Write for God

UPDATE ON 2/9/09: Eluana Englaro went to her Heavenly Father tonight. In pace requiescat.

The case of Eluana Englaro is a hot issue in Italy and the rest of Catholic Europe, but it has barely dented our nation’s psyche. Most of the updates I’ve read have been in foreign online journals, where it’s become a right-to-life cause similar to Terri Schiavo’s death struggle here in Tampa Bay in 2005.

In 1992, Eluana was in an auto accident that left her in a persistent vegetative state (PVS), which is essentially a long-term coma with periods of wakefulness, but no cognition. Her father, Beppino Englaro, had petitioned Italian courts to disconnect his daughter’s feeding tube. It is what she would have wanted, he says. Despite the efforts of the Vatican and pro-life groups in Italy and the rest of Europe, it looks like Eluana’s slow death will begin today because her father has transferred her from a Catholic clinic to a secular hospice that has agreed not to feed her. As we who support an end to the death penalty know, it is only the State that can kill without impunity. It gives itself the power of God to say who deserves to live or die.

During Terri Schiavo’s battle, I visited the nursing home whose environs had become a media circus as her family and her husband fought over her Constitutionally-guaranteed right to life.  I parked at a supermarket shopping center in Pinellas Park and walked a few blocks to the nursing home. Everywhere, there were protestors, Rosary circles, pro-life and pro-euthanasia signs, national media with their spots staked out by portable tents and, most of all, law enforcement.

An elementary school ironically called Cross Bayou was down the street and the students were evacuated during one or two of the days of the Schiavo furor. Law enforcement imagined that, with so many pro-life people around, there would be an act of criminal sabotage. They did nothing to stop the actual crime that was being committed inside the nursing home, where Terri Schiavo was murdered. She died of dehydration; her parents couldn’t convince a court that taking the Body of Christ in Communion wouldn’t be “nourishment.”

And so Eluana Englaro will most likely die in the same way as Terri Schiavo: She will die of thirst. Jesus said, “I thirst,” during his own agonizing death and Eluana can only appeal to Him now. Whether her earthly father says he knows what she would have wanted or not, she is a human being in the image of God, her Heavenly Father. No one has a right to take away her life.

Pray for Eluana, yes, but also pray for those who imagine that they can play God to determine who lives and dies. Murder is the gravest of sins, no matter who commits it. The State is not exempt.