Petition organizers said this week they have reached the minimum 500,000 signatures needed for parliament to choose whether to initiate the referendum.
A successful referendum on assisted suicide, activists say, would clear the way for a bill also legalizing euthanasia, though lawmakers in the Catholic-majority country are divided on the issue.
In a statement issued after an online meeting this week, Italy’s bishops said, “anyone who is in conditions of extreme suffering must be helped to manage pain, to overcome anguish and despair, not to eliminate their own life.”
Quoting Samaritanus Bonus, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 2020 letter on the care of persons in the critical and terminal phases of life, they said: “the Magisterium of the Church recalls that, when one approaches the end of earthly exisstence, the dignity of the human person entails the right to die with the greatest possible serenity and with one’s proper human and Christian dignity intact.”
The document reaffirmed that euthanasia is an “intrinsically evil act.”
In their statement, the bishops said that “choosing death is the defeat of the human, the victory of an individualistic and nihilistic anthropological conception in which neither hope nor interpersonal relationships find more space.”
Credit: Source link
