Patrick Jamieson, Victoria, BC

Dying to Meet You was the title of an evening talk and panel at St. Andrew Cathedral on Wednesday March 4 and subtitled ‘Preventing Euthanasia, encouraging Hope’. It was ostensibly about the special problem presented to Catholics by Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).

As advertised in the Sunday bulletin, the event featured a speaker, Amanda Achtman with the lengthy title Ethics Education & Cultural Engagement Lead for Canadian Physicians for Life and founder of Dying to Meet You. After hearing her harangue, the title could well include the term political.

But the problem is that there is no political or prophetic dimension to the Catholic response to the issue. The clerics on the response panel stated that anguished suffering is all one can imagine. Zero analysis proferred by either priest or bishop. One could hear Former Bishop Remi De Roo turning in his grave in the silence of the venue, a silence enhanced by an enforced refusal to allow any questions or remarks from the audience, or perhaps one should say congregation.

It was all one way except perhaps from Sister Marie Zarowny who attempted to broaden the conversation beyond religious pieties from two centuries previous.

Upon reflection I started to wonder if the purpose of, and even reason for the event was because Catholics were taking the MAiD option in equal numbers to the secular and general population. The speaker, a younger woman was admonishing the audience regularly in her remarks to not let down her generation by taking MAiD.

The problem is that there is neither reasoned moral analysis nor practical political action advocated, as though these were beneath the moral tone of pure Catholic doctrine she wished to present as the preferred solutions of Catholic moral high mindedness.

2.

This impression was reinforced the next day at a meeting with Dr. David Robertson, the regional head of the MAiD program on Vancouver Island.

This was a meeting set up by Telford Nault who is appalled at the prospect of funeral homes being used for provision of MAiD. This has occurred a number of times across the Island and elsewhere in BC. The practice started as a personal arrangement between a patient who would be having MAiD and their local funeral director.

This emerging reality became apparent to us through both of our involvement with a Catholic case in February. Carl Blais was a pious devout traditional Catholic who chose MAiD and died by that means at the Jubilee hospital in Victoria, after Telford caused such a fuss to stop it from happening at Sands Funeral home in the same city. (see “The Saga of Carl Blais; and MAiD” in the Other Features tab)

Telford has been a pioneer on Vancouver Island in the funeral business since the 1960s, which he outlined to Dr. Robertson at an independent office in Langford. I was there to speak about my experience of Carl’s case from the perspective of 10 years employed in Catholic Health care communications nationally, and 40 in progressive Catholic journalism.

My family of origin while strongly Roman Catholic has First Nations origin and includes a moral theologian who has developed a reasoned argument against MAiD utilizing the methodology of philosopher Bernard Lonergan and theologian Gregory Baum.

The dialogue with Telford and Dr. Robertson in his role as a public educator for the program regionally, was lengthy and genial between an advocate for MAiD, a thorough opponent of the program, and Telford who like many Catholics sees the need for the program if only because of how his mother died in unrelieved agony in the 1950s, as he described during our time together with the Doctor.

3.

The Carl Blais situation has come to reveal more about the question than one might have assumed given the singularity of his case. Is he more typical of devout Catholics than one would have assumed? Carl lived like a monk in the same seniors complex where I have a subsidized suite. He was devoutly Catholic and left all his funds to the local Fransiscan Friary which he attended for decades.

All his closest associates were traditional Catholics, who all seemed to have ducked for cover when he obdurately insisted on taking MAiD asap. As a result he approached me and other more progressive Catholics; although his friends eventually came around once they realized there would be no lightning bolts or the roof would not fall in on them metaphorically, from church authorities. His most beloved spiritual director was an esteemed Jesuit, his best friend a diocesan priest and two friars were present when he took his fatal measure on February 17.

His early supporters were removed as executor and funeral director because he said they were too happy while I presented the carefully moral reasoning against euthanasia: a) that one does not eliminate suffering by eliminating the sufferer, as Hospice Canadian-founder Dr, Balfour Mount said; b) that MAiD compromises venerable Canadian institutions such as the medical profession and Historic Catholic Hospitals, and now the funeral industry, and; c) that it contributes to cultural decline.

My own reflective belief is that Carl was not capable psychologically of making such a decision due to his mental constraints. After the conversation with Dr. Robertson, I could more easily see how he had fallen in love with the archetype of Death itself, to use Jungian terms, with certain medical staff as the muse figures he insisted on having present at the end.

4.

To return to the Wednesday evening event, its prime value was to underline the inadequacy of the traditional Catholic response if it persists in absolute moral stances and pious adages that threw little light on any way forward. Catholic moral theology is rooted in reasoned thinking and open dialogue which was the opposite of the plea to pastoral inevitabilities of pastors trying to relate to a situation made more difficult by the official stance of the institutional church. Due to this hardline attitude, pastoral agents are given a difficult time getting access to Catholics who choose MAiD.

We need events of open discussion; events of reflective moral reasoning, open listening and reasoned attitudes and analysis, if only to equip traditional Catholics with the tools to make a sensible decision which includes an understandable moral critique of the MAiD program.

5.

MAiD itself is ten years old now, and is approaching a period of legislative reform due to the question of euthanasia and the mentally ill; and also, the increasing demand, according to Dr. Robertson for advance planning due to fear of encroaching dementia which will make a rational decision to choose MAiD more difficult.

A national review consultation is overdue during which its recognized flaws can be revisited in this process. This could involve informed Catholics if they are educated as adults, which includes questions and presentations from the audience, something pointedly disallowed by the cathedral event.