Both of you are a little off-track. Hildy had something more like this in mind for the Holy Father.
Posted on 09/17/2007 8:02:22 AM PDT by presidio9
Doctors assisting Pope John Paul II in his final days never suspended medical treatment and the pontiff did not ask them to do so, his personal physician said.
Pro-euthanasia activists in Italy have said the pope refused medical treatment such as artificial respiration and feeding because he wanted to be allowed to die.
The Catholic Church forbids euthanasia, which has been at the centre of a heated debate in Italy in recent months. However, the church's Catechism says medical procedures that are "burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary or disproportionate to the expected outcome" can be discontinued with the permission of the patient or family.
Renato Buzzonetti, the late pope's long time doctor, said the pontiff's last known words, "Let me go to the house of the father", should not be interpreted as if he had asked doctors to stop treating him.
"That sentence was an act of very high prayer. . . an almost unique example of his attachment to the faith of the Lord and at the same time to life, which John Paul II deeply loved until the very last moment," Buzzonetti said in an interview with daily La Repubblica.
"It is not true that the medical treatment of the Holy Father was interrupted," said Buzzonetti, who was the pope's doctor for nearly 27 years.
"He was never left alone, without monitoring and assistance, as some people wrongly want to suggest," he said.
Buzzonetti recalled the pope's final days before his death on April 2, 2005. The details have already been made public by the Vatican and have also been published in a book by Buzzonetti and other aides.
The pope was hospitalised for two periods in February and March of 2005. During his second stay, he underwent a tracheotomy and had a tube fitted in his throat to help him breathe.
On March 31, the ailing pope suffered septic shock caused by an infection of the urinary tract and cardio-circulatory collapse.
Asked why the pontiff had remained in his Vatican residence rather than return to hospital, Buzzonetti said: "He was explicitly asked about this by his secretary, Stanislaw Dziwisz. But the Holy Father wanted to stay at the Vatican, where he could in any case count on qualified and continuous medical assistance, 24 hours a day, by highly specialised personnel."
The pope started slipping in and out of consciousness in the morning of April 2. Later in the day he muttered his last comprehensible words to a nun in Polish, before entering a coma and dying at 9.37pm.
I’m curious...are you against people deciding for themselves not to continue with treatment at the end of their lives?
Why stop there? Aren't we all technically "dying" from the moment of conception?
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
What do you mean by “treatment?”
Discontinuing the types of treatment designed to bring about a cure when no cure is possible, is a perfectly rational and compassionate choice.
Discontinuing comfort care like food and water because the patient isn’t dying quickly and cheaply enough for the heirs, is wrong on so many levels.
Well, well. Tired of the excitement elsewhere?
Glad to see the record was set straight.
May God bless the Holy Father, Amen.
Ping
“Pro-euthanasia activists in Italy have said the pope refused medical treatment such as artificial respiration and feeding because he wanted to be allowed to die.”
Discontinuing feeding would have been wrong, but if Pope John Paul had refused artificial respiration, I don’t believe that that would have contravened the moral teaching of the Church.
However, if he suffered, he had a close friend who had suffered much more horribly in the 1970s. This is, of course, Cardinal Francis Xaview Nguyen Van Thuan, who wrote the great spiritual exercises of the Jubilee Year of 2000.
Cardinal Francis Xavier Van Thuan was imprisoned by the communists in Vietnam shortly after the fall of the country.
The communists had all sorts of fun with Cardinal Van Thuan. First they would starve him to death. Then they would feed him but keep him locked up in a small area and not allow him to go to the bathroom so that his own waste was all around him.
In the end, the communists decided to end their fun and games and might have felt their program of indoctrination (i.e., torture) was ended, but the communists were not satisfied with the results. He was first moved to Northern Vietnam where he knew no one, and starting converting the communists in his community to the Catholic faith.
After this disaster for the communists, he was closely guarded by the internal police. But then he started converting his internal police detail.
Finally, after converting too many people, he was expelled from the country. His family was well known in Vietnam, which might have kept the communists from killing him outright...
If some of things that Cardinal Francis Xavier Van Thuan went through, he might have thought of suicide or death, but did not.
Cardinal Francis Xavier Van Thuan's story was probably a significant inspiration to Pope John Paul II when he was suffering...
This appears to be the same article I posted yesterday with a slightly different title.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1897491/posts
Both of you are a little off-track. Hildy had something more like this in mind for the Holy Father.
What happened, did you get ousted in the recent WAnker Rebellion?
Are you opposed to babies in the womb deciding for themselves if they are going to be slaughtered? (Don’t feel like you need to answer, we already know that you support abortion, euthanasia and whatever else the culture of death might be offereing.)
Or worse.
Good grief, look at that smile.
Contrast that to the Pope's smile on my homepage, and you tell me which philosophy you want to throw your lot in with.
Why is that when liberals say they’re leaving they never really leave?
But there are certain things which I refuse to budge on.
Which is why I am going to find it really nauseating to pull the lever on Rudy Giuliani when he wins the nomination.
Rooty Toot isn’t winning any nomimation, so you have nothing to worry about.
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