Write for God

Pope John Paul II

Four years ago today, April 2, we lost Pope John Paul II. Our Holy Father succumbed to disease and old age in parallel fashion to Terri Schiavo’s forced starvation by her husband. The Pope seemed to be prolonging his life to pray for Terri while he was still with us. We followed the Pope’s story in the national media and the Schiavo story in our local papers.

The Schiavo story happened in our backyard: the hospice where she died and the court battles between her parents and her husband all took place within 15 miles of our house.  Michael Schiavo’s attorney worked at an office within walking distance of us.

During the Schiavo court battles, I was having Chinese food with friends at one of our favorite lunch hangouts when Judge George Greer, whose ruling eventually made it possible to kill Terri, walked in with a beefy bailiff.

One of my friends greeted the judge, who stopped to talk to her. He had received threats and was afraid to be out alone, he said. The bailiff was protection when the judge wanted to leave his office for lunch. Judge Greer, small and soft-spoken, waved goodbye to us after picking up his takeout order. The transaction took a few minutes and yet it posed so many questions for me.

A disabled woman’s life hung in the balance and a small man picking up Chinese food for lunch had the power to tip the scales to either life or death.  The banality of evil indeed! The judge had a bailiff to protect him, but the woman didn’t have the law on her side. She starved to death on March 31, 2005. Two days later, Pope John Paul II, a vocal champion of life, followed her to eternal life.

Our diocesan bishop could have been as vocal about the sanctity of life as the Pope, but he wasn’t. (Click here for comments by Bobby Schindler, Terri’s brother, about the lack of a diocesan response to the court decision to murder his sister.) At one point, the bishop called Terri’s case a choice ”made within a family,” like deciding which color to paint the dining room or where to go for summer vacation.

Father Frank Pavone came to Pinellas County to plead for Terri’s life, as did many other clerics who found the murder of a disabled woman offensive to God, but the diocese didn’t join them in forcefully speaking out for life. (Abortions are decisions “made within a family,” too, but that doesn’t mean that the Catholic Church doesn’t vigorously defend the rights of the unborn.)

Pope John Paul II had spoken of the dignity of all human beings, including those condemned to death by the few nations that still uphold the death penalty. The Pope was never wishy-washy about what constituted life: It is always sacred, without ifs or buts. Life is sacred–period.

Terri Schiavo died and Pope John Paul II followed her two days later. Four years after their deaths, we have seen another Terri Schiavo in Eluana Englaro, a young Italian woman whose father defied the Church and the law to end her life. It’s not likely that we will see another Pope John Paul II in our lifetime.

In terms of his world outreach, his theological acumen and his force of personality, Pope John Paul II could arguably be called the greatest Pope of the past century. Four years after his passing, we still miss him. May we one day live to see this great servant of God be lifted to sainthood.

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.