VATICAN CITY - The Vatican issued a ruling today that patients in permanent comas should be given food and water, in a reference to the Terri Schiavo case that sparked bitter debate in the United States two years ago.
The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith made the deliberation at the request of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which was seeking guidance for similar future cases.
Schiavo, who had been in a coma for 15 years, died at age 41 after her feeding tube was removed on the order of a Florida court.
At the time the Vatican accused the court of "arbitrarily" bringing forward the moment of her death.
Comatose patients must be fed, Vatican says
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Great news!
The fact that American bishops would even wonder about this is a little troubling.
Support for the GOP among centrist voters collapsed in 2006. Exit polls showed that independents preferred Democrats by 57% to 39% in House races nationwide and by crushing margins in almost all of the most competitive Senate races. But despite those results, virtually no major Republican leader suggested the center rebelled because Bush and the Congress had tilted too far to the right — for instance by intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, seeking to carve out individual investment accounts from Social Security or, above all, resisting any rollback of the American military commitment in Iraq.
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