2024-04-10 07:16:45
A few hours before the presentation of the bill on the end of life to the Council of Ministers, the Catholic Church announced, Wednesday April 10, that it was equipping itself with a special spokesperson, a sign of its determination on this “major social subject”.
“In view of the numerous deadlines, particularly parliamentary, which will mark the news in the weeks and months to come”the Conference of Bishops of France (CEF) has appointed a spokesperson of four bishops “all particularly mobilized” on “this infinitely serious and complex question of supporting people at the end of life”affirms the CEF in a press release.
The four spokespersons are Pierre-Antoine Bozo (Bishop of Limoges), Matthieu Rougé (Nanterre), Emmanuel Gobilliard (Digne, Riez and Sisteron) as well as the Archbishop of Tours, Vincent Jordy.
“Dike rupture”
Bishop Jordy warned at the end of December against “dam break”. Mgr Rougé said in March, after an interview with the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, who mentioned nursing homes as a possible framework for assisted dying, his “impression that in the “start-up nation” non-productive people no longer have a place”. “There is such a fear among older people of being a burden on those around them that they end up saying to themselves “maybe this is the solution””said Mgr Gobilliard to Agence France-Presse, after touring the nursing homes in his diocese.
According to the bishop, who in the early 1990s accompanied some two hundred HIV patients at the end of their lives at the Spallanzani hospital in Rome, “personal and spiritual attention extinguishes the request for euthanasia”. In its press release, the CEF is concerned that the bill “would open the way, for the first time in France, to the possible legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia”.
At its spring assembly in Lourdes in March, the CEF passed a declaration calling for “No [pas] devoy[er] Brotherhood “ to try to make their voices heard “deep reservations with regard to the bill announced on the end of life” and denounce “provoked death”. Another sign of its determination, it has also equipped itself with a center dedicated to institutional affairs.
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