Document Forbids Assisted Suicide : Catholicism: John Paul’s 11th encyclical says the practice is a form of murder and tells church members not to support or obey laws such as Oregon’s “right to die” legislation.

Pope John Paul II’s Gospel of Life encyclical contains the Vatican’s most stinging rebuke to date of laws allowing physician-assisted suicide, calling the practice a form of murder and commanding Catholics not to obey such laws.

Assisted-suicide initiatives--such as the one approved by Oregon voters in November--only create the illusion of lawfulness, Pope John Paul II said. “The democratic ideal is betrayed” in their foundations, he writes in his 194-page Evangelium Vitae.

Catholics fought hard against the Oregon suicide measure and remain involved in efforts to defeat it in the courts. Oregon is the only state in the nation to approve such a law, and a constitutional challenge to it will be considered in federal court in Eugene in three weeks.

Employing some of the same constitutional language that has been used in legal briefs filed against the Oregon law, the Pope calls euthanasia and abortion a denial of “the equality of everyone before the law.”

The attack on euthanasia, which he describes as “false mercy,” forms part of a wide-ranging papal critique in John Paul’s 11th encyclical since he became Pope in 1978.

He also targets abortion, infanticide, the death penalty, fetal tissue research and the killing of embryos--all part of what the pontiff calls an encroaching “culture of death.”

The legalization of such practices, even by majority vote, takes democracy in the direction of totalitarianism, the Pope warns. He commands Catholics not to vote for such laws, not to campaign for them and, if they are enacted, not to obey them “as they are completely lacking in juridical validity.”

The encyclical does offer alternatives to Catholics faced with terminal illness and suffering.

There is no moral obligation to submit to aggressive medical treatment to prolong life, the Pope writes. And reiterating the opinion of Pope Pius XII, John Paul states that narcotics may be used to alleviate suffering even if the result is decreased awareness and a shortening of life.

Richard Doerflinger, associate director of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, says the encyclical makes a double case. The gospel of the sacredness of life is central to Catholic faith, he says, and protection of life at its most defenseless--at the beginning and end--is a core responsibility of society.

“The values of freedom and life are interrelated,” Doerflinger says. “Freedom cannot be used to denigrate life.”