Where are the Churches in Canada’s Euthanasia Experiment?
A PRIEST serving in the Anglican Church of Canada has written an excellent article on the current state of euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canada and the churches’ response to it.
The author is Rev’d Benjamin Crosby, an Episcopal priest from the Diocese of Massachusetts who is studying for his doctorate at McGill University. He is also an honorary associate priest at Christ Church Cathedral in Montreal.
With great clarity Crosby covers the history of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) and the generally woeful response of mainline Protestant churches, including the Anglican Church of Canada; the concerns of the disabled community; and the theological implications of current and proposed legislation.
His article was published in The Plough on Feb. 27, 2023. For copyright reasons we may only reprint a short extract.
We would urge all our readers to view his full article at www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/culture-of-life/where-are-the-churches-in-canadas-euthanasia-experiment In our books it is a must read!
TO THEIR GREAT SHAME, Canadian mainline Protestants, the historic bastions of public Christianity in Anglophone Canada, have utterly failed to speak prophetically to the broader Canadian society or even coherently to their own members since the passing of MAID legislation in 2016. While many of these church bodies opposed euthanasia before its legalization, since then they have consistently avoided taking strong positions on it, essentially conceding the Quebec doctors’ argument that MAID is at base a medical issue, not a religious one. They have largely embraced a role as providing value-neutral “pastoral care” in whatever end-of-life choices their people may make. But this sort of neutrality proves impossible to maintain. By abandoning their teaching authority, the churches end up supporting MAID advocates’ accounts of human dignity and worth as bound up in choice and independence – accounts that are contrary to Christian teaching and death-dealing to disabled people….
One of the most visible examples of Christians standing against MAID is in the 2020 open letter “We Can and Must Do Much Better,” in which evangelical, Pentecostal, confessional Protestant, Anabaptist, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox leaders joined Jewish and Muslim leaders in decrying MAID’s expansion…. “Rather than withdrawing from those who are not far from leaving us, we must embrace them even more tightly, helping them to find meaning up to the last moments of life.”.…
As the Canadian Evangelical magazine Faith Today writes, paraphrasing the physician and professor Dr. Margaret Cottle: “It is not undignified to be cared for. …If we believe every person is created in God’s image, then they deserve such care.” That is, dependence, requiring the assistance of others to live one’s life, does not do anything to detract from one’s basic humanity – pace the United Church of Canada prayer that invites the suffering person to pray, “Daily my dignity is being eroded.” Inclusion Canada, an organization advocating for the rights of Canadians with intellectual disabilities, strikes the same tone in a more secular register, warning against the “wide-scale perception that some persons’ lives are not worth living.” Instead, the organization seeks to promote “positive narratives” about “the quality of life of persons who live with disability, frailty, and suffering.” Similarly, the Canadian Council on Disabilities has articulated its opposition to “negative stereotypes about people with disabilities as suffering individuals in need of state-regulated assistance to end our lives.”
…The notion underlying much MAID advocacy – that a good, dignified life consists above all of independence, absence of suffering, and the proliferation of choices – is contradicted by the experience of disabled persons asserting that their lives have value despite physical pain or the need for care from others, and despite any constraints upon their options. And for the Christian, it is contradicted too by our understanding of the good life as one of acknowledged dependence upon others and above all on God. The Presbyterians make this point powerfully by quoting the beginning of the Heidelberg Catechism in their MAID report:
Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?
A. That I am not my own, but belong – body and soul, in life and in death – to my faithful Saviour, Jesus Christ.
For the Christian, if indeed Jesus Christ is our model of a fully human life and life in Christ is our goal, independence, freedom from suffering, and the proliferation of choices simply cannot be the necessary requirements for a good life. And Christians can and must agree with secular disability rights advocates that any account of human dignity that places disabled people outside it because they need care is nothing less than evil.
…It is my hope that Christians will continue to accompany them in this struggle, not only Roman Catholics and evangelicals but even within the mainline churches as well. As an Anglican priest serving in the Anglican Church of Canada, I pray that my own church may repent of its silence, its collaboration with a death-dealing euthanasia system that is particularly hostile to the lives of disabled persons. May we stand for the dignity of all people and the goodness of our dependence upon each other – and upon God. TAP
