Only a totalitarian states gives cover for death, warns Spanish bishop

Madrid, Spain, Jul 28, 2008 / 15:13 pm

The president of the Subcommittee on Family and the Defense of Life of the Bishops’ Conference of Spain, Bishop Juan Antonio Reig Pla, said last week that when the state “provides legal cover for the culture of death, it automatically is transformed into a totalitarian state.”

In an interview with the newspaper ABC, Bishop Pla commented on proposals by the Spanish government to liberalize abortion laws and legalize euthanasia.  “A democratic and social state has the duty to protect the poorest and the weakest, which include the unborn, the handicapped, the elderly and the terminally ill.  When the state, instead of protecting the weakest, provides legal cover for the culture of death, it automatically is transformed into a totalitarian state, the foundations of coexistence are broken and a society of death, a true thanatocracy (a government run by death), emerges.”

“Liberalizing and facilitating abortion is not the way,” he said.  “This would produce more death and more suffering.  I think we are all convinced that abortion is an evil. But therefore we should offer alternatives.  The first and foremost is education and prevention,” he stressed.

Regarding euthanasia, the bishop recalled that Spanish doctors “are excellent professionals and they know how to apply all the remedies medicine has to offer for alleviating pain and helping the infirm without falling into futile therapeutic treatment.  Today the problem is the opposite. There are people who make themselves to be the masters of life and provoke the death of others,” he said.

“All of this apparently reasonable and humanitarian discourse is nothing more than an excuse to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia, which consists in directly provoking the death of one enduring a serious illness or suffering, or indirectly denying medical treatment that is ethically obligatory.  We are dealing with a manipulation of the language in order to manipulate consciences and inoculate in them the virus of the culture of death,” Bishop Pla said.

“With abortion and euthanasia, the law turns its back on science and sacrifices the lives of the most defenseless of our brothers and sisters to the ideology of death,” he said in conclusion.