Local News in Brief : Right-to-Die Act Opposed
Archbishop Roger Mahony Wednesday urged Catholics to oppose a state right-to-die initiative and called the proposed ballot measure “truly alarming.”
In a pastoral letter to the Los Angeles archdiocese, Mahony said the Catholic Church’s moral position in such Vatican documents as “The Declaration on Euthanasia” is that the “killing of a human being can never be sanctioned, even if the motive is to eliminate suffering and pain.”
“The threat to the dignity of human life raised by this initiative is truly alarming and requires our utmost attention and forthright action,” Mahony said in the five-page letter.
The mercy-killing initiative, or Humane and Dignified Death Act, would take this one step further, however, permitting a terminally ill patient to ask for and receive a physician’s help in putting an end to life.
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