Stephen Grcevich, MD

The sickness in our society is profoundly revealed when religious sisters who have devoted their lives to caring for the sick, elderly and dying must go to court to defend their right not to participate in ending those lives. Archbishop Ronald Hicks @AbpNewYork is absolutely right to stand alongside them, thank you your excellency! The deeper issue here is not simply religious liberty, important though that is, but our increasingly impoverished understanding of compassion. For centuries, the Church has understood that human dignity is intrinsic, not something diminished by dependency, suffering or approaching death. The Christian response to suffering is not to eliminate the sufferer, but to accompany them with love, relieve their pain and affirm their worth, especially when they are most vulnerable. There is a bitter irony in a state invoking compassion and personal autonomy whilst allegedly seeking to compel those whose entire vocation is compassion to facilitate suicide. Once medicine accepts that deliberately ending a patient's life can constitute care, something fundamental changes in the relationship between doctor, patient and society. We should be profoundly grateful to these sisters. Their witness reminds us that the measure of a civilisation is not how efficiently it facilitates death, but how faithfully it cares for those who can no longer care for themselves. ewtnnews.com/world/us/new-yo…