The Catholic Bishop of Portsmouth has told his parishioners that the ideology behind assisted suicide is the same as Nazism.
In a pastoral letter read out at Mass across churches and chapels today, Rt Rev Philip Egan said that any change in the law to make it legal for terminally ill adults in the UK to end their lives would be to “capitulate to the very ideology Britain fought against in the Second World War”.
The letter urged people to ask their MPs to vote against the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill which has been introduced to Parliament by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater. It's due to be debated and voted on at the end of November.
Bishop Egan described the idea of assisted suicide as "gravely immoral, an offence against God, and evil masquerading as kindness... If we yield to this and permit killing, we will cross a line from which there is no return.
“Like using nuclear weapons, once deployed, it’s too late – there’s only escalation.”
He went on to say that legalising assisted suicide would put pressure on the most vulnerable to end their lives for fear of being a burden and that it would "completely undermine palliative care and the work of care-homes. It could spell the end of hospices, since it would be cheaper, more efficient and far less trouble to kill someone – or to permit them to kill themselves – than to care for them and generously fund their care.
“Assisted suicide would place an unacceptable and immoral demand on medical staff, expecting them to become accessories to killing. It would undermine the trust we normally place in doctors, making us suspicious of their motives.
“It would darken the atmosphere of medical wards that care for the elderly, and it would inexorably lead to euthanasia, the right to make another person die, when difficult cases need to be decided by consultants and relatives, or lawyers and the courts … It’s easy to imagine a future in which doctors advise patients to seek suicide rather than treatment.”
Bishop Egan is the latest Catholic church leader, including the Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Vincent Nichols and the Archbishop of Cardiff-Menevia Mark O'Toole, speak out against legalising assisted dying.
In the Anglican church, the Archbishop of Canterbury Most Rev Justin Welby has also warned against any change in the law.