Pope Francis strongly opposes assisted dying during his visit to Lourdes

The Pope was clear. This Sunday in Lourdes, in the middle of his third day of visit to France, he spoke about the end of life. “It is impossible to consider causing death as normal,” he said, firmly insisting, two months after the adoption in France of a law establishing a right to assisted dying, that “what is legal is not necessarily moral.”

“No human law should make you lose the certainty of your dignity,” he told sick and disabled pilgrims, assuring, to loud applause, that “it is in the name of this inalienable dignity of the human person that the temptation to kill under the guise of false compassion must be firmly rejected.”

He denounces “planned death”

After years of debate, the right to “assisted dying”, a major societal reform of Emmanuel Macron’s presidency, was ratified on July 15 by the French Parliament, to the great dismay of the Church of France for whom this measure constitutes an “anthropological rupture”. “Medicine can never become the servant of planned death,” insisted the sovereign pontiff during this visit under the motto “so that the world has life”, before pleading to “relentlessly” develop palliative care and medical research and to “tenderly accompany the sick”.

“Dear sick brothers and sisters, I want to tell you: you are not a burden, you are the beating heart of our humanity and a precious treasure for the Church,” insisted the Pope, who after his speech greeted and blessed the faithful who came to welcome him, first and foremost pilgrims in wheelchairs.

“Turning a blind eye to human dignity”

A few hours earlier, during an open-air mass in front of 150,000 people, the Pope had castigated the “current trends which seek to redefine the value of human life in the face of illness, suffering or old age”, and erected the Grotto at the heart of the Catholic site as “a sanctuary of Christian hope”.

The Pope had already condemned “the offer of a planned death” in his first speech at the Elysée on Friday. He deplored on Sunday that “certain societies tend to look away and turn a blind eye to the dignity of human life”.