Priests seek guidance for pastoral response to Catholics seeking euthanasia
Father Thomas Lynch, president of Priests for Life Canada, called for a national initiative to address Catholics accessing medical assistance in dying (MAID). Lynch said many priests have encountered Catholics choosing MAID and urged the Church to speak more clearly and consistently in favor of life. Father Paul Moret said past Canadian bishops’ statements about personal conscience may have contributed to some Catholics’ acceptance of MAID. Canada recorded 16,499 MAID deaths in 2024, but the federal reporting system does not track the recipients’ religious affiliation.
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Canadian Catholic priests and church-affiliated groups are calling for clearer, wider pastoral guidance as they encounter Catholics seeking medical assistance in dying (MAID). They support the Church’s opposition to euthanasia but also raise questions about how pressure, suffering, and a person’s circumstances should shape pastoral responses. 1
Father Thomas Lynch, president of Priests for Life Canada, said priests he has addressed often report firsthand experience with Catholics seeking or undergoing MAID. He called for a national initiative, arguing that guidance should not be left to individual dioceses or occasional bishops’ statements. 1
Deacon Laurence Worthen of the Christian Medical and Dental Association of Canada likewise urged a more extensive education effort, including parish information materials and preaching. His association offers a program on dying and hope that presents life as a gift from God to be cared for rather than intentionally ended. 1
The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) said it continues to oppose MAID and pointed to its parish resource on palliative care, death, suffering, accompaniment, and bereavement, as well as a committee focused on end-of-life issues. In a June statement marking ten years since legalization, the bishops said euthanasia and assisted dying “can never be morally acceptable.” 1
The article reports that Canada recorded 16,499 MAID deaths in 2024, but the federal reporting system does not record religious affiliation, so the number of Catholics among them is unknown. A 2023 Ipsos poll commissioned by the pro-MAID organization Dying with Dignity found that 83% of Canadian Catholics supported MAID for patients whose natural death was reasonably foreseeable, compared with 84% of Canadians overall. 1
The article describes differing parish situations. Father Joseph D’Souza said he declined an anointing request from a religious sister planning to access MAID and later declined to celebrate her funeral Mass; after consulting his chancery, he blessed her grave and used the occasion to explain the Church’s opposition. Father Paul Moret said he preached on the sanctity of life after reports that two parishioners had died by MAID, with their families allegedly concealing the circumstances to obtain funeral Masses. 1
Moret also questioned whether earlier Canadian bishops’ statements on personal conscience—including the 1968 Winnipeg Statement—may have left some Catholics with the impression that individual conscience permits departure from Church teaching. He said reports of people being pressured by medical professionals or family, or seeking MAID amid inadequate health care, make it difficult to assume every choice is freely made. 1
He asked for clarification on how such circumstances should inform pastoral care, drawing a comparison with the Church’s recognition that psychological disturbance, anguish, or fear can diminish a person’s responsibility for suicide. 1
Conscience and pastoral care in Catholic responses to euthanasia
Catholic responses to euthanasia hold together two commitments that must not be separated: euthanasia is morally wrong, but the person asking for it must not be abandoned. Conscience matters because people make decisions under suffering, fear, pressure, and sometimes despair; pastoral care therefore requires both clarity about the act and compassion toward the person. The Church distinguishes the moral character of an act from the degree of personal guilt, and calls for accompaniment, symptom relief, and respect for conscience—not condemnation or complicity.
The Catholic health-care directives define euthanasia as an action or omission that, by its nature or intention, causes death in order to alleviate suffering. They say Catholic health-care institutions may not condone or participate in euthanasia or assisted suicide, and that patients who request it should instead receive loving care, psychological and spiritual support, and appropriate treatment for pain and other symptoms.
The moral concern is not that suffering is good, or that medicine should leave suffering untreated. It is that intentionally causing a person’s death is not a permissible way to relieve suffering. Evangelium Vitae describes euthanasia as the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person, while distinguishing it from the use of pain-relieving medication when death is neither willed nor sought, even if there is a risk of shortening life.
That distinction matters in pastoral conversations. A request for euthanasia can express a wish to escape pain, fear of dependency, loneliness, or a sense of being a burden. Those concerns deserve attentive care. But recognizing the anguish behind a request does not make intentionally causing death a morally acceptable response. The Church warns that compassion becomes distorted if it seeks to eliminate the sufferer rather than address suffering and support the person.
Conscience is central because a person is morally responsible for choices, including choices made under civil law or at another person’s request. Samaritanus bonus says that no one can escape personal moral responsibility by appealing to another’s freedom or to what the law permits. It also affirms that health-care workers have a grave reason to resist participation in euthanasia, and calls on governments to recognize conscientious objection in health care.
At the same time, the Church distinguishes the wrongness of an act from the person’s subjective culpability. A person may judge in good faith, or be affected by anguish and despair; those factors can reduce or even remove personal guilt. But, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith teaches, an erroneous judgment of conscience does not change the moral nature of euthanasia or assisted suicide.
This distinction prevents two opposite mistakes. One is to treat a person’s sincere conviction or request as proof that euthanasia is morally right. The other is to assume that someone who requests it is therefore fully culpable or beyond pastoral care. The Church’s position is neither. It rejects the act while leaving room for diminished responsibility and continuing to seek the person’s good.
Pastoral care begins by listening and remaining close, not by reducing the person to the decision they have expressed. Samaritanus bonus explicitly says the Church’s position does not mean rejecting the sick person. It calls ministers to listen, help, explain the sacraments, and leave open the possibility that the person’s hope may revive and the decision may change.
“To delay absolution is a medicinal act of the Church, intended not to condemn, but to lead the sinner to conversion.”
This teaching addresses sacramental care when someone has decided on euthanasia or assisted suicide and persists in that decision. The document says that reception of Penance and Reconciliation, Anointing of the Sick, and Viaticum requires a disposition consistent with repentance; a minister should look for concrete signs that the person has modified the decision. If a person is registered with an association to receive euthanasia or assisted suicide, the document names an intention to cancel the registration as such a sign. It also stresses that postponing absolution is not a judgment that the person is fully culpable: personal responsibility may be diminished or absent.
The practical point is that sacramental discipline should not become a pretext for withdrawing pastoral presence. The same teaching insists that ministers remain close, especially when the act is not imminent, because accompaniment may help the person reconsider. But care must not take a form that implies approval: for example, remaining present through the performance of euthanasia could be understood as complicity.
For Catholic health-care workers, conscientious objection is more than private discomfort. Samaritanus bonus says that formal or immediate material cooperation in euthanasia or assisted suicide must be excluded, and that workers must not imply collusion through words, actions, or omissions. It also calls Catholic institutions to resist economic pressures that might lead them to accept euthanasia, and says that institutional collaboration is not morally permissible when it involves referrals for people requesting it.
This refusal must be joined to positive care. The Church describes Catholic health-care institutions as signs of the community’s care for the sick, and says society has a responsibility to ensure that incurably ill people are not left to their own or their families’ resources. In the directives, the practical response to a request for euthanasia is attentive care, psychological and spiritual support, and appropriate relief of pain and other symptoms.
Thus, conscientious objection should not be confused with indifference to the patient. The Catholic response rejects causing death while insisting on continued care, solidarity, and relief of suffering. It is a refusal of one proposed act, not a refusal of the person.
A faithful Catholic response must avoid both harshness and moral ambiguity. Harshness risks treating a desperate person as if the request itself settled the question of their guilt or worth. Ambiguity risks making the Church’s care appear to endorse the act. The sources instead call for a clear moral boundary alongside patient, humane accompaniment: listen seriously; address pain and distress; uphold conscientious objection; avoid gestures that suggest approval; and continue offering spiritual care and the possibility of reconciliation.
The central distinction is therefore between rejecting euthanasia and rejecting the person. Catholic teaching requires the first and forbids the second.