England hangs by a thread

By Fr Thomas Crean OP   |   27 November 2024

As Pope Leo XIII declared in his encyclical of 1884, Humanum genus, “to wish … to bring back, after a lapse of eighteen centuries, the manners and customs of the pagans is signal folly and audacious impiety”. During the 140 years that have passed since he wrote those words, attempts to realise such wishes have grown ever bolder, and now a new and worse paroxysm of the disease is upon us. This Friday, the second reading of the Bill on “assisted dying” will take place in the House of Commons; and England and Wales, considered as Christian nations, now hang suspended over the abyss by a thread.

The decriminalisation of abortion in 1967 was already, of course, a great evil. But at that time, people could still dissemble, and seek to persuade themselves or others that a human offspring might somehow not be human, and hence that the nature of the action that Parliament proposed to permit was uncertain. Today, in 2024, no such dissimulation is possible or attempted. No one denies that a sick adult is a human being, or that it is his deliberate killing that is proposed.

The natural law is written by God on the heart of each man, be he believer or non-believer, Christian, Jew or pagan. No one can be invincibly ignorant of its fundamental precepts, among which surely is the commandment against the deliberate killing of the innocent. Moreover, since it is nevertheless possible for some provisions of natural law to be obscured in the human mind by what St Thomas Aquinas calls evil propaganda (malas persuasiones), God has also revealed this law to mankind in summary form. This is what we call the decalogue, or Ten Commandments, which were miraculously engraved on tablets of stone in the days of Moses, and have been copied by hand or machine millions of times over from then until now.

The fifth precept of the decalogue is Thou shalt not kill, or, as it is often translated today, “You shall not murder”. For, as both Jews in Old Testament times and Christians in New Testament times have always understood, and as the Hebrew word itself implies, this law does not forbid killing an animal for food, or executing a malefactor, or resisting an unjust aggressor. What it forbids is to kill the innocent. 

A sick adult falls within this category. He is not a brute animal; nor is he a criminal convicted of some horrible offence against which society could not adequately protect itself without recourse to capital punishment; nor is he an aggressor who has unjustly taken up arms against the state. He is therefore, in the relevant sense, innocent.

The Bill before Parliament thus violates a principle of both natural and revealed law, and it does so in a way that is both direct and manifold. Direct, since it is not a question of allowing some medical procedure that may possibly, or even certainly, hasten death, but without death being intended. Rather, the aim of both the “co-ordinating doctor” mentioned by the Bill and of the sick man in his charge is that the sick man shall die. The violation of natural and divine law is also manifold, since the Bill proposes a combination of at least four grave crimes. 

First of all, the sick adult will commit suicide; he will therefore himself violate the commandment against murder, and in the most unnatural way, since to kill oneself is to kill the person to whom one has the greatest duty, after God.

Secondly, the “co-ordinating doctor” must provide an “approved substance” that he judges apt to kill his patient. He is thus obliged to have a murderous intention. Although the Bill, by a rather ghastly scruple, does not permit the doctor to administer the approved substance himself, it allows him to prepare it and even to assist his patient “to ingest or otherwise self-administer” it. He is also obliged to remain with the patient, though not necessarily in the same room, until either the man is dead, or else it turns out (in accordance with section 18, subsection 9a, paragraph ii) that the doctor has failed to poison him successfully.

Thirdly and fourthly, since each man approves the action of the other, each of them also shares the other’s guilt: the sick man must will the doctor’s murderous intention, while the doctor must co-operate in and therefore be guilty of his patient’s act of suicide.

In practice, the web of evil would often be still thicker. The “co-ordinating doctor” may take with him such other “health-professionals” [sic] as he judges necessary. Simply by their presence, they would be consenting to his actions and thus would incur the same species of crime as he. Guilty co-operation would also be given by the “independent doctor” who is obliged to supply the “co-ordinating doctor” with the paperwork declaring that proper safeguarding procedures have been followed and hence that the sick man fulfils all of the statutory criteria for death. For to the pride that marked the ancient paganism, this Bill unites the bureaucracy that marks the modern.

“Cursing and lying and killing and theft and adultery have overflowed, and blood hath touched blood … Therefore shall the land mourn, and everyone that dwelleth in it shall languish …” (Hos 4:2–3)

So did Hosea once chastise a kingdom that had formerly been part of God’s people but had been separated from the true worship by the ambitions of a schismatic king. Just a few years after this prophecy was uttered, that kingdom was overwhelmed by invaders and disappeared from history. Should the Bill of the Right Honourable Kim Leadbeater MP become “law”, then blood will again touch blood, this time in our own country: the blood of the unborn will begin to touch the blood of the elderly. 

In this supreme crisis, where the stake is not only the death of bodies but also the destruction of souls, let us turn to our saints. I know of no more suitable way of doing this than by the prayer that was formerly prescribed by the bishops of England and Wales for recitation before the Blessed Sacrament on the second Sunday of each month:

“O merciful God, let the glorious intercession of Thy saints assist us, particularly the most blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Thy only-begotten Son, and Thy holy Apostles, Peter and Paul, to whose patronage we humbly recommend this country.

“Be mindful of our fathers, Eleutherius, Celestine, and Gregory, bishops of the Holy City; of Augustine, Columba, and Aidan, who delivered to us inviolate the faith of the holy Roman Church.

“Remember our holy martyrs, who shed their blood for Christ: especially our first martyr, Saint Alban, and Thy most glorious bishop, Saint Thomas of Canterbury.

“Remember all those holy confessors; bishops, and kings, all those holy monks and hermits, all those holy virgins and widows, who made this once an island of saints, illustrious by their glorious merits and virtues.

“Let not their memory perish from before Thee, O Lord, but let their supplication enter daily into Thy sight; and do Thou, who didst so often spare Thy sinful people for the sake of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, now, also, moved by the prayers of our fathers, reigning with Thee, have mercy upon us, save Thy people, and bless Thy inheritance; and suffer not those souls to perish, which Thy Son hath redeemed with His own most Precious Blood, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee, world without end.”