ON New Year’s Day, Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Voluntary Assisted Dying laws will come into effect in the Sunshine State. Like her fixated Labor counterparts nationwide, the lately blonde Queensland Premier is at war with Catholicism. Going further than ultra zealot Daniel Andrews in Victoria – let that sink in – her legislation forces conscientiously objecting staff serving in private hospitals and nursing homes to refer-on VAD-desiring patients to more willing locums. The latter are authorised to walk into these havens of healing – seen by Christians as manifestations of sacred mission for at least 1700 years – and kill people. This isn’t a new humanitarianism but the revival of an old pagan mentality whose corollary – exterminationism – is inevitable.
Taunting the faithful and administrators with an ironic absurdity, the government maintains these break-and-enter executions will only be ‘necessary’ when patients are just “too sick to be moved.” The hangman will not to be cheated by natural causes – nor the state by ancient rights. That such extreme provisions were sold by the Queensland Law Reform Commission as a noble compromise between “a right to refuse to participate” and a “right to access a process that is lawful” exposes the nescience of what passes for a progressive intelligentsia in modern Australia. To the conscientious objector, referring-on a suicide to be remedied by a homicide does not ameliorate compunction. It makes him a Pontius Pilate at best or a Nuremberg lowlife at worst. More tragic than the invincible ignorance of heathens, however, is the casuistic mousiness of divines. Which brings us to the tepid ecclesiastical response to Palaszczuk’s maniacal démarche.
“We will not tolerate non credentialed doctors coming on site, nor will we assist in the provision of voluntary assisted dying in any of our facilities,” Francis Sullivan declared last August – by which time the government’s Stalinist intentions had already been unmistakably flagged. The Chairman of the Mater 
Group and one of Queensland’s most powerful Catholics, O’Sullivan is an adroit veteran of God vs. Caesar skirmishing but his intervention was less gladiatorial than it seems. “There is a practical solution and it will work for all sides of this debate,” he pleaded.
Except that for Catholics, only the solution proposed by the Franciscan saint of Auschwitz is respectable in murderous circumstances. The danger in ennobling crocodilian malice as a “side” that can be reasoned with is the one Churchill so famously warned about. Last week – a year after O’Sullivan’s one-man-out bravado – Archbishop of Brisbane Mark Coleridge realised Christian civilisation in Queensland would be eaten anyway. His handling of the politics, theology and advocacy surrounding corrupted medicine’s clash with religion – a Gordian knot, to be sure – has been flawed from the start.
One year after he prohibited conscientious objection as grounds for exemption from vaccination – “outweighed by legal obligations to civil law” – the Archbishop warned that patients who choose to be killed would be denied the last rites (which have never been afforded to the wilfully incorrigible in 2000 years). The earlier diktat was premised on the falsehood that only vaccinated priests could safely travel about ministering to congregants. More embarrassingly, it utterly contradicted his call two months earlier for a “blanket conscientious objection” clause in the emerging VAD legislation. Orthodoxy – like cake – cannot be had and eaten too like this without the hyenas of politics and the fragile of faith noticing. For his latest decree – on deathbed protocols – Coleridge was set upon by atheist Andrew Denton and a little troupe of like-minded mopes. The Prince Harry of Australian euthanasia, the whining Denton has been able to parlay his father’s quick and unremarkable death into a nationally retailed catharsis only because everybody is too polite to tell him to move on. In the age of Daniel Mannix and Fulton Sheen – let alone of Chesterton and Belloc – such a flyweight would be dispatched effortlessly if noticed at all.
This, however, is an age of enfeeblement wherein the barbarians are birdbrained but frenzied and the Christians baptised but snoring. Those in the Church who are enthusiastic seem less eager to convert the world than they are to yield to it. Scrambling to invent rubrics for a voluntarily assisted death in a Catholic hospital (by definition, compulsory), Archbishop Coleridge’s Liturgy Director, Dr Tom Elich – one of the foremost architects of the Novus Ordo in Australia – is advising pastors to “physically leave the room” during administration of poison, returning to the patient’s side while the “lethal dose” takes effect. In the absence of at least a stated intention to defy the law and block bounty hunters from entering a consecrated redoubt, this would constitute endorsement of a moral crime. Maximilian Kolbe did not “leave the room.” Otto Günsche did.
God would be turning in His grave. The Pope has also now laicized anti-abortion crusader, Father Pavone.
Sadly I can see a day when the Catholic Church in Australia will have to get out of hospitals completely. Start the preparation work to sell them to Ramsay or someone, so that their value can be maximized. At least then the capital could be used for good and not state-mandated evil.
The Left are working hard to exclude Christians from participating in society. Well that’s fine, we’ve had that many times in many eras. And it always goes badly for the excluders. God gives people who reject Him over to their own inner evil, and time and again they get into a miserable and ghastly mess.
“an age of enfeeblement”
disheartening
A baby can be aborted in a hospital with crucifixes on the walls (I know of one case only) so it’s not surprising what the assisted-death crusaders are demanding.
Those I know who support this have all enjoyed lives of relative ease, even self-indulgence; they’ve had the benefit of a fair amount of control – and they want that to continue to the end.
On the Catholic hierarchy, the less said by me, the better
God does not have a grave as he cannot die and is a living god.
suicide whilst completely wrong is not murder. The person in this instance wants to die.
In a sense this is why suicide although we cannot say it is that is so popular. People want to die and so why should we not let them.
I do find it noticeable that most advocates usually have relatives who had little to no palliative care before they died.
Every single culture in history that committed crimes against humanity believed that their victims lives ceased to have value.
The person ‘assisting’ them is the murderer.
VAD is not true suicide; it is homicide.
C’mon guys. get real……
Anyone can go jump off a cliff, or gas themselves or whatever. They can also try it with prescription or non-prescription drugs anyone can get a doctor’s assistance already. Thus suicidees have been “assisted” by the medical profession for a hundred years.
Let them that hate life leave it as painlessly as possible. When it comes to a choice between a bungled cliff-jump followed by hours or days of agony out bush or at the seaside vs a coupla tabs of something and a smooth exit I would give them the tabs myself if I had them. FFS!
Oremus.
Mantaray – there are two serious problems. One is forcing people to go against their consciences and the word of God, which is the problem here.
Second is that it will be misused, like the poor Dutch lady whose own relations held her down whilst she was being injected with the fatal dose. She was screaming don’t, don’t, as she wanted to live.
This is a risk for any oldy with assets that the kids want now and not in ten years time. Don’t for a second believe this won’t happen.
And care homes are going to be under huge pressure to clear beds….
Fr Pavone’s story is long and complicated, I’m not convinced that the decision was a wrong or a rught one, but I haven’t read the paperwork.
And it’s very disappointing to see bishops accommoding murder.
Indeed. Like with much of liberalism, it hides the evil involved by a sleight of hand. Medically-assisted ‘suicide’ is an action performed entirely by the person ‘assisting’. The patient does not die at their own hand, but at that of another.
The Church, in the face of these laws, should have, can still in QLD, inform the government that they will not receive any elective cases, nor open new nursing home places, if they are to be bound by these immoral and iniquitous laws.
The secondary problem with empowering people to kill other people, is you unleash the secret serial killers and deranged people with weird obsessions around death.
How are they being stopped from dying? Having a person kill them is not “letting them die”. By this insane clownworld “logic”, watching a murderer kill someone and not stopping them is letting the victim commit suicide.
Stop lying about what it is.
10,000 per year: Number of medical murders in Canada already under their yearly expanding laws…
Cult.Of.Death.
Also absolutely astonishing that any boomer would support this. For 40 years the entire government / treasury and medical “ethics”” apparatus has been talking about what the solution to boomers vs central healthcare vs medicare budget when they all hit old age is going to be. Here we are and it’s immediately, oh, look, euthenasia!
Insanity.
That should be rephrased, now people with long term disabilities can be convinced their life is not worth living along with the aged and mentally infirm. My main objection is that the state by proxy gets to decide whose life is worth living and whose is not. Given the level of gaslighting we have seen in public discourse I can only imagine the amount of mental fortitude required for a person at a low point in their life must need to be able to resist the idea their life is no longer worth living when that has been suggested by a trusted healthcare practitioner.
Anyone who believes VAD laws plus the crisis in aged “care” in Australia will not lead to “growing calls” for a “national conversation” about ending the hitherto open-ended Hippocratic commitment to the frail (using Canadian pressure tactics) is a wilfully indifferent muppet.
Surely any hospital operating for public services has to observe the law of the land? I understand the issue of religious beliefs, but we can’t have religion over-riding medical choices?
VAD isn’t a medical procedure.
It’s healthcare.
So roving bands of state trained assassins can enter any hospital by full force of law with a govt issued list of targets, is that it?
Oh, going on the list was voluntary! Like voting, all very secure of course. And voluntary, can’t forget that part. Voluntary and secure, safe and effective.
The problem with that Doubter is that the persecuted religious service provider then withdraws their service. Whereupon now there’re fewer “public services” than before the government got their jackboots on.
If on the other hand you allow their quaint beliefs they will cheerfully provide those services, and the very few people who want something more can go to a public sector service provider for their death fetish, be it abortion or euthanasia.
It is absurd to say people who assist people who wish to commit suicide are murderers. They are not. totally missled yes however the people concerned want to die.
Murder is killing a person who has no wish to die.
I would find it strange if a person wishes to die is in a hospital where the owners have a policy that does not allow that.
If this was the case it would be totally appropriate to ask them why are they in that hospital.
Bruce you will find those hospitals will be very particular of whom they admit as they should.
Only if parliament duly vote on it and it becomes “law” first!
In the age of the totalitarian secular state, anything what-so-ever that 50+1 % of bozos in some parliament somewhere decide to vote on the morning after the christmas party, emerging from the rooting in the offices or woken up naked covered in puke, is the highest level of human and spiritual existence. “The law” replaces god, the parliament becomes the church. King Canute weeps.
“Assisting” someone to commit suicide is literally black letter law murder today.
If some fifty year old man “helps” an angsty teenage girl slit her wrists, did he commit murder? Go!
There are many who believe there’s no such thing as the slippery slope. One of those muppets even comments here.
As for the bishops, the majority around the globe have well and truly succumbed to the entrapments of the world. Many don’t even believe in hell or satan these days and many just follow what this pope says in order to maintain their clerical status.
”But yet the Son of man, when he cometh, shall he find, think you, faith on earth?”
– Luke 18:8
There’s an ugly pattern developing here in that the Vatican is intermittently picking off champions of life, one at a time. First Father Altman got kicked out, now it’s Father Pavone. They expect Father Richard Hellman’s head to fall on a plate next.
The religious (or a body else) should be able to direct their Medicare tax to a provider consistent with their beliefs. Catholic health should pull a Mannix move and simply refuse government funding and just provide care within its means with no strings attached. Euthanasia is murder.
I am conflicted here. An extremely old relative was recently exterminated by a doctor administering the vaccine booster. You can be angry and grateful at the same time.
Almost the entire history of Assisted dying was written when average lifespans were under 50yo.
Now we have these appalling death factories called Nursing homes, where budget is not only King but the very essence of survival….of the business not the inmates.
Reading through the comments, I see too many politically manufactured/directed opinions, when we should all know that the objective should be to get in front of the game, form the opinion, not follow it.
The lives of some old people have all but ended, and it is our responsibility to find, reveal snd pursue an agenda that opens the door for them.
personally, I am more worried about a Government looking to save a few budget dollars.
I’m not sure that living in a world where compassion gets redefined as showing someone the door at a point where the state has determined their life no longer has value is one I want to be part of. The Inuit would leave disabled children, the elderly and infirm to the elements when they were going to be a burden, looks like some are going to redefine that practice as voluntary assisted dying.
We need to understand what a short ‘average lifespan’ means as it’s often quoted in the media and history books / academia.
In the ‘old days’ (dark, middle ages etc) many many people lived well into old age – 70, 80, 90+
Just that many also died at childbirth, as infants or of battle, various ailments and sickness in middle age thus ‘average’ doesn’t mean that almost no-one lived past 50 or whatever.
That’s right, Chris.
Explained:
Common misconceptions about science II: Life expectancy.
The days of our years are threescore years and ten [70]; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years [80], yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
That’s Psalm 90, Verse 10 – written circa 1000 BC.
Non Mentis
Bruce you will find those hospitals will be very particular of whom they admit as they should.
And as sure as night follows day, the leftards will then scream about religious hospitals discriminating against the terminally ill
PS, how are you going with your link to all the “evidence” you have posted about the relative costs of fossil and intermittent electricity generation?
Whatever else governments should or should not do, they have no business telling anyone – especially the vulnerable – to go top themselves. They have even less business spending our taxes on – and coercing hospital and nursing home staff into – bumping them off.
For those bothering to pay attention, the euthanasia debate explodes the myth that the left stand up for the most vulnerable.
Misconception or misdirection.
And what was/is their “average” health?
how many of the 70,80,90 group had dementia?
twostix says:
19 December, 2022 at 10:54 am
Medically assisted suicide was first legalized in Canada for terminally ill patients in 2016, but last year, the law expanded to offer euthanasia to patients whose natural death is not believed to be imminent.
Starting next year, a new law will allow people suffering from mental illness, which had not previously be a qualifying condition, to receive medically assisted suicide.
Anyone see the link between calls in Canada to have people who refuse the “vaxxine” to be considered “mentally ill” and the above? The mentally ill cannot make their own medical decisions lawfully – a government official will make that call.
how many of the 70,80,90 group had dementia?
Probably not many – there would not have been the contaminants we have today in their food and water.
Which takes me back to the Covid “Booster” Extermination program at the Aged Care institutions.
Most newcomers to Aged care have some self care ability, like washing and toileting, but the average stay is under three years. So that is a fairly steep curve into dependency.
And the financial guru’s may be able to put a figure on the profit/loss of a third year inmate, being in need of two staff to wash them, etc.
Now if the “average” stay reduced a little, would profitability improve?
Morphine has always been the “Go To” killer, but required medical “justification?
The Booster has been a fantastic alternative, but has limited lifespan, and could have involved fraudulent Death Certificates.
Finally, there may be investment in Aged care by politicians, or there may be pressure from investors, or it may be altruism/
But they are; the law has never concerned itself with the intent of the victim in the case of murder which is why all cases of euthanasia, before its legalization, were considered murder as it satisfied all five elements as acknowledged by Blackstone.
Let them scream.you merely make the point this is the service we provide for these reasons.
no different to enrolling in certain schools.
Err have you ever read the regular CSIRO reports on that. Maybe take into account what Origin, AGL or Energy Australia are saying, then there are the academics who specialise in this and finally the thinktanks.
Get fair dinkum Dover. Most of us do not support suicide. There is a load of difference in helping a person to die when that is their wish more so when they are in pain ( although as I have said they rarely have palliative care) and a person who simply blows someone away because they could or wanted to.
Sufferers of depression and suicidal ideation are aided in their recovery by care given in hospitals and also by regular – at times daily – visits to their homes by state funded teams of nurses and doctors. It cannot be true to have it that both aiding the recovery of the ill and killing them is one and the same thing. I wonder which of the principles will prevail.
It takes someone pretty willfully obuse to think that a Kermit Gosnell like situation might not occur with VAD. But it’s ok because all those vulnerable people were convinced by an authority figure that their lives didn’t matter.
At law, there is no difference. Moreover, that you have to add guff about pain indicates that you’re not that confident about the victim’s consent making a decisive difference.
Here’s a quintessential example of a government program … first they go apeshit on the anti-smoking campaigns all over the place … they yell, they threaten, they cajole they shake their fists to the heavens about the evil of smoking.
Then next thing you know they bitch about too many old people around the country … off retiring, not paying taxes, occupying a house that the government numpties would prefer to offer to a young and aspirational immigrant family. Golly, they need to start figuring out how to kill off these bloody old buggers … wonder what strategy might solve this new problem that nobody could possibly have seen coming?!?
Non Mentis
Err have you ever read the regular CSIRO reports on that. Maybe take into account what Origin, AGL or Energy Australia are saying, then there are the academics who specialise in this and finally the thinktanks.
LOL. Interested parties on the gravy train are your “evidence”, and you can’t even answer simple factual questions on capacity factors, or on the economic impact of capital expenditure on transmission lines.
Can you even think for yourself? Probably not, given that you failed pre-school.