Divine Mercy: The Heart of the Gospel

The Mercy of God and Modern Medicine 155 Christ has a determining role. It displays new horizons of mean­ ing, o f resurrection and life, to the one who sees the prospect of earthly existence being closed to them. So then, death with dignity, a merciful death, means something far different than what is paraded in slogans or on the front pages o f our newspapers. The “right to life” in a terminally ill person is the right to die in total serenity with human and Christian dignity. The falsehood, as the Pope has summarized it in Evangelium Vitae is this: Death is considered senseless if it suddenly interrupts a life still open to a future o f new and interesting experiences, but it becomes a rightful liberation, — a mercy, once life is held to be no longer meaningful because it is filled with pain and inexorably doomed to even greater suffering. Furthermore, when he denies or neglects his own fundamental relationship to God, man thinks he is his own rule and measure with the right to demand that society should guarantee to him the ways and the means o f deciding what to do with his life in full and complete autonomy. It is especially people in the developed countries who act in this way. They feel encouraged to do so by the constant progress of medicine and its ever more advanced techniques. This conference cannot address the subject o f assisted nutrition and hydration, because it is outside our topic, but I do want to discuss the topic o f pain. The Charter lays out a very important understanding — the Church’s understanding — o f the use o f pain killers. And I think this is very important because, when we read the lives o f heroic and won­ drous saints like Sister Faustina, we think of them as far above us and so we are not sure what is expected o f us! We have to understand what our attitude should be towards physical pain and suffering so that we can speak o f mercy in truth, and truth in mercy towards those who are suf­ fering, so that we will understand the greatness of souls like Sister Faustina and others, and so that we may aspire to the heroism to which Christ calls us, us individually, in our own lives. Now, in the last years there has been great attention to the use o f pain killers and what are called analgesics in the use o f internal illness. Assessing pain is very dif­ ficult. And the “Death with Dignity” , the Mercy Killing Movement, has made as much profit as it can from this. It always speaks about the peo­ ple in “intractable pain,” “uncontrollable pain” ! The skills of medical