USCCB Committee on Doctrine responds

MANASSAS, VA, July 31, 2008 (CNSweb) - Articles about end-of-life ethics by two college professors, including a bioethics professor at Loyola University of Chicago, have prompted a rare public correction by the leading American bishops responsible for pro-life activities and Catholic doctrine.

Cardinal Justin Rigali, Archbishop of Philadelphia and chairman of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., chairman of the USCCB Committee on Doctrine, raise their concerns in the August 4 issue of the Jesuits' America magazine.

The bishops write that two previous America articles by John Hardt, assistant professor of bioethics at Loyola University of Chicago's Stritch School of Medicine, and Thomas Shannon, emeritus professor of religion and social ethics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, "appear to misunderstand and subsequently misrepresent the substance of Church teaching on these difficult but important ethical questions" about "our moral obligations to patients who exist in what has come to be called a 'persistent vegetative state.'"

Both professors argue for exceptions to Church teaching, thereby allowing the removal of a feeding tube and hydration from such patients.

In his January article, Hardt cites a 2007 statement by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), which teaches that artificial nutrition and hydration may be withheld from a patient when "in some rare cases" the treatment "may become excessively burdensome."  Using the example of his father, who has asked not to receive artificial hydration and nutrition should he enter a vegetative state, Hardt writes, "[M]y father has judged that the burden of persisting in a vegetative state far outweighs the benefit of being sustained that way.  This, in my view, is a very Catholic way of thinking...."

Cardinal Rigali and Bishop Lori respond that Hardt wrongly defines excessive burden as "a simple dislike for survival in a helpless state."  In fact, the bishops write, "that claim has no foundation in the text [and] is actually contradicted" by the CDF.
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Glad they reacted to this since these type of article certainly must be addressed especially in a magazine put out by a religious order whose founder's Feast Day is today.