit the online Legislative Action Center of our Maryland Catholic Conference at www.mdcathcon.org.

The Freedom of Choice Act, or FOCA, eliminates even the most modest regulations on abortion and creates a “fundamental right” to abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy.

Despite its misleading title claiming freedom of choice, FOCA, co-sponsored by Maryland Senators Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin and Representatives Dutch Ruppersberger and Chris Van Hollen…

- Removes the choice of medical providers to refuse in good conscience to provide morally offensive services.
- Removes the choice of taxpayers to decline to have their money pay for morally abhorrent procedures.
- Removes the choice of state legislatures to undertake reasonable and widely accepted regulations of abortions, including those that increase education and family involvement while reducing the number of abortions.

Not only does FOCA eliminate legitimate conscientious choice, it actually expands the scope of laws to enhance abortion on demand by
- Making abortion a “fundamental” right: Thus, policies now in place by the will of the people and legislatures in many states would be overridden across the nation. (e.g. informed consent, parental notification, and restrictions on government funding of abortions).
- Requiring an expansion of government-assisted abortions through military and public hospitals.
- Requiring greater taxpayer subsidy of abortions.

A threat to all life, this legislation would also have a terrible impact on Catholic and other pro-life healthcare providers. Of particular note:

FOCA trumps state laws that protect rights of providers (e.g. Catholic hospitals, pharmacists, etc.) to conscientiously object to performing abortions if such state laws are seen to in any way “interfere” with a woman’s decision to have an abortion.

FOCA undermines the freedom of religion upon which our country was founded.

I pledge that we will join with other all law-abiding religious and public interest groups in taking every action necessary to resist this blatant attempt to stifle the consciences of those who continue to hold innocent human life sacred.

In his 1919 Pastoral Letter, Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore wrote: “In a special degree, the sense and performance of duty is required of those who are entrusted with public office. They are at once the servants of the people and the bearers of an authority whose original source is none other than God.”

I ask the faithful of this Archdiocese to pray for our President-elect and for all newly-elected leaders - that they will perform the duties entrusted to them with respect for the dignity of all human life and in complete faithfulness to the God we are all called to serve.

---

Please go to this site
www.fightfoca.com/
to sign a 'FIGHT FOCA' petition.

Catholic bishops will fight Obama on abortion

By RACHEL ZOLL, AP Religion Writer
Nov. 11, 2008

BALTIMORE – The nation's Roman Catholic bishops vowed Tuesday to forcefully confront the Obama administration over its support for abortion rights, saying the church and religious freedom could be under attack in the new presidential administration.

In an impassioned discussion on Catholics in public life, several bishops said they would accept no compromise on abortion policy. Many condemned Catholics who had argued it was morally acceptable to back President-elect Obama because he pledged to reduce abortion rates.

And several prelates promised to call out Catholic policy makers on their failures to follow church teaching. Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton, Pa., singled out Vice President-elect Biden, a Catholic, Scranton native who supports abortion rights.

"I cannot have a vice president-elect coming to Scranton to say he's learned his values there when those values are utterly against the teachings of the Catholic Church," Martino said. The Obama-Biden press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Archbishop Joseph Naumann of the Diocese of Kansas City in Kansas said politicians "can't check your principles at the door of the legislature."

Naumann has said repeatedly that Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic Democrat who supports abortion rights, should stop taking Holy Communion until she changes her stance.

"They cannot call themselves Catholic when they violate such a core belief as the dignity of the unborn," Naumann said Tuesday.

The discussion occurred on the same day the bishops approved a new "Blessing of a Child in the Womb." The prayer seeks a healthy pregnancy for the mother and makes a plea that "our civic rulers" perform their duties "while respecting the gift of human life."

Chicago Cardinal Francis George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is preparing a statement during the bishops' fall meeting that will press Obama on abortion.

The bishops suggested that the final document include the message that "aggressively pro-abortion policies" would be viewed "as an attack on the church."

Along with their theological opposition to the procedure, church leaders say they worry that any expansion in abortion rights could require Catholic hospitals to perform abortions or lose federal funding. Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Chicago said the hospitals would close rather than comply.

During the campaign, many prelates had spoken out on abortion more boldly than they had in 2004, telling Catholic politicians and voters that the issue should be the most important consideration in setting policy and deciding which candidate to back.

Yet, according to exit polls, 54 percent of Catholics chose Obama, who is Protestant. The new bishops' statement is meant to drive home the point in a way that cannot be misconstrued.

"We have a very important thing to say. I think we should say it clearly and with a punch," said New York Cardinal Edward Egan.

But some bishops said church leaders should take care with the tone of the statement.

Bishops differ on whether Catholic lawmakers should refrain from receiving Communion if they diverge from central church beliefs. Each bishop sets policy in his own diocese.

"We must act and be perceived as acting as caring pastors and faithful teachers," said Bishop Blase Cupich of Rapid City, S.D.

Dr. Patrick Whelan, a pediatrician and president of Catholic Democrats, said angry statements from church leaders were counterproductive and would only alienate Catholics.

"We're calling on the bishops to move away from the more vicious language," Whelan said. He said the church needs to act "in a more creative, constructive way," to end abortion.

Catholics United was among the groups that argued in direct mail and TV ads during the campaign that taking the "pro-life" position means more than opposing abortion rights.

Chris Korzen, the group's executive director, said, "we honestly want to move past the deadlock" on abortion. He said church leaders were making that task harder.

"What are the bishops going to do now?" Korzen said. "`They have burned a lot of bridges with the Democrats and the new administration."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


WOW! The bishops seem to have really found the right footing. I was hoping for something like this, but did not really expect them to reiterate their pre-election firmness so decisively.

As to the Catholic enablers and apologists for abortion and the politicians who advocate it, they simply continue to delude themselves.

And what does Dr Whelan mean that the bishops should 'move away from vicious language'? When did they ever use vicious language, which would be un-Christian, to begin with? Who has been using vicious language if not those who consider pro-life Catholics 'cretins'?

So 54% of American Catholics voted for Obama. If that is the percentage of hard-core pro-abortion Catholics, then that's not so bad after all. It is by no means a landslide. But whether their numbers are more or less than that, it doesn't matter.

If the bishops stand firm, and Catholics who do not pick and choose what doctrine to follow stand firm with them, things will get better, as in fact most pre-election surveys had shown that the percentage of Americans opposing abortion has been rising. (Just not perhaps the pwrcentage of Catholics who do, unfortunately.)

TERESA

Final statement from US bishops
wishes Obama administration well
but cites 'obstacles to unity'




BALTIMORE, Nov. 12 (USCCB) — Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), voiced hope for the Obama Administration but pointed to possible obstacles to our desired unity, in a Nov. 12 statement at the end of the annual fall assembly of the USCCB.

"The bishops of the Catholic Church in the United States welcome this moment of historic transition and look forward to working with President-elect Obama and the members of the new Congress for the common good of all," he said.

He said that "the unity desired by President-elect Obama and all Americans at this moment of crisis will be impossible to achieve," if the administration's policies increase abortions.

"Aggressive pro-abortion policies, legislation and executive orders will permanently alienate tens of millions of Americans, and would be seen by many as an attack on the free exercise of their religion."

"We express again our great desire to work with all those who cherish the common good of our nation," he added. "The common good is not the sum total of individual interests: it is achieved in the working out of a common life based upon good reason and good will for all."

---

STATEMENT BY CARDINAL GEORGE


"If the Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders labor; if the Lord does not watch over the city, in vain does the watchman keep vigil." (Psalm 127, vs. 1)

The Bishops of the Catholic Church in the United States welcome this moment of historic transition and look forward to working with President-elect Obama and the members of the new Congress for the common good of all.

Because of the Church's history and the scope of her ministries in this country, we want to continue our work for economic justice and opportunity for all; our efforts to reform laws around immigration and the situation of the undocumented; our provision of better education and adequate health care for all, especially for women and children; our desire to safeguard religious freedom and foster peace at home and abroad.

The Church is intent on doing good and will continue to cooperate gladly with the government and all others working for these goods.

The fundamental good is life itself, a gift from God and our parents. A good state protects the lives of all. Legal protection for those members of the human family waiting to be born in this country was removed when the Supreme Court decided Roe vs. Wade in 1973. This was bad law.

The danger the Bishops see at this moment is that a bad court decision will be enshrined in bad legislation that is more radical than the 1973 Supreme Court decision itself.

In the last Congress, a Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) was introduced that would, if brought forward in the same form today, outlaw any "interference" in providing abortion at will.

It would deprive the American people in all fifty states of the freedom they now have to enact modest restraints and regulations on the abortion industry.

FOCA would coerce all Americans into subsidizing and promoting abortion with their tax dollars. It would counteract any and all sincere efforts by government and others of good will to reduce the number of abortions in our country.

Parental notification and informed consent precautions would be outlawed, as would be laws banning procedures such as partial-birth abortion and protecting infants born alive after a failed abortion. Abortion clinics would be deregulated. The Hyde Amendment restricting the federal funding of abortions would be abrogated.

FOCA would have lethal consequences for prenatal human life.

FOCA would have an equally destructive effect on the freedom of conscience of doctors, nurses and health care workers whose personal convictions do not permit them to cooperate in the private killing of unborn children.

It would threaten Catholic health care institutions and Catholic Charities.

It would be an evil law that would further divide our country, and the Church should be intent on opposing evil.

On this issue, the legal protection of the unborn, the bishops are of one mind with Catholics and others of good will. They are also pastors who have listened to women whose lives have been diminished because they believed they had no choice but to abort a baby.

Abortion is a medical procedure that kills, and the psychological and spiritual consequences are written in the sorrow and depression of many women and men. The bishops are single-minded because they are, first of all, single-hearted.

The recent election was principally decided out of concern for the economy, for the loss of jobs and homes and financial security for families, here and around the world.

If the election is misinterpreted ideologically as a referendum on abortion, the unity desired by President-elect Obama and all Americans at this moment of crisis will be impossible to achieve.

Abortion kills not only unborn children; it destroys constitutional order and the common good, which is assured only when the life of every human being is legally protected.

Aggressively pro-abortion policies, legislation and executive orders will permanently alienate tens of millions of Americans, and would be seen by many as an attack on the free exercise of their religion.

This statement is written at the request and direction of all the Bishops, who also want to thank all those in politics who work with good will to protect the lives of the most vulnerable among us.

Those in public life do so, sometimes, at the cost of great sacrifice to themselves and their families; and we are grateful. We express again our great desire to work with all those who cherish the common good of our nation.

The common good is not the sum total of individual desires and interests; it is achieved in the working out of a common life based upon good reason and good will for all.

Our prayers accompany President-elect Obama and his family and those who are cooperating with him to assure a smooth transition in government.

Many issues demand immediate attention on the part of our elected "watchman." (Psalm 127) May God bless him and our country.

---

Boston's Cardinal O'Malley seems
to ignore that Rome has said
pro-abortion politicians
'must' be denied Communion
by John-Henry Westen



This is a comprehensive presentation that shows the pitfalls for American bishops who pride themselves on being 'in step' with their flock. When even someone like Cardinal O'Malley expresses such views, it's not a happy outlook for the Church.


BOSTON, November 11, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In an interview published today in the Boston Globe, Cardinal Archbishop Sean O'Malley, once again speaks on the matter of Holy Communion for Catholic politicians who support abortion.

Globe reporter Michael Paulsen asked: "You just alluded to the fact that many of the people in your archdiocese are Catholics who support abortion rights, including leading politicians, and both US senators. What is your position on whether they should present themselves for Communion, and whether you should be giving it to them?"

On presenting themselves, the Cardinal responded that the church's teaching is in the Catechism, but added that the bishops have more teaching to do on the matter.

However, with regard to "giving it to them," Cardinal O'Malley said: "But until there's a decision of the church to formally excommunicate people, I don't think we're going to be denying Communion to the people." He added: "However, whatever the Church's decision is, we will certainly enforce."

While there may be debate among US Bishops over whether or not to deny Communion to pro-abortion politicians, for the Vatican there is no such debate. The issue was closed several years ago with a letter from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

The then-head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith intervened into a debate among the US Bishops on the issue in 2004. Cardinal Ratzinger said in his letter, titled "Worthiness to receive Holy Communion," that a Catholic politician who would vote for "permissive abortion and euthanasia laws" after being duly instructed and warned, "must" be denied Communion.

Ratzinger's letter explained that if such a politician "with obstinate persistence, still presents himself to receive the Holy Eucharist, the minister of Holy Communion must refuse to distribute it."

Since then, Pope Benedict XVI has confirmed this position, speaking as Pope. Answering a reporter on an in-flight press conference in May last year, Benedict addressed a question on the Mexican bishops excommunicating politicians who support legalizing abortion.

"Yes, this excommunication was not an arbitrary one but is allowed by Canon law which says that the killing of an innocent child is incompatible with receiving communion, which is receiving the Body of Christ," he said.

In the comment, the Pope was referring to the Church's Canon law 915 which states: "Those upon whom the penalty of excommunication or interdict has been imposed or declared, and others who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin, are not to be admitted to Holy Communion."

Former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke, whom Pope Benedict appointed this year to head the highest judicial court in the Vatican, has remarked on the need for Bishops to uphold this canon since without doing so they undermine belief in the truth of the evil of abortion.

"No matter how often a bishop or priest repeats the teaching of the Church regarding procured abortion, if he stands by and does nothing to discipline a Catholic who publicly supports legislation permitting the gravest of injustices and, at the same time, presents himself to receive Holy Communion, then his teaching rings hollow," wrote Burke. "To remain silent is to permit serious confusion regarding a fundamental truth of the moral law." (See coverage: www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/sep/07091107.html)

Another prominent Vatican figure in this matter is the head (or Prefect) of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments - Nigerian-born Cardinal Francis Arinze. His department deals specifically with the sacraments, of which Holy Communion is preeminent.

Already in 2004, Cardinal Arinze said a pro-abortion politician "is not fit" to receive Communion. "If they should not receive, then they should not be given," he added.

Since then, Cardinal Arinze, who still holds the position of prefect of the congregation, has been asked about the issue so frequently he has begun to joke about it. The latest such incident was videotaped and is available on Youtube.

In the November 2007 video, Arinze said that he is regularly asked if a person who votes for abortion can receive Holy Communion.

He replied, "Do you really need a cardinal from the Vatican to answer that? Get the children for first Communion and say to them, 'Somebody votes for the killing of unborn babies, and says, I voted for that, I will vote for that every time.' And these babies are killed not one or two, but in millions, and that person says, 'I'm a practicing Catholic', should that person receive Communion next Sunday? The children will answer that at the drop of a hat. You don't need a cardinal to answer that." (see the youtube video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYdMHsq2AuE )

The full text of the interview with Cardinal O'Malley is available from the Boston Globe here:
www.boston.com/news/local/articles_of_faith/2008/11/o...

The full text of the letter on the subject by then-Cardinal Ratzinger is available here:
www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/apr/050419a.html

TNE END FOR ELUANA:
Top Italian court clears way
for her death
by Richard Owen in Rome

Nov. 13, 2008


Even the objective way this is reported by the headline is chilling. This is Italy's second case in two years of what one might call legalized euthanasia. Richard Owen did a fast job of reporting it for the Anglophone media no sooner was the decision announced in Italy - so I don't have to translate the initial Italian accounts




Italy's top appeals court today authorised a father to remove the feeding tube which has kept his comatose daughter alive for nearly seventeen years in the face of protests from the Vatican.

The ruling by the Court of Cassation in the case of Eluana Englaro, now 37, removes the last legal hurdle in a landmark right-to-die case which has fiercely divided opinion in Italy.

Ms Englaro has been in a vegetative state in hospital at Lecco in northern Italy, her home town, since suffering severe injuries in a 1992 car crash when she was nineteen.

The judges rejected an appeal against a ruling in July by a lower court in Milan which had authorised the removal of the life support. Ms Englaro's father, Beppino Englaro, has been seeking legal permission to end her life in nearly a decade of court hearings.

The Vatican and Catholic politicians argue that removing the feeding tube amounts to euthanasia, which is illegal in Italy. However the July ruling said Ms Englaro's coma was irreversible.

It also took into account the fact that before the car crash she had said that if she ever had an accident and entered a vegetative state she would rather die than be kept alive artificially.

The Englaro case has been compared to that of Terri Schiavo, an American woman from Florida who spent 15 years in a vegetative state and was allowed to die in March 2006 against the wishes of her parents after a long court battle.

Earlier this week Cardinal Javier Cardinal Lozano Barragan, head of the Pontifical Council for Health, said removing Ms Englaro's food and hydration would amount to "monstrous and inhuman murder".

The cardinal, the Vatican's "health minister", stated that "to suspend hydration and nutrition in a patient in a vegetative state worsens his or her condition and leads to a terrible death by hunger and thirst".

Mr Englaro however has frequently appealed for his daughter to be "freed from the inhumane and degrading condition in which she is forced to exist".

He later hailed the ruling, saying it proved "that we live in a state of law".

Alfredo Mantovano, the deputy Interior Minister, a member of the far right Alleanza Nazionale, said it was "euthanasia by the back door".

Luca Volontè of the Christian Democratic UDC party said the Court of Cassation had "authorised the first murder by the state in the name of the Italian people".


INITIAL REACTIONS IN ITALY

There's a whole bunch of Italian news agency reports each containing single statements, so I will just translate them with the name of the person who made the comment.



MONS. RINO FISICHELLA
President, Pontifical Academy for Life
It is a grave decision in all respects. For myself, I find it grave from the ethical and moral standpoints. Perhaps there are some who may find justification in procedural quibbles or in the interpretation of the judicial language, but substantially, it is an altogether grave decision which is alien to Italian culture, and an absolute offense insofar as it means taking a life.


CARDINAL JAVIER LOZANO BARRAGAN
President, Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Ministry
To stop providing water and food to anyone means killing a person. The Church teaches that the feeding and hydration of a patient in a vegetative state must not be suspended except in cases when these measures are absolutely useless. I do not wish to interfere with a court judgment but I must reiterate the doctrine of the Church. To stop feeding and hydrating a patient means to kill someone, which is against the fifth commandment.


Ardemia Oriani
Regional Counsel of the Partito Democrata
The decision respects Eluana's wish and her right to a natural death. Now let us leave her and her family in peace after all this time in the spotlight, to avail of the full legitimacy granted by the verdict.


A multi-partisan group of
Italian deputies in Parliament
Today's verdict writes a new sad page in our country's history.

Eluana Englaro has been condemned by an Italian court to a terrible and inhuman death by hunger and thirst. This is a decision that affects us all, the life of every citizen, and which can well open the door to euthanasia in general.

This has shown that a profound wedge can easily be driven between the lines of the law in a way that undermines the primary values on which every civil community is founded.

More than ever, we can no longer delay passing a law on the proper end-of-life care. Such a law shall be clear not only in its general declarations but on every point so that in Italy, there shalll be no room for euthanasia of any kind, passive or active.

It is sad that today, a tribunal of the land has passed this death sentence.

Signed by Saltamartini (Pdl), Polledri (Lega), Bocciardo (Pdl), Binetti (Pd), Di Virgilio (Pdl), Mosella (Pd), Santolini (UDC), Calgaro (PD), Bobba (PD), Pagano (Pdl), Vignali (Pdl), Lupi (Pdl), Volontè (UDC), Laura Molteni (Lega) and Renato Farina (Pdl).


FRANCESCO COSSIGA
Former President of Italy

With the verdict from the Court of Cassation on the Eluana Englaro case, the juridical institution of euthanasia has been introduced into the national order.

From the juridical-constitutional point of view, the constitutional court already paved the way by declaring inadmissible the appeal presented by the regional authorities of Milan against the decision of the Court of Cassation, explicitly attributing to judges the power to fill what they consider 'gaps' in the juridical order by adapting the law to changes in 'social consciousness', a step advocated for some time by militant judges who now appear to have won the battle [of legislation by judges].

Now, for instance, since the existing Civil Code does not contain a definition of marriage as the union between a man and a woman, the next step may well be for a judge, with his newly conferred power to 'update' the law, to introduce 'same-sex' marriage in consonance with a changed 'social consciousness'.


EUGENIA ROCCELLA
Italian Deputy Minister for Welfare
The decision by the Court of Cassation will mark the first time that an Italian citizen will die under an official death sentence.

Eluana Englaro will die not because she has a terminal illness but because she will be deprived of food and water. In the ministry we believe that it is not possible to determine with certainty whether a vegetative state is irreversible, and so, her case is not one of terminal illness.

Roccella tied up this issue with a move to introduce biological wills in Italy:
Even in the case of a biological will, a qualified physician explains to the patient in specific terms all the possible consequences of a therapy or lack of it, in order to obtain informed consent.

In the case of Eluana, there had been no previous declaration of anticipated treatment by her, but only a statement she reportedly made that she would rather die than be kept alive artificially. Even if she said so, it was certainly not in reference to a vegetative state. Each of us can say or has said at one time or other, 'Just unplug the machine if I should ever need one to stay alive'.

The proposed law on 'prior declaration regarding treatment' [formal description of the so-called biological will] is going through preliminary drafts and revisions, and I hope we can come up with a law by next spring. I think we can get a majority vote for it.


LEGAL & CONSTITUTIONAL OBJECTIONS
Translated from



'We respectfully request that because this is a case of a true and proper death sentence in the Republic of Italy [where the death penalty is outlawed], Eluana's passing should be observed not only by a few witnesses, but that a video of it can be made by the authorities to be available to whoever requests it, just as they do in countries which allow the death penalty.

"This way our children and grandchildren will be able to see how an Italian citizen can be condemned by a judge in a civilian and democratic state to die of hunger and thirst."


This was the initial reaction of the Associazione Scienza e Vita to the court verdict that allows the father of Eluana Englaro to stop providing food and water to his daughter who has been in a vegetative state since being injured in a car accident 17 years ago.

Italy's top appeals court, the Court of Cassation, did not rule on the merits of the case but simply declared 'inadmissible for lack of legitimacy' the Milan prosecutor's appeal to stop a lower court order, validated by the Milan court of appeals, that had earlier permitted the move on its merits.

Two days ago, the cassation court's main prosecutor already announced he found the Milan prosecutor's appeal inadmissible. He said the Milan prosecutor could not question the lower court decisions because the case did not involve public interest but merely a 'subjective individual situation'.

"The decision of the high court," said Scienza e Vita, 'authorizes in effect the suspension of hydration and alimentation which are, for us and for an overwhelming majority of Italians, simply life support and not therapy".

The decision implies, it said, "a reductive view of life, according to which other persons can decide when a life is worth living or not, but above all, that human life is disposable, that each of us can exercise a right to die, which carries a corresponding right to kill since someone must be responsible for executing the sentence.

"The right to die is not contemplated by the Constitution and defies the humanistic criterion of favor vitae which inspires it."

"A human life is not simply a private interest," said Giuseppe Dalla Torre, rector of Rome's LUMSA university [Libero Universita maria Santissima Assunta). "This decision was not about compromising any private individual right but a violation of a Constitutional right. If the Constitution can be violated on one particular, then it can be violated on everything."

Dalla Torre, who is a jurist, expressed the hope that "the lawmakers step in to avoid similar situations", saying a law governing end-of-life care is 'absolutely necessary", now that the courts have opened the way for legislating in the absence of a specific law.

Such action, he says, does not correspond "either to the common sense of Italians nor to constitutional requirement".

"Such an interpretation of the law," he says, "leads to killing in this case, and negates a founding principle of our social order, namely the centrality of the human being and his right to life in every state and every condition. When legal norms are formalistically laid down by judges, then one can legitimize killing, a principle rejected by our Constitution".

Carlo Casini, president of Italy's Movement for Life, said the court decision today " places in danger the lives of thousands of seriously handicapped persons who depend on their acceptance in society, and places everyone at risk of being killed legally when a court decides one is marginal and useless".

He said Italy could resort to the European Court on Human Rights but that court has no power to change court decisions reached in individual countries. Therefore, he said, "we must apply ourselves immediately and vigorously to pass a law which will revalidate Article 32 of the Constitution and will prevent other similar abandonment of persons in states of extreme physical disability."

"it is a very serious thing when questions as sensitive as this are decided in the courts," said Antonio Spagnolo, professor of bioethics at the University of Macerata. "This 'juridicization' of bioethics completely undercuts the patient-physician relationship. Recently, Pope Benedict XVI expressed the fear that legislative measures might prevail over medical judgments and the wish that each situation may be decided in the correct therapeutic context between physician and patient on a case by case basis."

The 'heavy and difficult' course taken by the legal maneuvers of the Englaro case, he said, "have made Eluana the sacrifical victim who is carrying the entire burden of the dynamics that have now brought end-of-life decisions exclusively to the courts".

The bioethicist thus urges a law on end-of-life decisions which will not need to resort to the courts, but will spell out criteria that take into account the relevant medical judgments, as well as the informed decision-making of the patient and/or respobnsible family members.


How AFP reported it:

Mercy killing gets
court green light in Italy



ROME, Nov. 13 (AFP) — Italy's highest appeal court on Thursday cleared the way for the removal from life support of a woman who has been in a coma for 16 years, the ANSA news agency reported.

The court upheld a July ruling by a lower court in Milan that doctors could stop artificially feeding Eluana Englaro, 37, as it had been proven that the road accident victim's coma was irreversible.

The Roman Catholic Church has made Englaro a symbol in its campaign against mercy killings and demanded that she be kept alive.

Rino Fisichella, rector of Rome's pontifical Lateran University, told Radio Vatican that he opposed the decision.

This decision is disastrous "on ethical and moral grounds as its condemns a young girl to death," he said, calling for a law to be passed banning "all active or passive euthanisia in Italy."

Englaro has lain in a hospital in northern Lecco since January 1992, and her father has been seeking an end to her life support since 1999.

The Milan court said that Englaro, when fully conscious, had stated her preference to die rather than being kept alive artificially.

Avvenire, the daily newspaper of the Italian Catholic Church, accused the court of "necrophilia" after the ruling.

The court decision also drew a swift rebuke from the Vatican, which said it gave "de facto" justification for euthanasia.

The Italian Catholic Church refused to allow a religious funeral for poet and writer Piergiorgio Welby in 2006.

Welby, who suffered from muscular dystrophy, died in December 2006 after being taken off an artificial respirator.

Now in sight:
Extra-solar planets
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: November 13, 2008




A dust ring, seen in red, surrounds the star Fomalhaut, which is located at the center of the image, but is not visible. The Hubble Telescope captured a fuzzy image of the planet, known as Fomalhaut b, which is no more than a white speck in the dust ring that surrounds the star. [NASA, via Associated Press]


A little more of the universe has been pried out of the shadows. Two groups of astronomers have taken the first pictures of what they say — and other astronomers agree — are most likely planets going around other stars.

The achievement, the result of years of effort on improved observational techniques and better data analysis, presages more such discoveries, the experts said, and will open the door to new investigations and discoveries of what planets are and how they came to be formed.

“It’s the tip of iceberg,” said Christian Marois of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia. “Now that we know they are there, there is going to be an explosion.”

Dr. Marois is the leader of a team that recorded three planets circling a star known as HR 8799 that is 130 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.

The other team, led by Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley, found a planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, only 25 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Piscis Austrinus.

In an interview by e-mail, Dr. Kalas said that when he finally confirmed his discovery last May, “I nearly had a heart attack.”

In scratchy telescope pictures released Thursday in Science Express, the online version of the journal Science, the planets appear as fuzzy dots that move slightly around their star from exposure to exposure. Astronomers who have seen the new images agreed that these looked like the real thing.

“I think Kepler himself would recognize these as planets orbiting a star following his laws of orbital motion,” Mark S. Marley of the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., wrote in an e-mail message elaborating on HR 8799.

More than 300 so-called extrasolar planets have been found circling distant stars, making their discovery the hottest and fastest-growing field in astronomy. But the observations have been made mostly indirectly, by dips in starlight as planets cross in front of their home star or by wobbles they induce going by it.

Astronomers being astronomers, they want to actually see these worlds, but a few recent claims of direct observations have been clouded by debates about whether the bodies were really planets or failed stars.

“Every extrasolar planet detected so far has been a wobble on a graph,” said Bruce Macintosh, an astrophysicist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and a member of Dr. Marois’s team. “These are the first pictures of an entire system.”

The new planetary systems are anchored by young bright stars more massive than our own Sun and swaddled in large disks of dust, the raw material of worlds.

The three planets orbiting HR 8799 are roughly 10, 9 and 6 times the mass of Jupiter, and orbit their star in periods of 450, 180 and 100 years respectively, all counterclockwise.

The Fomalhaut planet is about three times as massive as Jupiter, according to Dr. Kalas’s calculations, and is on the inner edge of a huge band of dust, taking roughly 872 years to complete a revolution of its star.

Both systems appear to be scaled-up versions of our own solar system, with giant planets in the outer reaches, leaving plenty of room for smaller planets to lurk undetected in the warmer inner regions. Dust rings lie even farther out, like the Kuiper belt of icy debris extending beyond the orbit of Neptune.

“This is a window into what our own solar system might have looked like when it was 60 million years old,” Dr. Marois said.



Sara Seager, a planetary theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said it was significant that the planets in both cases seemed to be associated with disks of dust, particularly Fomalhaut, one of the brightest and closest stars known to be host to a massive disk.

“Fomalhaut is like a Hollywood star to astronomers, so we have some personal excitement here,” Dr. Seager said. “It feels like finding out that one of your four closest friends just won the lottery big time”

Alan Boss, a planetary theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said the triple-planet system in Pegasus was particularly promising, “as we expect planets to form in systems in general, whereas spurious background interlopers will generally appear as single ‘planets.’ ”

But he and others cautioned that much more study of these objects was necessary and that the masses imputed to them were still highly uncertain.

Being able to see planets directly opens the door to spectroscopic observations that can help determine the composition, temperature and other physical characteristics of planets and allow for comparisons with one another and with their parent stars. Dr. Macintosh said he hoped to train a spectroscope on his new planets as early as Monday.

The new images are the fruits of a long campaign by astronomers to see more and more of the unseeable. In particular, it is a triumph for the emerging technology of adaptive optics, in which telescope mirrors are jiggled and warped slightly many times a second to compensate for the atmospheric turbulence that blurs star images.

The problem in seeing other planets is picking them out of the glare of their parent stars, which are millions of times brighter, at least in visible light. As a result, planet hunters usually look for infrared, or heat radiation, which is emitted copiously by planets still shedding heat from the process of formation.

For their observations, Dr. Marois and his colleagues used the 8-meter in diameter Gemini North and the 10-meter Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, both of which had been fitted with adaptive optics. Then they processed the images with a special computer program, which Dr. Marois described as “a software coronagraph,” for processing the images.

The team first spied a pair of dots about four billion and six billion miles out from HR 8799 in October last year. Following up, they discovered a third planet closer in, at about two billion miles. Then they discovered an old observation from 2004, which also showed the planets and how far they had moved around the star in three years.

“Seeing the orbit is one of the coolest things,” Dr. Macintosh said.

Dr. Kalas did his work with the Hubble Space Telescope, which is immune to turbulence because it is in space. He used a coronagraph to block light from the actual star.

He said he had been driven to look for a planet around Fomalhaut after Hubble photographs in October 2004 showed that a dust ring around the star had a suspiciously sharp inner edge, often a clue that the ring is being sculpted by the gravity of some body orbiting nearby.

A second set of Hubble observations, in July 2006, revealed a dot moving counterclockwise around the star. “I basically held my breath for three days until I could confirm the existence of Fomalhaut in all of my data,” Dr. Kalas recalled.

Fomalhaut is also a young star, about 200 million years old, and its dust ring extends 11 billion to 20 billion miles from its planet, Dr. Kalas said. In order not to disturb or roil the dust ring, Fomalhaut’s planet must be less than three Jupiter masses, well within regulation planet size, Dr. Kalas and his collaborators calculated.

A more detailed analysis, with another team member, Eugene Chiang of the University of California, Berkeley, as lead author will appear in the Astrophysical Journal, Dr. Kalas said.

In an e-mail message, Dr. Kalas pointed out that Fomalhaut was the closest exoplanet yet discovered, “close enough to contemplate sending spacecraft there.”

The Vatican on Current Affairs
The Vatican speaks out on euthanasia and stem cell research policy in the US

Richard Owen in Rome
The Times Online
November 14, 2008

Interesting that two news events this week - a high court decision to allow an Italian woman in an "irreversible coma" to die and controversy over a possible change of policy on stem cell research in the US under Barack Obama - have brought the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Health Care Workers and its Mexican head, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, into the limelight.

Cardinal Barragan is often described as the Vatican "health minister", but this is a bit of a simplification. The Council was created in 1985 by Pope John Paul II with a brief to "show the solicitude of the Church for the sick by helping those who serve the sick and suffering, so that their apostolate of mercy may ever more effectively respond to people's needs" and to "spread the Church's teaching on the spiritual and moral aspects of illness as well as the meaning of human suffering".

Javier Lozano Barragán, who is 75, trained as a priest at Zamora in Mexico and then at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and was ordained in 1955. He became auxiliary Bishop of Mexico City in 1979, then Bishop of Zacatecas in 1984 before returning to Rome in 1996 to head the Council, becoming a cardinal in 2003.

Cardinal Barragán therefore took part in the 2005 conclave which elected Pope Benedict, and has actively promoted the the canonisation of Pope John Paul II. He held a press conference this week on childhood diseases and infant mortality, only to find himself ambushed on two stories in the headlines: embryonic stem cell research, and the fate of Eluana Englaro, who as a teenager in 1992 was injured in a car crash which has put her into a "persistent vegetative state" for the past sixteen years.

The case has agonised Italy, which after all is still a Catholic country, even if attendances at mass and confession have fallen. In fact secular, left wing politicians complain that the influence of both the Italian Catholic Church and the Vatican over Italian life has if anything increased since the return to power of the Centre Right under Silvio Berlusconi in last April's elections.

Eluana Englaro's father has been fighting for a decade for the right to remove the feeding tubes that keep her alive at a hospital in the northern Italian town of Lecco. When the country's highest appeal court, the Court of Cassation, ruled this week that he could, he commented that the decision "shows that we live in a state of law" - in other words, Italy is a secular state in which the Church has a voice, but no more.

The Church's voice is pretty powerful, on the other hand. L'Avvenire, the daily newspaper of the Italian Bishops Conference, warned ahead of the ruling that the Court of Cassation would be "enacting the first death sentence in Italy since 1946" if it said yes. Cardinal Barragan was even blunter: to allow Eluena to die would amount to "monstrous and inhuman murder".

As for stem cells, asked whether the Vatican was concerned about reports that Mr Obama might reverse the Bush Administration's ban on embryonic stem cell research, the cardinal said such research had not resulted in any significant health cure so far and was "good for nothing".

But then Cardinal Barragan knows very well that health, far from being a low profile issue, puts him in the front line. I remember that when John Paul II was dying, it fell to Cardinal Barragan as well as to Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the then Vatican spokesman, to reveal that the Pope was in a "very, very serious" way.

He has also been asked by Pope Benedict to get to grips with the question of whether condoms can be used to help stop the spread of AIDS - to which his answer, unsurprisingly, is that the best answer to AIDS is premarital abstinence from sex before marriage and marital fidelity after it.

Cardinal Barragan has shared the spotlight this week with a younger prelate often described as one of the Vatican's brightest and best - Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella, head of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life. Archbishop Fisichella, 57, known as "Rino", is also rector of the Pontifical Lateran University and a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

He described allowing Eluena Englaro to die as an "immense crime" and a "civil and moral defeat". Eluena would die an "atrocious death" by being deprived of water and nutrition, a step on the road to legal euthanasia, Monsignor Fisichella said.

But he added, less dogmatically, that he had "profound respect" for Eluena's father ("I pray for him"), and that no one who has not had a similar experience can possibly judge her family, or indeed "other families dealing with similar cases".

Archbishop Fisichella played a behind the scenes role in the conversion to Catholicism of Magdi Allam, an Italian Muslim journalist who was received into the Catholic Church by Pope Benedict himself last Easter. He takes robustly conservative stands on homosexual unions, abortion and embryonic stem cell research - but rarely loses his cool, debating calmly and rationally, always showing respect for other views. A rising star? Watch this space.

The court decision that allows Eluana Englaro's father to stop providing her with food and water in order to end 16 years of coma has understandably dominated Italian media, where, from what I have seen so far, few have been willing to go out and voice their approval of what amounts to legal euthanasia. Far less than the approving liberal voices that praised Piergiorgio Welby's decision to end his own life by disconnecting his respirator last year.

Most of the major arguments - religious, moral, ethical, legal, constitutional and medical - against the decision were expressed by a wide range of prominent persons soon after the decision yesterday - and I translated the main ones, including those of Cardinal Lozano Barragan and Mons. Fisichella for the Church, and Deputy Welfare Minister Roccella for the Italian government. But the decision did not come early enough to make it to L'Osservatore Romano's issue for 11/14.

Here is the front-page editorial commentary on it in tomorrow's issue of OR (11/15/08), written by bioethicist and historian Lucetta Scaraffia.

In the face of a defeat -
An examination of conscience
by Lucetta Scaraffia
Translated from
the 11/15/08 issue of





The death sentence for Eluana Englaro - which means, as many authoritative voices have said, the introduction of euthanasia in Italy - is a defeat for everyone, not just the Catholic world.

It is not enough to say that secularization and exaggerated individualism are replacing the principles of an ancient religious and cultural tradition which has long been rooted in our society, nor that the media have been too openly biased in favoring death for the girl.

This time, we must admit it, the mass media have been more honest than on other occasions, and Catholic voices have managed to make themselves heard beyond merely the Catholic media.

It is a fact that on serious matters like life and death, the Church, especially in Italy still exercises some influence as we saw in the referendum on assisted procreation.

But this time, it appears that Catholic thinking was little heard, as the reasons advanced in favor of keeping Eluana alive were not convincing enough,

Of course, the mechanism of pity played a great role - this time, not for Eluana's pain - the doctors claim she no longer feels anything, and that therefore, she will not even feel the effects of dying from hunger and thirst - but her father's. As if with his daughter's death, his suffering would end. This is the paradox before which no one knows how to object.

Fear of suffering constitutes the movable basis of all the erroneous decisions that have been made on end-of-life issues . This is best known to those who propagandize for euthanasia promising a future without suffering - on the part of the patient or of his/her family.

It is precisely with a reflection on the meaning of suffering - that only Christianity knows how to face [the Buddhists do, too!] - that we must start again to prevent that such cases do not happen again.

Catholic tradition offers sure and clear criteria for decisions in these complex circumstances: the value of human life from conception to natural death, no matter in what condition it is lived, even when the circumstances to be faced are continually changing and gradually become more and more unprecedented and complicated.

This is the case with Eluana. To the objection, which Catholic thought shares, that feeding and hydration of patient are neither therapy, much less an unnecessary prolongation of therapy, but simply vital support, the answer has been that it is an artificial way of sustaining life, one that decades ago was not even possible. Where, they ask, does natural death come in?

Advocates for discontinuing life support argue that Eluana's condition was provoked by a medical intervention - in this, case an unsuccessful attempt to resuscitate the girl after severe brain injuries suffered in a car accident - and that therefore, even her coma is not a 'natural' state. In short, the argument goes, if medical science was responsible for reducing her to coma, it is also up to it to decide to end the condition.

As even that brief synthesis shows, the problem is more complex than the usual conflict about life and death, although this is what it comes down to. It brings up the role of technoscience in our life, the limits of medicine - all of which demands a close examination of these issues.

The terrible fate of Eluana becomes for all of us a warning, and tells us Catholics that we must think and work harder to propagate our principles - which are reasonable principles that can be shared by all, including non-believers - and bring them to bear each time new ethical and moral questions are raised by scientific progress.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


The Italian papers are reporting that the Region of Lombardy, of which Milan is the capital, has said no hospital or clinic in the region will accept to carry out the court order. Two other nearby regions have said the same thing.


has this report on the neurologist who has been following Eluana for years.

Prof. Carlo Alberto Defanti said that the procedure to discontinue the patient's feeding tube may start in a few days, and that they have identified a few places where they may be able to do this - one in the northeastern region of Udine.

"It definitely won't be in Lombardy," he said, aware of the region's decision. Eluana has been a patient at the Blessed Luigi Talamone hospice in Lecco, her hometown in Lombardy, for the past 14 years.

At the same time, he said that the procedure for discontinuing Eluana's food and water had been established in minute detail by the Milan court of appeals whose go-ahead, given in July, was, in effect, sanctioned by the country's highest appeals court to whom the Milan prosecutor had resorted for ultimate appeal.

Defanti said the decisions on timing would come from Eluana's father alone. He said that one month ago, his patient unexpectedly had a uterine hemorrhage which resolved by itself, and that she has even recovered from the temporary anemia resulting from that bleeding.

"Now she is as she has always been in the past several years," he said. Defanti was among the first who diagnosed Eliana's skull-and-brain trauma after her car accident in January 1992.

The court decision that allows Eluana Englaro's father to stop providing her with food and water in order to end 16 years of coma has understandably dominated Italian media, where, from what I have seen so far, few have been willing to go out and voice their approval of what amounts to legal euthanasia. Far less than the approving liberal voices that praised Piergiorgio Welby's decision to end his own life by disconnecting his respirator last year.

Most of the major arguments - religious, moral, ethical, legal, constitutional and medical - against the decision were expressed by a wide range of prominent persons soon after the decision yesterday - and I translated the main ones, including those of Cardinal Lozano Barragan and Mons. Fisichella for the Church, and Deputy Welfare Minister Roccella for the Italian government. But the decision did not come early enough to make it to L'Osservatore Romano's issue for 11/14.

Here is the front-page editorial commentary on it in today's issue of OR (11/15/08), written by bioethicist and historian Lucetta Scaraffia.

In the face of a defeat -
An examination of conscience
by Lucetta Scaraffia
Translated from
the 11/15/08 issue of





The death sentence for Eluana Englaro - which means, as many authoritative voices have said, the introduction of euthanasia in Italy - is a defeat for everyone, not just the Catholic world.

It is not enough to say that secularization and exaggerated individualism are replacing the principles of an ancient religious and cultural tradition which has long been rooted in our society, nor that the media have been too openly biased in favoring death for the girl.

This time, we must admit that the mass media have been more honest than on other occasions, and Catholic voices have managed to make themselves heard beyond merely the Catholic media.

It is a fact that on serious matters like life and death, the Church, especially in Italy still exercises some influence as we saw in the referendum on assisted procreation.

But this time, it appears that Catholic thinking was little heard, as the reasons advanced in favor of keeping Eluana alive were not convincing enough for Italy's superior courts.

Of course, the mechanism of pity played a great role - this time, not for Eluana's pain - the doctors claim she no longer feels anything, and that therefore, she will not even feel the effects of dying from hunger and thirst - but her father's. As if with his daughter's death, his suffering would end. This is the paradox before which no one knows how to object.

Fear of suffering constitutes the movable basis of all the erroneous decisions that have been made on end-of-life issues. This is best known to those who propagandize for euthanasia promising a future without suffering - on the part of the patient or of his/her family.

It is precisely with a reflection on the meaning of suffering - that only Christianity knows how to face [the Buddhists do, too! It is explicitly fundamental to their beliefs.] - that we must start again to prevent that such cases do not happen again.

Catholic tradition offers sure and clear criteria for decisions in these complex circumstances: the value of human life from conception to natural death, no matter in what condition it is lived, even when the circumstances to be faced are continually changing and gradually become more and more unprecedented and complicated.

This is the case with Eluana. To the objection, which Catholic thought shares, that feeding and hydration of patient are neither therapy, much less an unnecessary prolongation of therapy [something which is not], but simply vital support, the answer has been that it is an artificial way of sustaining life, one that decades ago was not even possible. Where, they ask, does natural death come in?

Advocates for discontinuing life support argue that Eluana's condition was provoked by a medical intervention - in this, case an unsuccessful attempt to resuscitate the girl after severe brain injuries suffered in a car accident - and that therefore, even her coma is not a 'natural' state. In short, the argument goes, if medical science was responsible for reducing her to coma, it is also up to it to decide to end the condition.

As even that brief synthesis shows, the problem is more complex than the usual conflict about life and death, although this is what it comes down to. It brings up the role of technoscience in our life, the limits of medicine - all of which demands a close examination of these issues.

The terrible fate of Eluana becomes for all of us a warning, and tells us Catholics that we must think and work harder to propagate our principles - which are reasonable principles that can be shared by all, including non-believers - and bring them to bear each time new ethical and moral questions are raised by scientific progress.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


The Italian papers are reporting that the Region of Lombardy, of which Milan is the capital, has said no hospital or clinic in the region will accept to carry out the court order. Two other nearby regions have said the same thing.

This is a logic that follows from the Hippocratic oath of all healthcare givers - 'first do no harm' - and their obvious duty to keep a person alive who is not terminally ill.



has this report on the neurologist who has been following Eluana for years.

Prof. Carlo Alberto Defanti said that the procedure to discontinue the patient's feeding tube may start in a few days, and that they have identified a few places where they may be able to do this - one in the northeastern region of Udine.

"It definitely won't be in Lombardy," he said, aware of the region's decision. Eluana has been a patient at the Blessed Luigi Talamone hospice in Lecco, her hometown in Lombardy, for the past 14 years.

At the same time, he said that the procedure for discontinuing Eluana's food and water had been established in minute detail by the Milan court of appeals whose go-ahead, given in July, was, in effect, sanctioned by the country's highest appeals court to whom the Milan prosecutor had resorted for ultimate appeal.

Defanti said the decisions on timing would come from Eluana's father alone. He said that one month ago, his patient unexpectedly had a uterine hemorrhage which resolved by itself, and that she has even recovered from the temporary anemia resulting from that bleeding.

"Now she is as she has always been in the past several years," he said. Defanti was among the first who diagnosed Eliana's skull-and-brain trauma after her car accident in January 1992.


Vatican rejects 'right to die'
after Italian court ruling



ROME, Nov. 14 (AFP) – The Vatican on Friday firmly condemned an Italian court decision allowing a father to remove his comatose daughter from life support, saying "the right to die does not exist."

"Life is sacred, the right to die does not exist," the Vatican's "health minister" Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan said in an interview published by the Italian daily La Stampa.

On Thursday, Italy's highest appeal court upheld an earlier ruling that doctors could stop artificially feeding Eluana Englaro, 37, as it had been proven that the road accident victim's coma was irreversible.

"To stop giving food and drink to Eluana is tantamount to committing murder," said Barragan, who heads the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care.

"It means letting her die of hunger and thirst, condemning her to a monstrous end," he added.

Englaro has lain in a hospital in northern Lecco since January 1992, and her father Beppino Englaro has been seeking an end to her life support since 1999.

The lower court had accepted testimony that when fully conscious Eluana Englaro had stated her preference to die rather than being kept alive artificially.

Her father hailed the ruling, telling the daily La Repubblica: "I wanted justice and the judges gave it to me. They tried to put themselves in Eluana's place, (to understand) her thoughts, her strength, her freedom and her irreversible vegetative state."

Such a state "does not exist in nature, while medicine can take forced feeding and care to an extreme, even when it no longer serves any purpose," he said.

Barragan also spoke to La Repubblica, saying: "The term 'vegetative state' is appropriate for plants, not human beings."

The Roman Catholic Church had made Englaro a symbol in its campaign against mercy killings and demanded that she be kept alive.

Avvenire, the daily newspaper of the Italian Catholic Church, had accused the lower court of "necrophilia" after its ruling in July.

In 2006, the Church refused to allow a religious funeral for poet and writer Piergiorgio Welby, a muscular dystrophy sufferer.

Welby died in December 2006 after being taken off an artificial respirator. [The Church considered him a suicide, since tt was his decision to be taken off the respirator, having won a court decision to do so after years of fighting for his 'right to die'.]

Uruguay President vetoes bill
that would depenalize abortion
Translated from the
11/15/08 issue of



Montevideo, Nov. 14 - Uruguay President Tabaré Ramón Vázquez Rosas yesterday vetoed a law that would depenalize abortion, passed by parliament on Tuesday.

During the debates in Parliament before the vote on the bill, Vazquez Rosas had announced he would veto such an act if it came to his desk

The bill passed by Parliament would have allowed abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Its passage raised protests in wide sectors of society.

Vazquez Rosas, who is an oncologist, has expressed his opposition several times to such a bill on ethical grounds.

Under the law, Parliament would be able to override the President's veto if they get at least three-fifths of the vote in each house of Parliament.

New York rabbi claims
Sistine Chapel images
contain 'secret' messages
BY DANA MASSING

Nov. 15, 2008


A load of trash. Apparently, this rabbi has never read Nostra aetate nor any of John Paul II's and Benedict XVI's messages about the Jewish roots of Christianity! But for the record, at any rate, to show the kind of anti-Christian stories that New York media love to play up, no matter what bunkum it all is, as this one is, by a rabbi who evidently has nothing but hostility for Chistianity.


A Jewish rabbi told a crowd at a Catholic college that Michelangelo's masterpiece at the Vatican doesn't contain Christian imagery, but has plenty of Jewish messages.

"There is not a single Christian figure in the entire ceiling of the Sistine Chapel," Rabbi Benjamin Blech said.

"Ninety-five percent of the figures are Old Testament. Five percent are pagan.

"There isn't a single Christian figure for a good reason," Blech continued. "Michelangelo wanted to undo the error of a failure to acknowledge the source of Christianity in Judaism."

The rabbi and Roy Doliner reveal many of what they call Michelangelo's hidden messages in their book "The Sistine Secrets: Michaelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican."

Both men spoke this week as part of the "Live from NY's 92nd Street Y" lecture series broadcast via satellite at Mercyhurst College.

Mercyhurst and Temple Anshe Hesed, Erie's reform Jewish congregation, teamed up to bring the series here.

Nearly 100 people in Erie joined audiences in Vail, Colo.; Evans, Ga.; the Bronx, N.Y.; Kitchener, Ontario, Canada; Miami, Fla.; Akron, Ohio; and Hollywood, Fla., who were watching the lecture.

They heard the rabbi, a professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University in New York City, and Doliner, a religious Jew who works in but not for the Vatican, talk about messages of Judaism, Kabbalah and tolerance in the fresco painting.

Erie Catholic Sybil Berarducci said she wasn't upset to hear about Jewish symbolism in the Vatican's principal chapel.

"I don't think it's all that secretive anyway," she said after the talk. "Jesus was Jewish."

Blech said he and Doliner aren't the first to find codes in the chapel, but what they are trying to show is that Michelangelo knew Christianity was rooted in Jesus' Jewishness.

"Michelangelo wanted to undo the damage done by prejudice, by corruption of the Church, which divorced itself from its roots and did not any longer recognize or acknowledge its Jewish beginnings," Blech said.

One of the secrets the men showed in their talk was in the corner image of David and Goliath. Doliner said that the four corners of a Catholic fresco normally have the writers of the Gospels -- Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The Sistine Chapel shows four times that God saves the Jewish people, Doliner said.

In the image of David about to behead Goliath, saving the Jews from the Philistines, the unusual positioning of the characters makes the shape for the Hebrew letter "gimel," Doliner said.

He also showed a shot of the floor of the chapel, at which point audience members murmured as they picked out a pattern that includes the six-pointed star, now known as the Star of David.

Other images the authors shared are in part of the ceiling showing the prophet Jonah. An angel above him holds up five fingers, the same number as the books of Moses, Blech said.

Another angel looks at Jonah's legs. Unlike other men on the ceiling, Jonah's genitalia is covered. His legs form the Hebrew letter "hei,"which means the number five, Blech said.

"Michelangelo was saying, 'Do not forget the source of Christianity is Judaism,'" Blech said.

Earlier, he revealed a secret that he said showed Michelangelo's dislike for then-Pope Julius II.



Blech showed a close-up of Zachariah, one of seven prophets on the ceiling. Michelangelo got away with painting Zachariah instead of Jesus by superimposing the face of Julius II on the prophet, the rabbi said.

Above Zachariah are two angels. One is "giving him the fig," or making a rude hand gesture toward the pope, conveying Michelangelo's dismay at a pope and a Church that wasn't living up to its own spiritual message, Blech said.

He and Doliner said they don't hate and aren't trying to insult the Catholic Church and they're not saying Michelangelo was a secret Jew.

"We're reporting Michelangelo's anger at what was going on in the Church back then," Doliner said.

"More than his anger was a plea for universal tolerance. And that's the true secret message of the Sistine."


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


In 1508, Michelangelo began work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; he finished in 1512.
To learn more about the Sistine Chapel, visit the Vatican Museums Online at mv.vatican.va/3_EN/pages/MV_Musei.html.

From the nuns who have been
Eluana's caregivers for 14 years:
'If you consider her dead,
just leave her with us'
Translated from

Nov. 15, 2008


LECCO, Italy - Eluana is not alone. She has never been in the 14 years since she was brought to a nursing home in her home city.

The sisters of the Ordine della Misericordine di San Gerardo in the Leccan facility named after Blessed Luigi Talamone have always provided her with loving maternal care - her mothers in her unforeseen second life since a car accident left her brain-damaged and in coma.

[Another report from Lecco says the care provided at this facility is free, and therefore does not involve any expense on the part of the patient's family, probably a major reason why her family transferred her to to the clinic three years after her accident. This makes her father's insistence on allowing her to die more perplexing.]

They have been her unfailing security cordon from the media and other curiosity-seekers - indomitable protectors of her privacy who have always surrounded her with love and respect.

The nuns feel that the court sentence allowing discontinuation of food and water to sustain her life is wrong and unjust, even if they do not say so directly in a note they released to the media:

"All of us sisters at the Beato (Blessed) Luigi Talamone clinic will continue to serve the life of Eluana Englaro and all our patients. Our love and dedication for Eluana and all those entrusted to our care leads us to invoke our Lord Jesus so that hope may prevail even in these difficult hours when hope seems to be an impossibility".

But caring for Eluana is not impossible, and that is the only concern for now of the Misericordine sisters, who also expressed their concern for all those who, like Eluana, risk dying of hunger and thirst following the logic of the court decision on Eluana:

"Our hope and that of many others is that Eluana and others in her condition will not be allowed to die of hunger and thirst. That is why, we reiterate again our willingness to continue to serve Eluana now and in the future.

"Let those who already consider her dead leave her with us, because we feel her very much alive. We ask for nothing in return, except silence and the freedom to love and give ourselves to those who are weak, defenseless and poor".

[Paradoxically, as other Italian reports have explained, the moment alimentation/hydration on Eluana is stopped, she becomes a 'terminally ill patient' who must therefore be transferred to a facility for the terminally ill!]

For his part, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, president of the Italian bishops conference, restated that the decision of Italy's highest appeals court represents a first step towards introducing legal euthanasia in Italy.

"This would be serious for the entire society," he told Italian state TV's TG-1 (RAI's premier news program), "because a society that cannot be on the side of its most helpless and most fragile members cannot be said to be human".

Cardinal Bagnasco also echoed the urgent need for a law that would regulate end-of-life cases like Eluana's.

"Such a law," he said, "should respect limits within absolute fundamental values, as for instance, the ascertained desire of the individual concerned, the physician's responsibility to science and to his conscience, and the clear distinction between what constitutes therapy or treatment versus vital support necessities like alimentation and hydration."

Italy's Minister of Justice Angelino Alfano said "Parliament is now called upon to fill this gap in the law, just as it has already raised to the Constitutional Court the technicality on which the Cassation Court based its decision on the Englaro case [that the Milan prosecutor had no competence to file an appeal on the case because it did not involve public interest, only a specific personal case].

Meanwhile, a group of three organizations, in turn representing 34 smaller associations, plan to present an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to rule on the Englaro verdict.

Rosaria Elefante and Alfredo Granata, who are drafting the appeal in the name of «Vive onlus», «Federazione nazionale associazioni trauma cranico» e «Rete», said:

"We will object to both the decree by the Appellate Court of Milan on July 24 that explicitly allowed discontinuing the feeding and hydration of Eluana, as well as the Cassation Court verdict that upheld it.

"This action expresses a collective interest and must be pushed in order that the verdict on Thursday may not open the doors not only to euthanasia but also to forms of eugenics [genetic pre-selection]. It is also an action in behalf of all families who have a member who is in coma or in a vegetative state."




I have just found the letter of Cardinal Tettamanzi (above, right) to the nuns of Lecce on the site of the Archdiocese of Milan. It is a very moving letter that sets out unconditionally the Catholic teaching on the value of human life. Here is a translation:
I.


CARDINAL TETTAMANZI'S LETTER
TO THE MISERICORDINE SISTERS OF LECCO
ON THE SITUATION OF ELUANA ENGLARO

---

Dearest Misericordine Sisters,

During all the news, commentaries and position-taking about the case of Eluana Englaro, I have been thinking of you, your feelings and fears, your daily services, and especially, your prayers.

Everyone knows that for you, Eluana is not a ‘case’, but a person, a young woman whom health care workers in your clinic have nursedears without publicity, with competence and freely given love.

She is a woman injured in her body and in her mind, whose real state of consciousness is not known to any of us, but who is and remains fully in her inviolable dignity as a person. You welcomed Eluana to your home, and she entered your lives, receiving your generous love.

The news of the verdict from the Court of Cassation has filled me with profound sorrow as a man, a believer, and the pastor of the Curch of Milan. Up to the last moment, I was hoping and praying that the life and personal dignity of this young lady would be respected.

Even now that the tragic circumstances of her earthly existence seem irremediably destined to an unreasonable and violent end, I address – hoping against hope – my supplications to God, the Lord of life.

I ask him that with his omnipotent mercy, he may allow a last opportunity to re-think the matter on the part of those who are taking on the most serious responsibility of procuring her death by denying food and water to one of his beloved creatures.

Human life is always – whatever its physical and moral condition – a fundamental, precious and non-disposable gift that God has given each of us, for which we are all responsible custodians and servants and not its masters.

The vocation of service and care of life, especially of those who are weak and fragile, inspires your work of mercy in Lecco at the Beato Luigi Talamoni Clinic. It is here that Eluana was welcomed and where she has lived, where you have offered, with joy and humility, not only everything that her physical body needs physiologically, but more than that, the warmth of your daily presence, affectionate and discreet, respectful of the feeling of her parents and even of their intentions which you do not share.

For all this, I am grateful, along with the entire Ambrosian church which has followed and continues to follow with attention and apprehension the eventual fate of this young woman, and which has prayed and continues to pray for her.

I see in you, dearest sisters, the living example of what the Church of Christ is called above all to do – with daily love expressed concretely even if not publicized – in behalf of all those who are most weak and most alone.

There are, in fact, many men and women of good will who, in our community and elsewhere, daily live this authentically Christian charity towards those who suffer. I am convinced that this example of dedication and love will remain – above and beyond all facile and continuous declarations of principle – a clear and precise sign in our social and cultural context, which is too often confused, and conditioned by orientations which are not respectful of – indeed, hostile to – human life.

I hope that your commitment to serving those who suffer is comforted and sustained by a sure hope: the Lord embraces and immerses the life of Eluana and so many other persons who are in similar circumstances in the light of truth and salvation. A light which the shadows of injustice and human presumptuousness cannot obscure nor overwhelm. A light which continues to shine and is there for all, even for those who do not welcome it.

As I bless you, dearest sisters, from the heart, and implore the Lord for every grace necessary in your mission of charity and mercy, I assure my closeness to each of you and my paternal support for your meritorious work for the sick and the suffering who require special attention and care.

In your continuing prayers for Eluana, I join you and so many persons who are living these tragic moments bitterly but who have not lost hope in the Lord of life.


With great affection,

DIONIGI CARD. TETTAMANZI
Archbishop


Milan, 14 November 2008

---

Cardinal Tettamanzi with the Holy Father at the General Audience
on 11/12, when he presented him with a copy of the new Ambrosian
Lectionary.

Not unexpectedly, there have been a number of significant statements made in the past two days about the Englaro case. I will translate a few of them, beginning with this interview with Cardinal Bagnasco.



Cardinal Bagnasco:
'Eluana's life does not
belong to the courts -
let us pray and hope'
by Luigi Accattoli
Translated from


ROME - "Eluana is still alive' and "Life is never at our disposal", says Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, president of the Italian bishops' conference, who in this interview, points out two urgent matters: for Christians, prayer "so that hope may prevail even in this difficult moments"; and for civilian society, a law which affirms and defends 'the indisposable value of life".

Because, he says, to undermine that principle would be equivalent to 'poisoning social coexistence' and taking one step towards 'a dishuman society'.

The cardinal denies that there has been a 'clash' between the Church and the Englaro family: "Nothing of the kind. We do have sincere closeness to the sorrow of a family that has been so severely tried. The sisters at the Talamoni clinic who have lovingly taken care of Eluana for years are a sign of this closeness. At this time, those nuns have declared they are ready to 'continue serving Eluana today and in the future', that they ask for nothing in return except silence and the freedom to love and give to those like Eluana who are defenseless. Their closeness and their wish is also that of the Church."

Eminence, in cases like these, does not Church teaching risk 'violating' the sensibility of the persons involved? Would more discretion not be better?
Discretion does not mean indifference. Eluana, like the thousands of persons who live the same condition she does, affects us very closely, and this is an occasion that calls for material and spiritual solidarity with such patients and their families.

I know from personal experience - even if the clinical circumstances are quire different - because for years, I had to take care of my mother who was immobilized and no longer self-sufficient, so I know what it means.

And yet Eluana is not dead already. Neither does she live in a grey zone between life and death. She is alive, and life is never ours to dispose of. Not by anyone. So I believe that at this time it is important to pray, as the nuns of Lecco have said, 'to invoke our Lord Jesus so that hope may prevail in this difficult time when hope seems impossible'.


What do you say of the role that has been played in all this by doctors, magistrates and politicians?
It is not for me to judge anyone. But I must note that imperceptibly a relativist mentality is spreading which presents itself in the guise of being good sense and the 'humane' thing to do, but which in reality erodes the principle that is at the basis of human coexistence, and that is, that life is not disposable.

If this happens, it is not only religious principle or moral tradition that is undermined - the very air we breathe becomes poisoned. Reciprocal trust will be even more difficult, and fatally, social coexistence itself.


The law governing 'end of life' issues that you said last September you are hoping for - is that relevant now?
Those who now say that such a law has now been made superfluous are the very same ones who until recently were clamoring for it. But in the light of the Milan court ruling last July on Eluana, which the Cassation Court has effectively upheld, it is clear there must be appropriate legislation.

To decide on this most sensitive frontier of existence, the word must now come from those who were elected by the people to make the law and who have the responsibility to promote a social coexistence that is ever more worthy of man, of all and of everyone.

They must know by experience that at the basis of a society that is truly human, there cannot be anything other than the indisposability of human life, even and especially in its weakest, most vulnerable forms. They particularly need, from all of society, special care, protection and accompaniment that is replete with professionalism but also with affection.

So, if the concept of existence will depend exclusively on its efficiency and usefulness, then we are headed for a dishuman society.


What do you think the law should provide for?
Outside of the technical aspects which do not concern the Church, I would say absolute certainty of any 'end of life' declaration made by the patient, the responsibility of doctors with respect to the patient, and a clear distinction between treatments and vital support functions such as alimentation and hydration which are normal necessities for any living person.





This commentary by a layman is very powerful and well-informed.


Once she stops getting
food and water,
Eluana becomes a terminal case
by Carlo Meroni
Translated from

Nov. 15, 2008

“Roma locuta, causa finita”. Rome has spoken, the case is closed.

With two statements of 'judgment' worthy of Pontius Pilate, the Court of Cassation has definitively closed off the two ways - parliamentary and judicial - along which it had been sought to avoid the death of Eluana Englaro by euthanasia.

A judgment which was taken without even entering into the merits of the case, but hiding behind the supposed inadmissibility of the Milan prosecutor seeking recourse from the country's highest appeals court, because, they claim, the question is particularly subjective about an individual person, and therefore, not affecting the public interest.

Who could 'celebrate' in the face of such a defeat? Who can sincerely maintain - without trotting out Vatican interference and the usual amenities - to support death rather than life? Who can love death more than life?

Perhaps the only satisfied person in all this is poor Beppino Englaro, who has finally seen victory for his cause after years of fighting for it. But at what cost? To be 'rid' of a comatose daughter?

I hope and pray that Signor Beppino, after having seen his motives recognized as plausible, can now set aside the bureaucratic verdict and take the time to look into the eyes of his daughter.

I hope and pray that, with a sensible mind, even if he has gained authorization (which does not oblige him in any way to carry it out) to stop the feeding and hydration of his daughter, he may change his mind (along with his wife, mother to Eluana) and decide to continue feeding her just as he and her mother fed her when she was a baby, and as she has been fed since her accident since in her condition, she cannot hold a spoon to feed herself.

"My daughter's life is hell, and I want to liberate her". These were the words of Mr. Englaro. Allow me to raise some questions? Who can tell if Eluana is in a condition of 'hell', when there are persons - fully able and of whole mind - who harbor in their hearts the real hell of hatred and envy and arrogance and rancor?

And what if Eluana is in a condition of peace that none of us is capable of imagining? What if her situation could be a key that will save the lives and/or lead to the rehabilitation of others like her? I believe hell is to be found so much more in the hearts of men than in a hospital bed or even in the suffering of a family with a critically ill member.

I pray and hope that Eluana's parents may have the kindness, the love, the will and the strength to follow their particular Calvary to its natural end, compassionately embracing their silent helpless child, and abandoning themselves trustingly to the will of Someone greater than we, greater than our human powers, greater than any Court of Cassation.

This is my subjective hope, because obviously I cannot judge the pain of a family who has seen a daughter in vegetative state for 17 years now.

But what bio-juridical and bio-ethical repercussions to the life of us all, could a verdict like that of the Court of Cassation produce?

Is this our Western civilization, is this progress, when a court can decide who is worthy to live or not? Italy has been the nation that pushed a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty at the United Nations - and now, this is what we show the world? To kill someone not because she has committed a crime but because she is totally helpless?

And how does one reconcile this verdict on Eluana with the United Nations convention on the rights of disabled persons? Signed by Italy in 2006, the convention provides that "those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual and sensory deficiencies" must be guaranteed "protection against discriminatory refusal of medical assistance, health care and services, and food and water, because of their specific disability".

It is obvious that the Court of Cassation was unaware of this convention, or has chosen to ignore Article 25 which provides for the above.

But I do not wish to indulge in legal quibbling. I am more interested in convincing the reader that, setting aside the situation of poor Eluana, the situation is grave indeed, because once more a diabolical and perverse manipulation of facts is under way.

It is deliberate on the part of the communications media which believes it must indulge what it thinks the consumers want. And it seems that today, people want to read newspapers and magazines and watch TV shows for tips on how to live beyond 100 years old, to make love after 80, to have a 20-year-old's skin when one is three times as old, and similar 'super-human' things.

It is as though sickness, suffering, aging, and death, are no longer part of human life. We want to sweep them under the rug as unpleasant facts that should never bother us again. It is sheer delusion.

But the mass media feed this perverse appetite, and so, in the face of a tragedy like Eluana's, they offer the public the fig leaf of apparent good sense that, who knows, may one day soon be useful to us in order to hasten the death of an old, sick and disabled parent whose existence has become too much of a burden for us and impedes us from gratifying activities that we cannot think of giving up for the sake of anyone.

This is the only effort that man today appears ready to make: whatever serves his self-gratification. That is why he works and sweats - to afford status symbols, to achieve maximum physical 'fitness', to be 'well off' in all the physical and material aspects.

But to exert oneself for a sick person who will never get better, only worse? What a waste of time! Everyone must die, after all, sooner or later. And so, modern man deludes himself that in some cases, homicide is an act of pity that can make us all feel better and free of any burden on our conscience.

We have all been carried away by a tsunami of selfishness. Otherwise, how to explain that many people appear to give credit - and claim it as their own thinking - to the countless platitudes we have been reading and hearing in the major newspapers and on TV about how it has all turned out well for Eluana!

As with abortion - which was first introduced legally only for pregnancies resulting from rape or with known severe malformations due to drugs ingested by the mother, then became accepted as the usual method to get rid of unwanted pregnancies - does not the Englaro verdict open the way for legalized euthanasia in Italy?

The hope is that Parliament will want to find a common and shared consensus soon in order to legislate against the introduction of any form of euthanasia, passive or active, into our society.

Because that is what the judgment means for Eluana: euthanasia, pure and simple. At least, let us call things by name.

Eluana is not in coma, as many have written. She is not attached to any machine or automatic respirator (as was Piergiorgio Welby). There is nothing to unplug, no medicine to stop, and her condition is not at all a terminal pathology such as cancer or similar lethal diseases.

What she does have is extreme disability due to impaired consciousness following a car accident. But no one knows or can know what is taking place in her mind - whether behind those eyes that seem to recognize and acknowledge the sisters who have been caring for her for 14 years, her brain is able to generate any feeling or sensation.

As reported about various experiences with patients in 'La Casa dei Risvegli Luca De Nigris' [Luca de Nigris House of Awakening) in Bologna (www.amicidiluca.it), persons in Eluana's condition can show - upon appropriate stimuli - levels of consciousness that were previously unimaginable.

Eluana is very much alive, so far. She has always breathed on her own without problems. Like all of us, she sleeps at night and wakes up in the morning. Her menstrual cycles come regularly, and a few weeks ago, her body recovered spontaneously from an unexplained uterine hemorrhage.

Yes, she is fed and given water through a feeding tube, since she cannot use her hands. But this is something done with babies in incubators, and with patients in advanced stages of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, and in the more complex cases of multiple sclerosis. Should they all be put to death?

Nor is there any such thing as 'therapeutic obstinacy' in Eluana's case, for the simple reason that she has not had any therapy at all. She has simply been fed and given water.

But now, if her father decides to take away the feeding tube, it is not going to be a 'sweet death' nor 'an alleviation of her suffering'. Because then, her tragedy enters its final act.

Since she is young (as was Terry Schiavo), it is expected that she would die of cardiac arrest after at most 18 days without water. In fully conscious persons, such a death would mean atrocious agony. And so, according to the earlier court's ruling, in order to prevent any such suffering - but did not the court presume that Eluana is totally unconscious? - she is to be heavily sedated.

It would be useful, as the Associazione Scienza e Vita suggested, that since this is a death sentence, one might emulate what happens with death convicts in the United States, where witnesses to the execution are required and the execution itself is filmed for posterity.

Because in this case, a film or video would record for future generations the great regression of post-modernism in which all shame is covered up by the shibboleth of 'self-determination'.

Which in the case of Eluana is very disputable. Yet the courts relied greatly on alleged reconstructions of comments she made when she was her normal self [and unaware she would ever be involved in the situation she's in now].

And so, our society has come to this:
A judge can decide who is worthy to live and who should die.

Doctors, whose professional oath and code of ethics binds them to keep persons alive and not to take away any life, can now decide to administer death to their patients.

Hospitals are no longer just places where one goes to be cured, but where one may be put to death!

I like to think, of course, that natural death is not the end of the road for man, but the intermediate stage towards a far greater destiny. Thinking of Eluana, I am reminded of Christ's warning in Chapter 25 of the Gospel of Matthew:

"Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink..."

Each one does as he believes. With my poor secular conscience, I choose 'veluti si Deus daretur' - to live as if God does exist.


And from the ever reliable and sensible Marcello Pera:

The spirit of the times
by MARCELLO PERA
Translated from



The Eluana case is not a judicial one, therefore there is no reason for it to come under the competence of the higher levels of the judicial system.

Nor was the verdict juridical because the highest appellate judges did not rule on its merits and sent the ball back to where the lower courts had left it, as did the Constitutional Court.

It is not a political case either, except in the sense that nature abhors a vacuum, and since Parliament has not provided for such a case, some other organism has intervened.

But it is a cultural case. The judges in Milan's appellate court and those at Cassation did not consult the codes of law at all. What they did was to listen to 'the spirit of the times'. A spirit which is blowing in their direction.

Years and years of individualism, hedonism, nihilism, relativism and utilitarianism prepared the ground for that verdict. And since these judges have a keen nose - so keen that sometimes they even anticipate the wind - they decided in the way that a great part of the Western world now feels and desires.

But they did achieve one thing - which has occurred so many times in the West in the recent past, and which judges consider they have the power to do - namely, to transform the tendencies and thinking of some militant people into a universal right!

So now, they have effectively allowed the right to euthanasia, active or passive, in Italy. Passive, for now, because they have allowed that those who no longer have any expectation of a 'decent' life (whatever they mean by that) stop being fed.

But active shortly, because it won't be long before whoever has requested and obtained the right to end his life will also ask and obtain the right to be given some medication that will allow him not to feel the agony of death that results from dehydration and lack of sustenance.

There appears to be no longer any good that must be protected for itself. If, as the exponents of utilitarianistic bioethics maintain, the definition of 'good' is 'whatever is good for me' (singular or as a group) - whatever is useful to me according to my autonomous decision which no one has a right to criticize - then even life becomes just an instrument for every person's individual motives.

The prosecutor of the Court of Cassation certainly caught the utilitarianistic wind when he decided that the Milan prosecutor had no business presenting the case to the highest appeals court of the land because the case is 'private' and there is 'no public interest to protect'.

And thus, what is good - ethics - becomes something private, which means every individual can do as he pleases, and no one can criticize what he chooses to do. Good in itself, independent of what individuals think is good, no longer exists.

Next thing, philosophers will say "Ethics has no truths", "Goodness has no basis", "Value judgments are only subjective". And don't all the newspapers now write that we should respect the decisions of others whatever those decisions may be; that we should listen to science; that we should be open and tolerant and respectful of all customs, all cultures, all decisions made by individuals or groups?

Does not TV preach to us all at dinnertime to make sure we don't miss the issue of the day, in this case, making sure we don't miss their subtext - 'It's better this way for Eluana and her family' - as this wise and reputable doctor says, as this or that family would want if they ever faced the same situation, as this politician preaches?

And if anyone - a believer, a priest, the Pope, or some average Joe Catholic - raises his voice againt this euthanasia by verdict, surely he will be told that he should keep his religion private and that the Church has no business 'interfering'.

A society that loses a sense of the sacred, of the limits beyond which one cannot go, of prohibition in some essentials, of duty beyond one's own personal convenience, thinks it is open and democratic; in fact, it thinks it is liberal.

It does not realize that it is, on the contrary, despotic, and is digging its own grave. It does not understand that today it may be you, tomorrow it will be someone else, and that if life is just an instrument for one's own ends, then someone will arrogate unto himself the right to someone else's life and will employ whatever is necessary to master and use that life as he wants to, depending on whether today what prevails is a presumptuous elite, a helpless majority, or an ethical dictator.

These things have happened before. What is to keep them from recurring? That we are blinded by tears whenever we remember the victims? No, those tears today are ceremonial tears, obligatory tears, emotion on demand. So they are good for the moment only. And after all, if everyting is private and subjective, then good and evil are simply emotions that can be summoned at will.

The judges in the Englaro case yielded easily, even complacently, to this idea of moral good without any foundations, but the people, fortunately, can still react properly.

Even in California, that vast supermarket of ethics to order, the voters said no to a decision that judges like ours had taken with their noses to the wind. The same progressive voters who went overwhelmingly for Obama also said in a referendum on same-sex marriage that the nature of matrimony is not something that can be defined by a judge, even if in their case, by the State Supreme Court.

The Eluana case is similar. If public opinion could react, if it can have the strength to reverse the ethical relativism which is seducing them and making them 'soft', if they can raise their voices and will be allowed to do so, then the sacredness of life, the dignity of the human being, will return to being values in themselves, public assets to be protected.

When this happens, then the judges will notice a new cultural atmosphere and will behave accordingly. But we must fight for that day to come. We must defeat the spirit of the times with the sport of humanity.

This is yet another eyebrow-raising article by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, which came out in Corriere della Sera on November 5, and which I had set aside for translation but did not get around to. It has now become more timely in view of the Englaro verdict, even if it does not deal directly with it.

What is perplexing are the cardinal's assertions that it is difficult for him - one of the most eminent Church figures in modern times - to define when life begins and when it ends, considering that the Catechism of the Catholic Church is quite definite about these.

But in the course of his reflections - which, to be fair, lead to a reflection, albeit sketchy, on the 'true life' meant by Jesus as opposed to mere physical life - he makes a number of provocative statements in his best Jesuitical and unctuously disingenuous manner....



The beginning and the end:
The two mysteries of life
By Carlo Maria Martini
Translated from

November 5, 2008


Editor's Note: Kos, the twice-monthly magazine of Editrice San Raffaele, edited by Luigi Maria Verze, dedicates the issue that goes on sale November 6 to the subject of ‘Life', with articles by Silvio Berlusconi, Vincenzo Vitiello, Giulio Cossu and Carlo Maria Martini. With the cardinal’s kind permission, we are publishing his article, in which he reflects on ‘life’ and ‘true life’ (which is realized in ‘friendship with God’).


La vera vita [The real life] is the title of a 1943 book by don Luigi Sturzo, with the subtitle Sociologia del sprannaturale. This spiritual work by a man who was dedicated above all to political and social problems has illuminated me in the search for what to say in response to a question posed to me about the complex issues about life.

Let us begin by recalling – something not always done – that by ‘life’ we mean ‘human life’, not other vital phenomena, no matter how complex they may be.

And in this sense ‘life’ is above all the opposite of death – the death of a man or a woman, the precise moment of which is not easy to establish, as the controversy among scientists shows, but whose consequences are evident in the rapid degradation of the entire organism.

Analogously, it is not easy to establish when human life begins exactly - above all, when a being can be called a ‘person’ or ‘individual’ and is therefore subject to rights as well as duties.

Nonetheless it remains true that every trace of human life, whether in its incipient stage or its final phase, deserves respect, attention, reverence.

It is enough that a human being has a minimum of ‘life’, that he shows some sign of permanent vegetative activity, to be considered still ‘alive’.

And this implies great ethical problems, such as those on the legality of intervening in the case of a human being who has been living for a long time, only and singularly – at least, so it appears - in a vegetative state.

An analogous question is raised about the start of life. Are there cases in which, even while recognizing all the respect owed to any human life, its presence can become so dangerous to others that ending it is inevitable?

Are there situations in which an existence becomes so insupportable and apparently unmodifiable that it would not be licit to judge anyone who would put an end to it?

Certainly, it will be very difficult to affirm these with the language of law or with abstractions – such language is unable to comprehend the complexity of the ethical, value-related and emotional elements that go into each case, which is always different from any other. I think that only someone who is juridically and emotionally involved in such a situation can comprehend something of such complexity.

This also gives rise to the great ethical question whether ‘human beings’, at whatever point of their development or degradation, are all equal in dignity and whether they all deserve identical protections.

It appears obvious that there is a degree of dignity common to everyone. Nonetheless it cannot be denied[????] that there are important differences regarding the value of a person and the attention with which society is called on to value and protect him.

In this regard, one gladly cites the ‘untouchability’ of a human being, to his ’intrinsic dignity’ that prohibits every instrumental use of a living human creature. This must be said even with the truly moving image of the ‘face’. The ‘face’ cannot be used or exploited for any reason – it should simply be recognized, respected, loved.

The face of another person speaks to us per se without requiring other arguments, even if it is no longer that evident when one does not see the other face directly, but only some biological manifestation of a being that is still amorphous or close to total degradation.

In such a case, one must rejoice at the fact that many men and women, even of different cultural formations, converge on the untouchability of the human being.

In recent decades, the Catholic Church, above all through its Popes, has intervened in many ways in defense of the human being, proclaiming the ‘non-disposability’ of each one from the beginning to the end of his physical existence.

In order to be more effective and credible on this point, the Church has even greatly retreated from its traditional acceptance of the death penalty, which represents an undeniable progress in the sense of never killing, ever, for whatever reason.

But the argument remains complex and there will always be ‘grey zones’ within which there will be arguments pro and con. In fact, mere ‘survival’ or ‘not to die a violent death’ is certainly not the goal of human life – rather, it tends towards that 'vitality' which is the full expression of the powers of the body and the mind.

And this gives rise to the use of the word ‘life’ to describe the historic career of a man or a group ( as in “the life of Julius Caesar”), or even the moral behavior of a man (‘a good life’), or of his social environment (“Life is very expensive here”), etc.

Many analogous expressions use the term ‘life’ in relation to the significant fundamentals that we cited, but the meaning that I would like to underscore above all is that which I have not mentioned so far but which is abundantly documented in the Gospel and in the letters of St. John and in other pages of Scripture.

Starting with the solemn prolog of the Fourth Gospel (“Through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race” [John 1,4]), the word life indicates first of all that quality which is God’s, which comes to be shared by men thanks to the resurrection of Jesus.

Or, for instance, “so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life" John 3,15); “that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life” (3,16); “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever disobeys the Son will not see life” (3, 36).

This is the ‘true life’ which don Sturzo also writes about. This concept underlies the whole of the New Testament, which thus offers us the ultimate reason for that ‘dignity’ or the ‘splendor of face’ which every man, even non-believers, is urged to recognize in his neighbor, even if he is not always able to specify the precise and ultimate reasons for the inalienability or inviolability of such prerogative.

There is more. Without this basic premise on the nature of man and woman who are called to participate in the life of God himself, it is not easy to explain how Jesus considered human physical life of minor value, such as to say, “I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body but after that can do no more.” (Lk 12,4), and to exhort them to wager their own physical life for higher values: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit. Whoever loves his life 16 loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life” (John 12, 24-25).

There is thus a ‘life’ which finds its fulfillment in ‘true life’. Physical life is the substrate and premise of that ‘true life’ which friendship with God is.

One can therefore understand that, in the face of a culture which devalues physical life on many occasions, violating the survival of defenseless persons, one feels – as the Church has felt in recent years through the voice of its Popes – that even the mere defense of physical life in itself already constitutes a great value and an important point of convergence.

But it would be wrong – and it would take us off course – to draw all conclusions only from this ‘absolute value’ of physical life. Because its value is only as much as it derives from something that is much greater and truly intangible, which touches the mystery of God himself.


I must admit I find the spiritual peroration a bit wanting, but the few articles and excerpts I have read so far by Cardinal Martini have not been exactly inspirational gems, and I must admit that my interest in him is peripheral but forced on me by the fact that he has so persistently set himself up in an adversarial manner to Benedict XVI's Magisterium.

Giuliano Ferrara has been the only one who has reacted so far to the 'doubts' that Martini raises about life and death...Here is a translation.
 


Cardinal Martini does not know
when human life begins and ends

Faith in eternal life leads him
to use ethically relativistic language.

by Giuliano Ferrara
Translated from

Nov. 10, 2008


Listen to this: "Inasmuch as I believe in eternal life, then, in the matter of temporal, physical life in this world, I can compromise, gloss over, make nuances and modify my views according to the times, and history, and culture, because ultimately, birth and death are mysteries about which each one can and should judge according to his own sensibilities. Against a non-negotiable ethic of life from the moment of conception to natural death, there is a Christian relativism which involves one's freedom to decide."

I read these things the other day - which I have taken the liberty to paraphrase and place within quotation marks - in a newspaper, signed by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini.

Next Saturday, I must speak about 'the conceptus' at a meeting of Catholic physicians who have kindly invited me to address them. Shall I tell them, as the cardinal says, that the concpetus is a mysterious being, whose status is difficult to establish as a 'person' or an 'individual'?

And if I say the opposite - that I know perfectly that a conceptus is a person, an individual, would I not be contradicting a prince of the Church? Will I be called an outrageous 'devout atheist' who preaches a civilian religion, does not know anything of eternal life, and one who would reduce Christianity to a banal ethical theory?

Carlo Maria Martini is an exegete, theologian and pastor who is universally respected, deservedly. Indeed, the famous Jesuit is considered by some circles as a sort of 'alternate Pope' - in short, an authority of such high standing, a most venerable figure in world Catholicism.

His ideas about things, however - in many essential aspects - differs from that which is prevalent in the Magisterium of Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

His particular dissent - apart from certain Church matters 'in suspension' which Martini believes should be redefined by a Third Vatican Council - has to do with the ethics of our time, especially about the controversial relationship between the prevailing mentality, our sum of scientific knowledge to date, our capacity to experiment and operate in the fields of medicine and biogenetics, and human life in general.

But even on other matters essential to the faith, such as liturgy, the modern idea of clergy and laity, the method if reading and interpreting Scriptures and the message of Christ, Cardinal Martini has a markedly personal point of view, which enriches the Church and our culture with opinions based on his considerable cultural and theological experiences - opinions which are quite influential.

As a lay advocate of the absolute, non-negotiable, non 'relativizable' idea of human life, I have found myself agreeing - sometimes enthusiastically, but in general, quite soberly - with the positions that the recent Popes have taken, by Benedict XVI in particular.

And for good or bad, I have placed myself into the conflicts that oppose the Church to the world, from abortion to euthanasia to assisted procreation to contraception, etc.

My viewpoint is not strictly religious, and obviously not magisterial (in the sense of a teaching function) nor dogmatic. It is - or, at least, it seeks to be - an orientation that is generically humanistic and rational, as well as secular, but which, however, is not intimidated nor silenced by the current nihilistic conformism, which considers that nothing is true or stable, that everything is transitory and 'historical', and that therefore, the life of this element of nature that man is, must be viewed in terms of what will benefit the techno-scientific agenda.

In this view, life would be, so to speak, at the disposition of whoever wants to manipulate it for man's material well-being, this banal notion of 'fitness and wellness' to which the prevailing culture would reduce us.

That is why I was very disappointed and irritated by Cardinal Martini's text published in Corriere della Sera on November 5, taken from a magazine of San Raffaele University, and entitled: "The beginning and the end: the two mysteries of life - Carlo Maria Martini", subtitled, "Difficult to establish when a human being can be called a 'person' or an 'individual'".

Martini expends many words to argue a short and clear thesis - the same one, more or less, exposed on the pages of this newspaper by the lay theologian Vito Mancuso, the writer who has been fighting for a 're-establishment' of the Christian faith, for ridding the Christian faith of what he considers dead and buried (which is not little, since Mancuso objects to an entire body of doctrine which he finds cumbersome).

Mancuso says Christianity should not be reduced to vulgar materialism, to the 'bios', as certain Catholic circles argue, and that in considering the value of human life, the lion's share should to to its 'spiritual' character. [It would be useful to re=read in this connection an article by Sandro Magister on Mancuso and his avowed intention to rewrite Christian doctrine by himself. It was posted in the Forum not too long ago, and I will provide the link as soon as have traced it.]

For example, on the question at least of biological wills as an official document, Mancuso (who, by the way, is clearly anti-abortion)thinks that the freedom of the individual should prevail over every other consideration. I have summarized and simplified his views, but that is it, substantially.

Martini thinks as Mancuso does. But I have the impression that he is going even farther beyond - although without declaring so openly, perhaps because of the hesitation and trepidation that any person capable of hope would experience in speaking of these decisive issues of life and death.

The result is a certain Jesuitic grayness, an ambiguous argumentation that is permeated with negativity, a 'trial balloon' of Christian relativism, but not in the obvious and generally good sense that one might think of a relativistic theory such as, for example, that of the 'lesser evil;.

Reading Martini's text, it becomes obvious to a Christian who has read and meditated on the Gospels that true life is the life beyond, one emancipated from sin and death which Christ's resurrection guarantees in eternity for the believer.

But from this truth of the faith - in a displacement of thought that I think is integralistic and which does not respect the terms of the faith-and-reason nexus - Martini concludes that physical life can be relativized, that it is "not easy to establish the precise moment of death" and likewise, it is "not easy to establish when human life begins exactly, especially, when a being can be called a 'person' or 'individual' who is subject to rights as well as duties."

Perhaps it has escaped Martini, but Barack Obama during the campaign told an evangelical pastor who asked him at what point he thought human life begins, that "the question is above my pay grade", which he followed by pontificating with one of those usual para-scientific platitudes used to obfuscate what is is quite clear to the eye as well as under a microscope lens: namely, that the act of love generates a child - which is a unique and unrepeatable life; that the conceptus (the organism resulting from the union of sperm and egg) is the fruit of this conception, and that 'conceptus' is the natural name for the individual who results from an act of love.

The entire text of Martini is a radical negation of the profound reasons that led a part of secular society to fight alongside the Catholic Church against the attempt to take down all barriers and ignore any limits in a law that would have radically liberalized assisted reproduction in Italy.

Faith in 'true life' is the cardinal's ostensible starting point, despite his statements of apparent prudence and a nod to 'conventions', for a reasoning that denies the absolute indisposability of human life in this era of forced abortions by the state in some Asian countries, of the 'family planning' ideology that has been entrenched in Western society, of serial abortions, of eugenic selection sanctioned by the moral indifference of society and governments, and of euthanasia after the Dutch model which sanctions even euthanasia for children.

Curiosity about life and the ethical questions raised by a humanistic viewpoint led me to look into the 'true life' that Christians believe in, and into their faith in general.

But if a cardinal of such a vast influence brandishes his faith in the resurrection and the 'true life' meant by Christ, in order to devalue and relativize human life in these times, then I fail to see the sense of his faith.

Following Jesus is not an ethical theory - I know this well. But I would not wish belief in the Resurrected Christ to be the excuse for relativistic ethical theories that simply obscure and obfuscate the clear limits that define our beginning, our life and our death. I find that outrageous.

Eluana Englaro continues to dominate the public discourse in Italy to judge by Italian media coverage which after the first two days of cautious commentary and reporting mostly the voices of those who protest the court verdict as a garve affront to the inviolability of human life, they have nos reverted in full mode to their strident pro-euthanasia adavocacy as in teh days of teh Piergiorgio Welby controversy. Only now, they are careful not to use the word 'euthanasia' in their headlines.

Meanwhile, this article summarizes developments to date for Anglophone readers, including developments not previously reported on the Forum earlier.




Italian nuns refuse to kill Eluana
By Hilary White



MILAN, November 17, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The nuns who run the hospice in which Eluana Englaro has been living for 14 years have refused to carry out the court order to remove her food and hydration tube.

On Friday, the highest court of appeals of Italy upheld a previous court’s ruling that Eluana Englaro, the young disabled woman who has been in a state of diminished consciousness since being in a car accident in 1992, may be killed by the removal of her food and hydration tube.

In a letter published in yesterday’s Avvenire, the daily newspaper of the Italian Bishops Conference, the Misericordine nuns of Lecco said, “Our hope, and that of many like us, is that the death by hunger and thirst of Eluana, and others in her condition, will not be carried out.” [Story posted on this page last Satuday. See above.]

“That is why, once again, we maintain our availability, today and into the future, to continue to serve Eluana. If there are those who consider her dead, let Eluana remain with us who feel she is alive. We don’t ask anything but the silence and the liberty to love and to devote ourselves to those who are weak, poor and little in return.”

At the same time, the Secretary of Welfare, Eugenia Roccella, said in a statement today that there is “no obligation” for government-funded health care facilities to implement the decision of the Court of Cassation that patients can be dehydrated to death.

Legal experts have said that it is possible under Italian law for the sisters to apply for permission from the courts to be appointed Eluana’s legal guardian.

Monsignore Ignacio Barreiro, the head of the Rome office of Human Life International told LifeSiteNews.com that such a possibility could be a real glimmer of hope for saving Eluana’s life.

“It’s more than reasonable,” he said, “that someone who wants to keep the person alive should be appointed the guardian, rather than the person who’s ready to kill her. You don’t have to have a doctorate in theology to say that; it’s just common sense.”

Msgr. Barriero, who was an attorney before being ordained to the priesthood, added that it is a basic principle of law that “you cannot have a conflict of interest between the guardian and the person who is under guardianship. The purpose of a guardian is to look after the well being of the person.”

550 delegates of the Movement for Life, meeting in Montecatini for the 28th National Congress of the Centers for Aid to Life, have written to President Giorgio Napolitano to ask him to “enforce his highest moral authority” to allow Eluana Englaro “to continue to be cared for and loved by the Sisters of Lecco.”

Giulio Boscagli, Assessor to the Family and Solidarity in the region of Lombardy in which Eluana lives, agreed with the nuns, saying, “The ruling of the Court of Cassation seems to have lost sight of the reality” that Eluana is not dead but alive, although currently in a “seriously disabled condition.”

The desire of the nuns to care for Eluana as though she is “a daughter,” he said, “is the right path, the path taken by all those who daily take care of people who are in a vegetative state or very seriously disabled.” Boscagli pledged the “closeness and support” of the Regione Lombardia for the nuns.

At the same time, the decision of the Court of Cassation has alerted lawmakers to a legal loophole that could be used to sanction euthanasia. Justice Minister Angelino Alfano said that parliament must “fill the legislative vacuum in place” that has allowed the court to rule against Eluana.


I have not seen any Italian reports so far on what Eluana's parents plan to do next, and when.



We must continue to pray that Eliana's father sees the light and decides to leave his daughter with the nuns who have been caring for her with full and genuine charity for the the past 14 years. It would be the best solution all around, and he would not have his daughter's death on his conscience.

Go, Nuns!!!

My gosh, what a brilliant, beautiful, loving, and humble move by those nuns! It's too bad Terri Schiavo didn't have somebody caring for her like that. She'd probably still be alive and her parents and brother wouldn't be heartbroken.

Vatican cardinal pleads for life
of Italy's 'Terri Schiavo'






Rome, Nov 18, 2008 (CNA).- The president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, said this week that Italy’s “Terri Schiavo,” Eluana Englaro, “has been condemned to die of hunger and thirst because she has been living in a vegetative state for many years. Let us hope that at the last minute this decision will be reconsidered and ideology will not completely blind consciences.”

According to the SIR news agency, the cardinal made his comments at the conclusion of a Mass for the 27th Congress of the Centers for Aid to Life.

The case he was referring to involves a 37 year-old Italian whose feeding tubes have been removed after the Supreme Court ruled her father had the right to disconnect them to bring about her death. The case is being compared to what happened in the U.S. with Terri Schiavo, who died thirteen days after her tube was removed.

Cardinal Antonelli said, "Eluana is in a 'vegetative state,' but she is not a vegetable. She is a person who is sleeping," he said. "The person that Eluana is, even when she is sleeping or disabled, retains all of her dignity. The person is valuable in herself, not for what she produces or consumes, or for the pleasure or satisfaction she gives to others."

“We are called to bear witness even with our sacrifice” and to make an “intelligent, generous and persevering effort in favor of life,” the cardinal said.

"Many words have been said and written about Eluana's case," he continued. "The most beautiful and persuasive of these are those [spoken] by the nuns (who care for Eluana): 'If there is someone who considers her dead, let them leave Eluana to continue with us, who feel she is alive ... Let us have the freedom to love and to give ourselves to one who is weak.'"

“I feel I must repeat the call of Mother Teresa, ‘Don’t kill the children with abortion. If you don’t want them, give them to me’,” the cardinal said.




A tale of two patients:
'Gianni is in a room next to Eluana
but we will not let him die'
by Piero Colaprico
Translated from



In a space of about 20 square meters, two persons lie in a vegetative state.

One is a friend of Cardinal Angelo Scola, who spoke about him the other day; the other is Eluana.

We know a lot about Eluana - surely, much more than she would want us to. But of Gianni Micheli, almost nothing. He was the president of a public utility company in Lecco, married, with children.

One of those who comes to visit him regularly at this clinic run by the merciful sisters of Lecco, Raffaello Vignali, who is a deputy in Parliament, says:

"Gianni is a dear friend, and Gianni is here. We come to visit him as one visits a dear friend. He sleeps, he wakes up, he takes a nap, he coughs, he moans - there is no doubt he is very much alive".

Indeed, even papa Beppino, when he would come to visit Eluana, would greet her, "Ciao, bambina! We can do it!" But then, while Gianni's family and friends have been trying their best to deal with the unexplainable mysteries of life, Beppino asked to "stop tormenting Eluana, because she would have found all this care - which does not lead to anything - a violation, an invasion of her privacy by others". [I understand how immeasurably difficult the circumstances are for Mr. Englaro, but surely that statement is not at all charitable, nor fair, to the nuns who have taken care of her for him and his family - for free - for 14 of the last 17 years since her accident!]

And now that he has been upheld by the Court of Cassation; that he has on his side people like Umberto Veronesi, Massimo Cacciari, and Stefano Rodota; that instant surveys apparently show that 70-80% of Italians polled think like him - he would like to be left in silence and leave unreported the eventual death of his only daughter "whose predestined death was interrupted by a resuscitation which she did not wish". [This is the first time I see these statements by the father - and they strike me as very strange, indeed. Was he always against the emergency surgery that the doctors performed right after the accident to try and save his daughter's life?]

We are on the second floor of the Beato Luigi Talamoni clinic of the Misericordine sisters. Two doors next to each other. But two polarly opposite ways of looking at life and of judging the life of others. Two different ways of talking, explaining, living and dying.

And here we are around them, physically present but quite remote in terms of circumstances - we who, for instance, ask ourselves what limits there are to religion, to medicine, to politics.

Vignali says, "I cannot stand the idea of a so-called biological will. Man is not just a biological entity. My first impression when I first came to visit Gianni here was what I felt when we first had a baby. What can babies understand? You don't know, but it does not matter. You feed them because they are, they exist."

Vignali is a 'ciellini' [member of Comunione e Liberazione; the term comes from the Italian initials 'ci' and 'el'] like Micheli, a pre-political 'ciellini' when don Giussani [C&L founder) was still alive, when Cardinal Scola was a young member of the C&L 'popular movement' in Lecco.

He disagrees strongly that what the sisters are doing for patients like Eluana and Micheli is 'disproportionate care' that simply generates 'more suffering".

"There is no suffering here. Gianni's wife, his children, his friends come and go. His room is not a sad place at all, but a place of friendship and life. Life which no one can 'possess', as we do not possess' even our own life.

"You ask me about Eluana. I see a person who is alive, and I also see her father's sorrow. And I understand, but one cannot decide about somebody else's life or death, not even of your own children. I hope he does not go ahead and do what he is now allowed to do."

And that is the great difference that exists between these two parallel stories. Papa Beppino said after the verdict:

"I have nothing against the sisters who have taken care of Eluana perfectly, but I am convinced that a citizen who lives in a country of law, is allowed to say 'No, thanks' to medicine or to his religion.

"If anyone wants to be tended indefinitely, then by all means. But if I want to refuse such care, then I should be allowed to do so. Now it has finally been allowed to Eluana." [Who, however, was not the one who refused the care, because she is incapable of doing so!]

There is almost a tangible contraposition between the 'absolute serenity despite enormous tragedy' that Gianni Micheli's family and friends speak of, and the exhaustion of a small man, his wife who is eaten up by sorrow, and this fragile woman, now 37, who has been 'vegetative' for the past 17 years.

But perhaps not quite. Beppino Englaro has been worn down, true, by the battle he has waged for years, but he says "My heart is limpid".

In the same way that they have never wavered, those who have held Gianni's hand for the past one and a half years, though stricken by the unexpected tragedy to a man who was literally 'larger than life', one who was called 'a force of nature', before his accident.



Hospital refuses to remove
Eluana's feeding tube
after Court Ruling
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor



Rome, Italy, Nov. 18 (LifeNews.com) -- The hospital where Eluana Englaro has been receiving care and treatment [No treatment!] before an Italian court ruled that her father could take her life refuses to pull her feeding tube.

No doctor and none of the staff at the hospital in Lecco have agreed to kill the woman who is considered Italy's version of Terri Schiavo.

Last week, the highest appeals court in Italy granted her father the right to kill her via euthanasia by removing her feeding tube.

Englaro has been in what doctors term a so-called vegetative state following a car accident and has received food and water via a feeding tube.

However, the Italian nuns at the Blessed Luigi Talamoni clinic who are caring for her refuse to comply with the court ruling.

They are getting support from Roberto Formigoni, President of the Lombardy region, who, according to the London Times, has said any doctor who kills a patient by removing the feeding tube would face disciplinary action for "failing to honor commitments to the well-being of their patients."

The Times indicates medical officials from northern regions such as Piedmont and Friuli, where Englaro's family is from, are also refusing to take her life.

Vladimiro Kosic, head of health for Friuli-Venezia Giulia, told the Times, "Our hospitals are places of life, not death."

Meanwhile, Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, the archbishop of Milan, says he is hoping civil authorities will "change their minds" about allowing "a beloved creature of God" to be deprived of food and water.

Also, the government of Premier Silvio Berlusconi has attacked the court ruling and questioned the ability of judges to determine that her condition is "irreversible."

Both the government and Catholic officials are worried the Englaro decision will pave the way for a court ruling or legislation in the Italian parliament that would legalize assisted suicide or euthanasia.

Some pro-life advocates are looking at the legal possibility of getting appointed as Eluana's guardian, replacing the decision-making of her father, or taking her case to the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg.

If the feeding tube is pulled, Englaro will be starved and dehydrated to death in the same painful manner that took Schiavo's life over the course of 13 days four years ago.

The Court of Cassation rejected an appeal by prosecutors of a lower court ruling from July that allowed Beppino Englaro to kill his daughter. Beppino claimed Eluana had told him shortly before her accident that she had visited a comatose friend and said she didn't want to be in the same condition.

Under Italian law, killing a patient via direct euthanasia with an overdose of drugs is illegal and patients have a right to refuse treatment, but the law doesn't address cases like Englaro's when the patient is unable to make their own medical decisions.

Responding to the ruling, Beppino told the ANSA news agency that the decision "confirms that we live under the rule of law" and he said he is happy the decade-long legal battle has come to a close.

Earlier this year, some of Italy's leading neurologists said Englaro should not be killed and they questioned whether she is in a persistent vegetative state.

"She is not a person in coma, or a terminal patient, but a severely handicapped person in need of special basic care, as occurs in many other situations of serious injuries to parts of the brain that limit the capacity of communication and self-sustenance," they said, according to a Zenit report.

"A patient's nutrition and hydration, even if assisted, cannot be confused with medical treatment; they have always constituted the fundamental elements of care, precisely because they are indispensable for every human being, whether healthy or sick," they went on to say.

"The tube through which nourishment is received does not alter this elementary truth; rather, it can be compared to a prosthesis or any other type of aid," they explained.


What the Jews think



ROME, Nov. 18 (Translated from Apcom) - Rabbi Giuseppe Laras, president of the Rabbinical Asembly of Italy, says that the feeding and hydration of Eluana Englaro should not be stopped.

"It is a very sensitive situation," he told newsmen who asked his opinion while he was attending a round-table discussion in the Italian Parliament's Chamber of Deputies.

"In the Jewish point of view, human life does not belong to man and should be respected to the very end. In Eluana's case, life persists and it goes on autonomously. She is a person who sleeps and wakes, who assimilates what she is fed like any normal person, and in whom all bodily functions, except voluntary movement and active consciousness, are regular. So it is difficult to think that this is a life that is 'over'."

"In my opinion," Laras continued, "in this situation, one cannot suspend feeding and hydration, even if we know we are facing a most difficult subject and with all due respect to the father of this poor girl and to those who must deal with the situation."

The former president of Italy's Constitutional Court discusses the juridical implications of the Englaro court decision.


Judges writing the law -
a distortion of democracy:
the verdict on Eluana also
violates the Constitution
by GIOVANNI RUGGIERO
Translated from

November 18, 2008

Life and death are not facts that are simply private but are always matters of public interest, says Antonio Baldassare, former president of Italy's Constitutional Court and professor of constitutional law at the Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali (LUISS).

[Italy has two 'Supreme Courts' - the Constitutional Court, which judges all constitutional questions, and the Court of Cassation which oversees that the law is equally applied to all the appeals courts and lower courts.]

Baldassare is highly critical of the Cassation Court's ruling in the Englaro case, saying "it is a dangerous precedent, and is completely outside our democratic system".


Professor, what do you mean 'outside our democratic system'?
It completely turns upside down all the rulings made so far on such matters. We are dealing here with non-disposable rights which have constitutional protection and therefore are public.

It was precisely on this basis that the Italian Constitutional Court ruled in 1985 when abortion was legalized, instead of following the American Supreme Court [in the Roe v. Wade case] which used exactly the same reasoning as the Cassation Court did.

The Italian Constitutional Court said the contrary, that we are considering the start of life, which as with the end of life, has to do with the public interest - the defense of human life and of human dignity.

If a decision on life and death were simply a private matter, then the right to health does not make sense, whereas it is a right guaranteed by the Constitution, both as a private right and a public right. And so, the Cassation Court ruling even violates the Constitution.

The Constitution provides that legislators make the law. For a simple reason: they are acting in behalf of the people they represent. If the public disagrees with what they do as lawmakers, then they can always change the majority in Parliament


In short, politicians pay a price for what they do - and that is a risk that judges do not have...
If we allow judges to do what the Cassation Court did on the Englaro case - in which they specified a new right, established its circumstances, defined its limits and predisposed the way in which it should be carried out - thus establishing a concrete norm not found in the law, then he becomes an authority that has no political answerability to the people and therefore does not have to bother about consequences.

Evidently, we then have a government by the judiciary which is completely not what out democratic system calls for.


The prosecutor of Messina, Alberto di Pisa, said that in theory, whoever actually takes out the feeding tube from Eluana could be criminally prosecuted. What do you think?
These were already said by the lawyer who represented the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies before the Constitutional Court which refused to make a ruling [on the Englaro case] even if all the conditions for admissibility were present.

The argument is more than well-founded. In a system that provides against homicide even of a consenting person and against instigating suicide [as ways of euthanasia], Cassation has introduced a ruling that is completely dissonant from those norms which are, of course, still in effect.


Don't you think the citizen is bewildered by all these ambiguous rulings?
It is the unfortunate consequence of a declaration by the Constitutional Court, taken from the German system, that a judge can make constitutionally oriented interpretations of the law. The judges have chosen to interpret that possibility - as Cassation did - in a way unparalleled in any Western nation, namely, that a judge can, in deciding on a concrete case, create a new norm ostensibly based on constitutional principles.

This is an aberration, and I am stunned that my colleagues who sustain the validity of all this appear to be unmindful of the distortion caused in the democratic system designed by our Constitution.



provides us with a summary at a glance of

---

The stages that led to
the death sentence for Eluana

January 1992 Car accident results in severe skull and brain damage.
Despite surgery, Eluana emerges from coma to pass into a vegetative state.
1994 Eluana is transferred to the Luigi Talamoni clinic.
1999 Her father makes first requrest to Lecco court to discontinue food and water to Eluana.
This and subsequent attempts by him are rejected.
October 2007 Englaro’s lawyers appeal the lower court verdicts to the Court of Cassation.
It rules that this will be allowed on two conditions:
1. That science declares Eluana’s condition ‘irreversible’; and
2. That her ‘presumed wish’ be established on the basis of 'her previous declarations
her personality, her life style and her beliefs'.
June 2008 The Appeals Court of Milan authorizes the suspension of food and water for Eluana.
July 2008 The Milan prosecutor opposes the decree on the ground that the appeals court
had not adequately ascertained the objectivity of the supposed irreversibility of Eluana’s condition.
He asks at the same time that the court suspend the executability of its decree, but this was
immediately rejected.
He brings it to Parliament where both Houses vote that the appeals court had exceeded its authority.
The Constitutional Court rejects the argument, and sends the case to the Court of Cassation.
November 14, 2008 The Court of Cassation rules that the Milan prosecutor’s appeal is ‘inadmissible’
because it is ‘purely a private matter’ that does not involve the public interest, thus making
the Milan appeals court’s decision definitive.

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