Posted on 10/20/2003 3:25:53 AM PDT by Smocker
Seattle Catholic is not affiliated with the Archdiocese of Seattle Seattle Catholic A Journal of Catholic News and Views 19 Oct 2003
A Persistent Paralytic State by Thomas A. Droleskey
"A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.
"Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
"Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end? ...
"Western society has chosen for itself the organization best suited to its purposes and one I might call legalistic. The limits of human rights and rightness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting, and manipulating law (though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert). Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: this would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames. (An oil company is legally blameless when it buys up an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to purchase it.)
"I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take full advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man's noblest impulses.
"And it will be simply impossible to bear up to the trials of this threatening century with nothing but the supports of a legalistic structure."
The words of Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, offered during the Harvard University commencement ceremony on June 8, 1978, are quite relevant to the case of Terri Schindler-Schiavo, who is at this very moment in the fifth day of being starved and dehydrated to death under cover of law in Florida. Governor Jeb Bush, who has been advised by such diverse legal authorities as the Thomas More Law Center and former U.S. Taxpayers Party Vice Presidential nominee Herbert Titus that he has the authority under the Florida State Constitution and state law to intervene directly to save Terri's life, remains in a persistent state of political paralysis. Although he has given some indications that he would like to intervene, he has stated that the courts have ruled in the matter of Terri Schindler-Schiavo and that he is powerless to do anything further. Bush's gratuitous, self-serving exculpation of his moral and legal duty in this matter is similar to his older brother, now President George W. Bush, having said on October 3, 2000, that he would be powerless as president to reverse the decision of Food and Drug Administration to permit the marketing of the human pesticide, RU-486, since it had been determined that the baby-killing potion, which also kills women, by the way, was "safe" for women. A coward who is unwilling to run the risk of public criticism on the life issues always takes shelter in the decisions of others. Thus, the life of Terri Schindler-Schiavo is on the hands of not only Piniellas County Circuit Court Judge George Greer and Federal District Court Judge Richard Lazarra and Terri's faithless husband, Michael Schiavo, and his attorney, George Felos. Terri Schindler-Schiavo's blood is also very much on the hands of a modern Pontius Pilate, Governor Jeb Bush.
As I have noted in a few recent pieces on the Seattle Catholic website—and in some detail in an upcoming piece in The Remnant, the Florida statute that permits the withdrawal of food and water from incapacitated patients (be they in an actual coma or in a persistent vegetative state, neither of which is the case with Terri Schindler-Schiavo) is unjust and immoral on its face. Human beings do not have the authority to dispose of innocent human lives by starving and dehydrating them to death. No person has the right to starve and dehydrate himself. No person has the right to authorize another to do so if he becomes incapacitated. No human legislature has the right to pass legislation to make it "legal" to do such a thing. No human court and no jurist have the right to enforce any law that is contrary to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law.
Governor Jeb Bush seems to understand none of this. He is willing to take none of the political and legal risks that might be associated with issuing an Executive Order awarding guardianship of Terri to her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler. Governor Jeb Bush, who says he is pro-life (although he believes babies can be killed with legal impunity in cases of rape, incest, and alleged threats to the life of a mother) has headed for the tall grass, hiding behind the black robes of judges and the letter of an unjust and immoral law. He says or does nothing while attorney George Felos, who believes he has the ability to read the souls of incapacitated persons, prevents a Catholic priest from administering Holy Communion to Terri as she is being starved and dehydrated to death. Jeb Bush is just as cowardly in the face of domestic terrorism imposed upon an innocent human being by unjust laws and court decisions as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was implying in 1978, in hardly subtle terms, that the appeaser named James Earl Carter, Jr., was in the face of Soviet and Red Chinese aggression around the world.
A Florida nurse named Cecilia Martin has noted that there is an additional ground for Governor Bush to act. Terri Schindler-Schiavo has been in a hospice for over three years. As Mrs. Martin wrote:
"You will see [by clicking on a website] that to be admitted to a hospice a patient must have a terminal illness ... [The regulations state that ] the patient must be certified by a doctor to be dying within six months. Terri has been in hospice for over three years! Terri's presence in Hospice is in violation of GOVERNMENT LAWS. She should be taken out at once because she is there illegally. The Governor has the right to enforce those laws. If Medicare funds are being used for the killing of Terri Schiavo, we the tax payers are paying for it. The head of the Republican party in the nation should know that this act of judicial, court ordered murder of a disabled, vulnerable and abused woman, a woman the Republican Governor has the authority to save, will act be made public."
Terri Schindler-Schiavo has no terminal illness. An unjust and immoral death sentence is being carried out against her right now. Her death may be fast approaching. However, she was no closer to death upon her being admitted to the hospice three years ago that any other person suffering from a chronic disability. And though she has been denied the therapy and rehabilitation care that Michael Schiavo had pledged to use an award of over $1 million to secure, her right to life depended not one whit on her cognitive abilities. She has the absolute right to live and the absolute right to food and water to sustain her life. (It is interesting that George Felos, who has said Terri does not communicate with others, justified keeping the priest out of room to administer Holy Communion on the grounds that he did not want to cause her "distress." How can a non-cognitive person be caused distress? Mr. Felos has, once more, contradicted himself, hasn't he?)
Governor Jeb Bush is not the only one who has acted in a cowardly way. Bishop Robert Lynch of the Diocese of Saint Petersburg has been of no assistance to Terri's right to live, as I explain in my upcoming piece in The Remnant. Contrast Lynch's spiritual paralysis with the courage of Bishop Clemens von Galen, the Bishop of Munster, Germany, who preached firmly against Adolf Hitler's euthanasia policies in 1939:
"Once we admit the right to kill unproductive persons, then none of us can be sure of his life. A curse on men and on the German people if we break the holy commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' ... Woe to us German people if we not only license this heinous offence but allow it to be committed with impunity."
We are no better than the Nazis. Indeed, we are worse. Most of our bishops and Catholic politicians are either cowards who do nothing in the face of grave evils or actually give sanction to grave evils. And we dare call ourselves a civilized people while over 4,000 human beings are systematically and cruelly slaughtered in their mothers' wombs each day under cover of law, to say nothing of the chemical abortions produced by abortifacient contraceptives. Terri Schindler-Schiavo has had advocates to try to save her life. How many people in Terri's situation are being starved today with the consent of all of his or her family members? How many doctors are doing things in hospitals under the cloak of medical respectability to dispatch people who have outlived their "usefulness" either with or without the consent of family members?
As Jeb Bush and Robert Lynch wring their hands and hide in the tall grass, millions of people around the world continue to pray for a miracle to save Terri Schindler-Schiavo. Even if such a miracle is not forthcoming, Our Lady will use those prayers for the conversion of men and nations to the true Church founded by her Divine Son upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, in ways that we will understand only in eternity.
May Our Lord have mercy on us all, especially on a country that dares to call itself a foe of terrorism while promoting it under cover of law on its own innocent citizens.
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Terri is not in a coma.
She is not on life support.
She laughs, cries, vocalizes.
Her face brightens for her mother.
She swallows.
"So why don't they let her mother feed her?"
The husband/guardian doesn't allow.
His lawyers don't allow.
The judge & courts do not allow.
Governor Bush does not intervene
The FL Senate does not intervene.
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