Judicial Death and the Church

Canada’s top court has effectively overturned its nation’s laws against assisted suicide, overriding longstanding legislation of Canada’s elected representatives and a thousand years of Common Law, not to mention even more ancient understandings about human life rooted in millennia of Jewish and Christian teaching, which is no little thing. But fully self-actualized philosopher kings and queens in judicial robes may do so cavalierly, because they are the vanguard of the ever progressing radically autonomous individual, who is subject to no normative reality and may endlessly reimagine truth contingent only on need.

Twenty seven years ago Canada’s top court invented abortion on demand for its nation, and eleven years ago it essentially validated the decrees of lower courts decreeing same sex marriage. Who is to stop these little ermined deities in their quest for immortality? And who doubts that the U.S. judiciary, after the U.S. Supreme Court almost certainly invents a right to same sex marriage later this year, will eventually proceed to discover a right to assisted suicide?

Ostensibly a measure of compassion, legalized assisted suicide implicates all of society in commodifying human life, declaring some lives not worthy, and inevitably pressuring the sick, the old, the disabled and the depressed, including children, to believe their obligation is to die, lest they be unwanted or burdensome. This right to die mindset imagines each individual has no organic connection to the transcendent or to the wider community and therefore may decide, often under coercion, to kill themselves, with the authorized complicity of medical personnel whom history and morality have since the dawn of civilization trusted to preserve life.

There’s nothing lovely or noble about a society empowering doctors and nurses to kill the ill, the elderly, the handicapped and the despairing. But assisted suicide is the natural dehumanizing cousin of abortion on demand, as both insist that life is expendable. Natural law and decent societies everywhere have opposed willfully disposing of the most vulnerable. But post modern self-empowerment fancies that present wants override all wisdom of the past.

Christianity of course has always opposed killing the sick and depressed no less than killing the unborn, believing that each of us individually and societies collectively are measured and ultimately judged by how we treat the weak. There should be few higher callings today than for churches everywhere, acting as the Body of Christ, in their testimony of God’s love, and in their witness for justice to society, to oppose with all their strength the growing culture of death.

Many in the church are already too theologically compromised to witness for life. Others have persuaded themselves that their Christian witness is more effective if avoiding discomfort and controversy. Still others, shunning historic Christian teaching, imagine that protecting the Welfare State, or environmental activism, or even opposing capital punishment for the homicidally guilty, have equal if not superior moral weight.

But The Church has no ultimate spiritual and social validity if it does not unabashedly affirm the sacred worthiness of the unborn, the sick, the disabled, the old and the despairing, all of whom need protection and hope, not authorized death. And in pursuit of that holy calling, The Church must teach that judges are servants of the law, not its lords.