Questions to the Moralist - Personal Web Server - Boston College

elieved life after death. However he is eager to embrace that reality and so he decided
to end his life with the consent of his loving wife and family as well. In fact, his son who
is medical practitioner will facilitate the process of injecting the medicine in his body.
Prior to the injection of the medicine, his family called a priest for the last sacrament.
The priest arrives in the house and Antonio lying in bed while his family is watching him,
presuming that Antonio is sick and dying. After the priest gives the Final Blessing and
the sacrament, Antonio got up his bed and told the priest that in the few moments from
now my son will give the medicine to end my life."
Fr. Jim can we consider this case euthanasia? Does Antonio's decision violate the
commandment of God?
Fr. Bretzke replies:
The short answer is "yes," this is clearly euthanasia, and would violate God's
commandment as we understand it now. However, we cannot judge the man's own
intention, state of mind, etc., so we would not judge "him" per se, and entrust him instead
to God's mercy.
Fr. Jim
Dear Fr. Jim:
I have some questions need to be clarified, may be it comes too early.
Is it moral enough for a bishop to tell the lie to policemen, like in Hugo' Les Miserables,
though his intention is to protect the poor man, but on the other hand, by doing so, he is
against the civil or criminal law. So when we deal with such cases , are we looking first
for or obliged to a greater value of human existence? This may be not truly relate to the
Gestapo or Osama bin Laden.
Secondly, we just discussed in class that a Bishop receives the money from the Devil
(like thief, drug-lord, corrupted officers, etc) for the poor. But in the view of civil law, his
action is immoral, he also encourages the devil to do more evil thing, therefore he should
be charged by law if the money is part of bribery or booty (at least by Chinese law). The
tension is: in our real world of life, we always encounter the dilemma of moral law and
civil law, or as an attorney, is it moral to protect (by defending in the court) a cold--blood
murder because it is my profession? knowing that this murder may be hurt more people
in the future.
Thank you very much
Fr. Bretzke Replies:
I don't understand the money given to the bishop for the Church by a corrupt
official to be "bribery" and neither do I see this action as "encouraging" the corrupt
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