Fr. Larry Holland, an elderly priest in Vancouver, Canada, has recently been in the news after it was disclosed that the hospital where he was recovering from a fractured hip offered to help him die. Actually, he was offered a death prescription twice! In Canada, it is legal to have a medical professional kill you or provide you with drugs so you can kill yourself.
It seems strange to suggest such ways of dying to a priest, but as EWTN reports, Canada’s death professionals—the Association of MAID [Medical Aid in Dying] Assessors and Providers—published guidelines that direct members not to assume a patient’s faith would keep them from engaging terminal services. The document warns that “healthcare professionals may draw incorrect assumptions about a person’s views on MAID; e.g., they may assume that a patient objects to MAID because she is a Roman Catholic nun, and yet Roman Catholic nuns and others dedicated to a faith-based way of life have requested MAID.” Perhaps that claim is true, but in my research I haven’t found a single verifiable report that a nun or priest has accepted a doctor’s offer or suggestion to die. It is possible they know something that isn’t recorded in the public statistics, or perhaps it’s just a fictional ploy to give an air of moral justification to an evil deed.
The Church’s teaching against physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia could not be more clear. Directive 59 of the USCCB’s Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERDs) states, “Catholic health care institutions may never condone or participate in euthanasia or assisted suicide in any way.” Of course, a Catholic physician can never participate in death-dealing acts in whatever hospital he or she practices their healing art.
But the Canadian document doesn’t allow physicians a moral escape. It states, “While the Charter enables clinicians to limit their services based on conscience or religion, clinicians may not impede, directly or indirectly, access to services, thus unjustifiably infringing on the rights of patients to access those services.” The guidelines say that “physicians have an obligation to refer or transfer their patient to another professional.” That’s a huge problem. Directive 27 of the ERDs states, “If a patient or a patient’s surrogate requests a medical intervention that is not in accord with Catholic teaching, health care professionals may not refer the patient to another professional for the purpose of obtaining that intervention.”
Canada has placed doctors with a conscience in a pickle: You don’t have to do the deed, but you must direct the patient to a doctor who will. The Church says no to such referrals. At the very least, this would be considered material cooperation with evil. It can’t be done while remaining on the right side of the moral law.
Some human acts are and will always be wrong in themselves; there is no way they can be made licit or justified by circumstances in which they are committed.
Canada doesn’t report MAID as a cause of death, so statistics are difficult to assess. However, according to MAID’s most recent statistics from its 2024 data, 16,499 individuals died under the MAID provision, and it became the fifth leading cause of death in Canada. We might wish that Canada would report its statistics with alarm or at least embarrassment—and maybe be chagrined by the headlines about Fr. Holland—but in its Sixth Annual Report, the minister of health writes that she is “pleased” to share the data. Chilling attitude, isn’t it?
The practice of medicine has been turned inside out from days when the ancient text of the Hippocratic Oath, taken by all new physicians, pledged, “I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing.” That phrase would eventually be distilled in the nineteenth century to simply the Latin phrase primum non nocere. “First, do no harm.”
Killing patients is a dreadfully final act of injury and wrongdoing, and both faith and reason mitigate against healthcare’s involvement in it—ever.
Some human acts are and will always be wrong in themselves; there is no way they can be made licit or justified by circumstances in which they are committed. Catholic theology has articulated these truths into its moral teaching, but the moral precepts of the Church aren’t required to define these acts as evil. Hippocrates, who lived almost a hundred years before Christ and is outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, discerned by reason alone that physicians should never cause harm. Reason can still discern the same truths today.
There are many perspectives on natural law, but the classical understanding claims that some truths are universal and written on the hearts of all persons. Catholic theology calls that conscience, and it articulates these truths for clarity, just as God provided clarity through the precepts of the Decalogue. Theology uses the technical phrase malum in se (evil in itself) to define acts that are evil by their very nature or object. Killing patients, even when they request it, is an act that is evil in itself. It is an act contrary to the good of the person and to the proper end of a physician’s care of patients. Acts that are intrinsically evil or disordered (malum in se) can never be made good by intention or circumstance (CCC 1755–1756).
Euthanasia, genocide, torture, slavery, rape, adultery, homosexual acts, masturbation, blasphemy, and other similar acts all fall under this category of sins. Euthanasia is found in its appropriate company.
With specific regard to euthanasia, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that
an act or omission which, of itself or by intention, causes death in order to eliminate suffering constitutes a murder gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator. The error of judgment into which one can fall in good faith does not change the nature of this murderous act, which must always be forbidden and excluded. (CCC 2277)
For those who reject Catholic doctrine, an appeal to the natural law tradition can defend the same principle in nonreligious language.
The preamble of the Declaration of Independence articulates certain rights it calls “unalienable.” In the natural law tradition, these rights are understood as goods rooted in human nature and not merely in personal choice or social convention. The founders recognized the right to life as the first of those rights because human life is a basic good that cannot be surrendered, transferred, or nullified by oneself or by another. Human dignity is likewise considered intrinsic rather than conferred. It is not something that can be assigned or taken away by another—as much as many voices in our society would like to do so.
Euthanasia violates the intrinsic dignity of the person; it is an act offered as a solution to suffering, but the circumstances of an act—a patient’s suffering—cannot nullify the inalienable good that is not one’s possession to surrender. To assume so would be to assert an autonomy inconsistent with a proper good. As the venerable Jérôme Lejeune, himself a medical doctor, is quoted as saying, “Hate the disease and love the patient: This is the practice of medicine.”
The health care landscape in Canada is, frankly, horrific with long wait times for care. An article in The American Journal of Bioethics claims, “There have been, and continue to be, a significant number of troubling cases of MAID, including cases reported in the media where the requestor did not want to die but found MAID far more accessible than basic, standard resources (their first choice) that would have offered treatment or made their suffering bearable.” Could this be the reason that the annual growth in MAID deaths in Canada has been an average of 25.3 percent since 2020?
In an overcrowded medical environment, one would hope that Fr. Holland’s experience of being offered MAID wasn’t an attempt to free up a bed in a hospital. But two offers to kill a priest in recovery from a hip fracture might indicate it’s a reasonable question to ask.
Canada legalized MAID in 2016, and in just a few years, it has come to rank a close second behind the Netherlands in the number of deaths by euthanasia each year. That is not a statistic to be “pleased” to share. Physician-assisted suicide is now legal in thirteen US states and the District of Columbia. Americans, beware what we accept as “health care.” Primum non nocere!