Unfolding just as it did in America
To this day, most Americans who remember the Terri Schiavo ordeal that unfolded so publicly three years ago still don’t know the truth about that whole case. Most think she was ‘brain dead’ or in a ‘persistent vegitative state’ (neither of which were true), that her family should have just ‘let her go’ (she wasn’t going anywhere, she only needed food and water, like us) and that that government had no business intervening in ‘a private family matter’ (yes, they did, because it was a precedent setting denial of constitutional due process that resulted in her death).
The facts and the ongoing work of her legacy can be found here.
The Italian Terri Schiavo ordeal is ramping up even more at this moment, and is now eerily similar to our national drama over this young woman’s life and death. It falls under the heading of ‘the right-to-die’.
Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday affirmed the need to protect life even while suffering, making a last-minute intervention as Italy grapples with a fiercely debated right-to-die case.
Eluana Englaro, 38, has been in a vegetative state for 17 years after a car crash. On Friday, after a decade-long court battle, her nutrition began to be reduced in preparation for removing her feeding tubes, which her father has said was her wish.
Which is opposite Terri’s case, in which her husband, who was living with another women for years and fathered two children with her, conveniently came up with Terri’s ‘wish’ to not be cared for in an impaired state but to die instead…..and came up with that years after she initially (and mysteriously) had oxygen cut off to her brain long enough to become impaired.
But back to Eluana…
Benedict didn’t refer by name to Englaro in his message Saturday for the annual World Day of the Sick. But the pope said he wanted to reaffirm with vigor “the absolute and supreme dignity of every human being” even when “weak and shrouded in the mystery of suffering.”
In a bid to keep Englaro alive, Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right government passed an emergency decree Friday saying that feeding and hydration cannot be suspended for patients who depend on it.
But in an unusual confrontation between Italy’s top officials, President Giorgio Napolitano refused to sign the decree, saying it defied court rulings that allowed Englaro’s feeding tubes to be removed and violated the fundamental separation of executive and judicial branches.
It is hotly political, which it was (and still is) here in the US as well. But the issue of human dignity and the sanctity of life transcend politics.
Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, who heads the powerful Italian bishops’ conference, said refusing food and water to Englaro was nothing less than “homicide.”
“A light is going out, the light of a life,” he wrote in Saturday’s edition of the bishops’ newspaper Avvenire. “And Italy is darker.”
It’s creeping across the world wherever the idea that hastening a person’s death is accepted as a ‘right’.
