It’s not a happy day. Terri Schiavo dead, and the Pope in grave condition. It’s
hard to see people suffer ….

Here in small town America, we don’t have a very sophisticated perspective of world events. So I guess I’ve grown up just a little naive.

I’ve always assumed that the courts would tend to err on the side of protecting the lives of the innocent and the voiceless, and that it would be very difficult to find a judge willing to let one person kill another, on the grounds that the former claimed the legal right to do so. Turns out I was naive, and that it’s much harder to find a judge willing to help keep an innocent, helpless person alive. Who knew?

Turns out it’s much harder for a state government to get through the appeals process and execute someone already sentenced to die by a judge, than for a family to get a judge to save someone who has not even committed a crime. This seems extremely ironic to me, and small town guys like this writer all ill-equipped to confront irony of this magnitude.

But even here, we know that Michael Schiavo is in a whole lot of hot water as a Roman Catholic. His juggernaut of insistent self will has run afowl of the Pope, whose offices denounced the court order to remove the feeding tube. And soon it seems that both Terri Schiavo and the Bishop of Rome will be having a word with The One Judge that really matters in this case.

This is from the latest AP report on the failure of the Pope’s health:

The Vatican’s attitude to the chronically ill has been apparent in its bitter
condemnation of a judge’s order two weeks ago to remove a feeding tube from
Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged American woman who died Thursday.

Vatican Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, reacting to Schiavo’s death,
denounced the removal of her feeding tube as “an attack against God.”

Although different, some see parallels in the two cases.

Under John Paul, Vatican teaching on the final stages of life includes a firm
rejection of euthanasia, insistence on treatments that help people bear ailments
with dignity and encouragement of research to enhance and prolong life.

A 1980 Vatican document makes the distinction between “proportionate”
and “disproportionate” means of prolonging life. While it gives room for refusal
of some forms of aggressive medical intervention for terminally ill patients, it
insists that “normal care” must not be interrupted.

John Paul set down exactly what that meant in a speech last year to an international conference on treatments for patients in a so-called persistent vegetative state.

“I should like particularly to underline how the administration of water and food, even when provided by artificial means, always represents a natural means of preserving life, not a medical act. Its use, furthermore, should be considered, in principle, ordinary and proportionate, and as such morally obligatory.”

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