A voice for life

Not so long ago, it would have been considered the kiss of death for Canada’s Catholic bishops to launch a national campaign against medicalized killing. 

The thinking, until very recently, among those engaged in the anti-euthanasia and anti-assisted suicide fight was that persuasion could come only from strictly secular arguments based on entirely non-religious premises. 

It was an approach rooted in frontline experience. During the 2010 public hearing process in Quebec that ultimately led to passage of the province’s “medical aid in dying” law, polite coughs and then open sneers met any hint of faith-based language. Indeed, one honest politician who served on the hearings commission acknowledged that submissions from dozens of Montrealers were disregarded simply because they had ties to organized Catholicism. In such an atmosphere, it made precious little sense wasting breath trying to appeal to such sullied minds using sacred language.