As you have likely read already, fifty people have been killed in an attack on an Orlando ‘gay’ nightclub, with fifty-three more injured, the largest individual mass-killing in U.S. history.  The alleged assailant was a 29 year-old Muslim man, Omar Mateen, a security guard originally from New York (hence, his permission to own assault rifles), although his parents are from Afghanistan.  Mateen pledged allegiance to ISIS in a 911 call to authorities during his attack, which apparently lasted for three hours.  He was holding the survivors of his initial rampage hostage (there were apparently 300 or so party-goers at the club at 2 a.m. when Mateen arrived).  Police stormed the building at 5 a.m., and shot Mateen dead.

 

We should also mention, lost in the international news of this massacre, the murder of Canadian Robert Hall, who had been held hostage by Islamic militants in the Philippines for the past nine months.  A ransom was demanded, which Canada has a policy of not paying,  a policy reasserted by Prime Minister Trudeau this morning.

 

Prayer should be our first response to such disasters, and may God receive the souls of all these victims in His mercy, and grant speedy healing to the survivors.  But we must also respond with a reasoned analysis of what horrific events such as this massacre signify.

 

What we see here are the effects of a deep and divisive clash of cultures.  I have written before that certain cultures cannot co-exist, for their fundamental principles are so contradictory, violent collision is inevitable.

 

Consider the current cultural landscape of the United States:  Abortion more or less on demand, sexual licence and the corruption of youth, homosexual ‘marriage’, transgenderism, enforced cooperation in contraception and abortifacients, widespread drug use with increasing calls for legalization, and, now, the spectre of euthanasia, with the culture of death reaching its crescendo.

 

There are many who disagree fundamentally with this culture, many of them following Trump, but they are, for now, willing to work within the democratic and legal process.

 

When one adds widespread and growing Islamic immigration to the mix, with its own highly moralistic, cohesive, but inherently coercive and fundamentalist response, should we expect anything less than such some sort of violent clash?

 

There is a are far deeper moral and metaphysical divide behind the bullets, the dead and the wounded.

 

Obama is being somewhat disingenuous when he calls for a climate of tolerance and solidarity.  He himself, along with those who follow his cultural principles, are quite willing to use force in their own nouveau secular Inquisition to coerce compliance for their immoral laws.  Middle-aged men stripping naked in change rooms in front of young girls because they think they too are ‘girls’ is not a recipe for cultural cohesion and peace.

 

What set off Mr. Mateen was nothing that extreme.  According to his own father, it was the sight of two men kissing in public.  Obama and his cohorts see nothing wrong with that, and even much that is good and noble.  Others would say that homosexuality and other moral aberrancies, along with their concomitant behaviour, are intrinsically disordered, but society should leave people free to do as they like with their affections, within certain bounds.

 

The problem is that those ‘bounds’ keep expanding.  One may appreciate the frustration of individuals like Mateen, without, of course, adopting his uber-violent reaction and that of radical Islam in general.  As far as possible, we should engage in respectful and rational dialogue (to say nothing of prayer and works of charity and reparation), to achieve some level of the aforementioned ‘cultural cohesion and peace’.  But the fault lines are there, and widening by the day, as the forces of immorality and disintegration become stronger, more virulent, more aggressive, now with all the force of law behind them.  How long can such deeply divided cultures coexist?

 

The Islam represented by Mateen and ISIS adds fuel to the fire, for they are not interested in ‘respectful and rational dialogue’, but in enforcing their own point of view by terrorism and force, so the infidel may ‘submit’ to the laws of Allah (as they see them).  Reports state that Mateen was ‘unhinged’, even insane, but he was acting in accordance with his deeply held convictions, shared by many of his co-religionists throughout the world.  At some level of his warped and seared conscience (we of course know not how deep) Mateen thought he was doing a good and noble deed; in his eyes, he died a ‘martyr’, and, we may presume, expected a blessed eternity as the police bullets tore through his own body.

 

Although there are likely only a very few Mateens out there (but we may sadly expect more of them, as ISIS calls for wholesale jihad against America), there are many who sympathize with him. In an unearthed video from 2013, an Imam in Orlando  declared that killing homosexuals is the right thing to do.

 

Death is the sentence. We know there’s nothing to be embarrassed about this, death is the sentence

 

The numbers of those who concur with such views are growing by the day in the formerly Christian cultures of Europe and America, by immigration, by birth, united by their religion and its defined purpose.  This is not the place to discuss the historical value of Islam, but at least in its current embodiment, the religion of Muhammad as a general rule does not enrich and ennoble the countries it dominates, driven in large part by the internecine strife between Sunni and Shiite.  These crumbling, bombed-out, bloodied regions with no functioning economy or future, from Syria to Afghanistan, are the primary reason why Muslims are fleeing (one might politely say ’emigrating’) in desperate droves.

 

Amongst these droves are a few like Mateen, and it does not take many like him to foment societal chaos, deeply transforming a culture, and not for the better.  Already, fear and anxiety are on the rise, not least amongst homosexuals and their LGBTQ fellow-travellers.  We will now likely see an even greater enforcement of ‘hate speech’ by the State, with any criticism of homosexuality and its ilk now deemed illegal and punishable, as propaedeutic to such violence as we just witnessed.

 

But the paradox is that the more the State seeks to suppress freedom of expression, even ‘respectful and reasonable dialogue’ in which I hope this blog engages, the more the tendency to violence increases, as the only response left, whether by the State, or by individuals.  Violence of whatever sort is never the real answer.  Man must be moved suaviter and fortiter to the truth, in the depths of his conscience, something Islam, as a rule, disdains:  ‘Convince’, in its original etymology as ‘conquer’, by force and violence.

 

Alas, the deeper problem is that the conscience of America, and Canada, is itself seared and corrupt, increasingly blind to the truth.  We are a divided people, and drifting further apart, with the superficial strength of Islam taking up the centre, a process, so far, more advanced in Europe than here.

 

The future does not bode well, either for America, or our own Canada, or the world.  As I have written before, echoing John Paul II, at the basis of the culture of any nation are its religious principles, that which binds the people together in a common purpose and a common identity. However much we may nuance this truth to render it palatable to the wider public, the only real, long-term solution to our woes is a unified, integrated Christianity, as embodied most perfectly in Catholicism which, until now, has been our culture, and united us as a people and a nation for millennia (whether we realized it or not).

 

As we as a society lose our religion, we lose our culture, and, yes, our common purpose and identity, the result will be continued societal disintegration, with violence as the rule.  What will replace Islam, when it too falls as a house divided against itself, I hesitate even to ponder.

 

But a hint may be found in the words of William Butler Yeats, who penned so forcefully in 1919, looking back at the worldwide bloodshed and chaos of the First World War:

 

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction; while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

We would do well to remember that Yeats’ called his poem ‘The Second Coming’, and what precedes this second advent of Christ, as his following words make clear, is the Antichrist,

 

the rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born

 

Evil is on the transcendent in our world, and we of sound faith must hold fast to the truth and goodness it offers us, shining, as Saint Peter declared, like ‘sparks amongst the stubble’, not with our own light, but the light of Christ, Who will achieve the final victory through these passing trials.

 

At the end of May, Jean Vanier was interviewed on the CBC by Carol Off for the evening program As it Happens.  As most of you are aware, Vanier is a widely revered figure, a ‘living saint’ some may say, the founder ofL’Arche, which cares for severely handicapped and developmentally challenged people, heroic work that I could scarcely consider doing.  I visited the L’Arche in Inverness, Scotland in 2003, when two of my students were working there in the summer, and was duly impressed.

 

The theme of the interview was medical assistance in dying, and to be fair to Dr. Vanier (he earned a Ph.D. on Aristotle’s Ethics from the Institut Catholique de Parisin the mid-sixties), he spends most of the discussion on the theme of caring for the sick, accompanying, helping and loving each other, developing from an ‘I’ to a ‘we’ model, and palliative care.

 

Early in the interview, Carol Off asks him directly whether he is in favour of the proposed assisted suicide law, and Vanier avoids answering directly, but later in the interview, he confesses on his own recognizance that he is in favour of a law.  You can peruse the whole clip here.  The interview with Jean Vanier begins at minute 29, with his own admission at the end of minute 36.

 

Here is Vanier in his own words, after a nuanced preface:

 

Shouldn’t we have some legislation to permit this?  I say yes, but let’s put in safeguards…

 

Curiously, this snippet does not show up on the CBC’s own written transcription, for reasons I cannot discern.  A few moments later, as they end their discussion, Ms. Off asks Vanier if he would ever consider having his own life ended:

 

That is certainly a very personal question, and I would say no…But I have never lived intense pain…

 

Presuming that under the influence of such ‘intense pain’, he might avail himself of this option?  Or that others may?

 

We should be clear what the proposed law (Bill C-14) legalizes: Not suicide (which is already legal), nor the administration of painkillers for the alleviation of pain, even if this hastens death somewhat, a practice that is also already legal, and, in fact, morally justified.  As Pope St. John Paul II states in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (par. 65):

 

Among the questions which arise in this context is that of the licitness of using various types of painkillers and sedatives for relieving the patient’s pain when this involves the risk of shortening life. While praise may be due to the person who voluntarily accepts suffering by forgoing treatment with pain-killers in order to remain fully lucid and, if a believer, to share consciously in the Lord’s Passion, such “heroic” behaviour cannot be considered the duty of everyone. Pius XII affirmed that it is licit to relieve pain by narcotics, even when the result is decreased consciousness and a shortening of life, “if no other means exist, and if, in the given circumstances, this does not prevent the carrying out of other religious and moral duties”  In such a case, death is not willed or sought, even though for reasonable motives one runs the risk of it: there is simply a desire to ease pain effectively by using the analgesics which medicine provides.

 

Rather, what the proposed Canadian law legalizes is physician-assisted suicide, which means giving doctors the right (and in some jurisdictions, potentially, the duty) to deliberately and consciously end the lives of their patients, should they (so far) voluntarily request it.

 

No Catholic, indeed no person of good conscience, can support any ‘euthanasia’ legislation, and there is no ‘compromise’ position on this that is morally acceptable. Again, John Paul II from Evangelium Vitae (par.72-73):

 

…laws which legitimize the direct killing of innocent human beings through abortion or euthanasia are in complete opposition to the inviolable right to life proper to every individual; they thus deny the equality of everyone before the law. It might be objected that such is not the case in euthanasia, when it is requested with full awareness by the person involved. But any State which made such a request legitimate and authorized it to be carried out would be legalizing a case of suicide-murder, contrary to the fundamental principles of absolute respect for life and of the protection of every innocent life. In this way the State contributes to lessening respect for life and opens the door to ways of acting which are destructive of trust in relations between people…

 

Abortion and euthanasia are thus crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize. There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws; instead there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection.

 

LifeSiteNews asked Dr. Vanier for a clarification of his words, highlighting the problematic quote above, and he did offer one, the full text of which is provided at the end of this article, in both the original French, and English translation.  He declares:

 

I stand by everything that I have said. The main thing is in any case to support life and to avoid all situations of suicide that originate in a situation of depression and solitude.

 

So, we may presume, that Dr. Vanier thinks there are cases, outside of depression and solitude, wherein suicide, assisted or not, should be permissible, even aided by law and physicians under the law?  This is what Vanier apparently means when he goes on to clarify:

 

If the correct sedative or medication has not been found one cannot oblige someone to live through an unrelenting agony.

 

Presuming, again, that we should put them out of their ‘unrelenting agony’ by offering them assisted ‘suicide’.

 

Finally, Vanier ends off his clarification by declaring that

 

Pope Francis continues to tell us that everything cannot be regulated by a law and there are always exceptions.

 

Vanier seems to be referring to the recent exhortation Amoris Laetitia (and other declarations by the Pope) wherein the Holy Father warns against a strict, casuistic reliance upon the ‘law’, particularly the laws governing marriage.  This is not the place to go into the complexities of this discussion, but let it be said for now that although there may be exceptions to human law, there are never exceptions to thenatural moral law, amongst which are suicide and murder, violations of which must be resisted even to the point of martyrdom, as Pope John Paul II declares so forcefully in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor (cf., par. 76; 90-94).

 

What is implied in Vanier’s responses is that there is such a thing as suffering which is ‘unbearable’, and that we must take it upon ourselves to end such suffering by legally-sanctioned murder-suicide.  He would do well to peruse Pope John Paul II’s 1984 Letter, Salvifici Doloris, a profound meditation on the salvific power of suffering.  God always provides the helps and graces necessary to bear such suffering as He sends, whether through natural, medical means, or through supernatural, grace-inspired means.

 

Either way, we cannot and must not usurp God’s mastery over life and death, and take it upon ourselves to end such suffering by suicide or murder, regardless of our compassionate motives. Not only is this contrary to the law of God and human dignity, but even at a practical level, who is to say what suffering is bearable or not?  Pope John Paul makes clear in his letter that much of the ‘world of human suffering’ is subjective and spiritual, largely opaque to empirical, medical analysis. People can live joyfully in the midst of great physical pain, while others in peak bodily health are depressed and suicidal.

 

And on a more direct, personal level, does not Dr. Vanier realize that amongst the first victims of any non-consensual extension of the euthanasia law (which is more than likely, as history attests) will be people like his very beloved and very vulnerable core members of L’Arche?  Does he not realize what will happen to the ‘safeguards’ that he proposes the legislation put in place?

 

This is truly saddening, and I hesitated even to write about it.  I had to listen to the audio more than a few times to be sure of what I was hearing, but Vanier’s statement to LifeSiteNews more or less makes his position clear.  My fear is that the CBC had him on as the voice of a rational, compromising, compassionate Catholicism, gently advocating the ‘medical assistance in dying’ bill, in rare instances, with love and all the proper ‘safeguards’, of course.

 

The CBC chose well, for Jean Vanier is indeed one of the great Catholics of the last and this century, giving his life up, including marriage and family, to work with the weakest and most vulnerable amongst us.  I had the honour to hear him speak and to meet him briefly a number of years ago at a talk he gave in Kingston.

 

But that is why his words are a scandal, and may lead others who are on the fence to support the proposed legislation, or even to consider availing themselves, or their loved ones, of euthanasia.  In his clarification, Dr. Vanier warns that one must not “take part of a series of remarks…out of context”, and I hope I have not done so here.  In fact, you can read the whole context yourselves.  To be clear, I do not think that Dr. Vanier is ‘pro euthanasia’, and his emphasis is on the accompanying of the dying via palliative care. I still hope that his words stemmed from some level of confusion about the law or what it entails.

 

That said, suicide and murder are never justified even in the most extreme cases, and a whole lot of palliative care cannot make up for even one deliberate killing.  We should pray that Jean Vanier retracts his words and reconsiders his position.  Or the Church may have to reconsider all the schools named after him (I have never been a fan of naming Catholic buildings after living people anyways, which used to be contrary to Church practice).

 

It would be sad to see such a great life end on such a sad note.

 

(from an article posted on Life Site News)

***************

Jean Vanier’s full statement to LifeSiteNews on assisted suicide

English translation

I stand by everything that I have said. The main thing is in any case to support life and to avoid all situations of suicide that originate in a situation of depression and solitude.

My sister Therese, who was a palliative care doctor, has always said that 97 percent of people die fully conscious and without suffering. For the remaining 3 percent, they worked at finding a way to administer medication so that all could die without suffering.

If the correct sedative or medication has not been found one cannot oblige someone to live through an unrelenting agony.

One must not take part of a series of remarks and take them out of context. The most important thing is to accompany people with a competent doctor and above all if possible involved in palliative care.

Pope Francis continues to tell us that everything cannot be regulated by a law and there are always exceptions.

Original French

Je maintiens tout ce que j’ai dit. L’essentiel de toute façon est de soutenir la vie et d’éviter toutes les situations de suicide qui vient d’une situation de dépression et de solitude.

Ma soeur Therese, qui a été médecin dans les soins palliatifs, a toujours dit que 97 % de personnes mourraient en pleine conscience et sans souffrance. Pour les 3 % restants ils travaillaient pour trouver la façon d’administrer les médicaments pour que tous puissent mourir sans souffrance.

Si l’on a pas trouvé les bons calmants ou médicaments on ne peut pas obliger quelqu’un de vivre en agonie sans rémission.

Il ne faut pas prendre une partie du discours en coupant du contexte. Le plus important c’est d’accompagner les personnes avec un médecin compétent et surtout si possible engagé dans les soins palliatifs.

Le pape François continue à nous dire que tout ne peut pas être réglé par une loi et qu’il y a toujours des exceptions.