The leaders of both main Churches in Germany have sharply criticised the Federal Constitutional Court’s decision to overturn the ban on assisted suicide and ruled that there is a “right to self-determined dying”.
In a common public statement, conference president Cardinal Reinhard Marx and the chairman of the Protestant Churches in Germany, Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, warned that allowing official offers of assisted suicide would – “in a subtle way” – put elderly or incurably ill persons under pressure to end their lives.
From the Christian point of view, the way illness and death were dealt with were decisive fundamental questions of human existence, they recalled.
“A person’s dignity and value should not be judged by their achievement potential, their use to others, their health or their age. They are – we are absolutely convinced – a manifestation of the fact that God made human beings in his own image and are thus answerable to him for their lives.,” the bishops said. “The more natural and easily accessible options for suicide become, the greater the danger that pressure will be put on people in extremely burdensome situations to make use of the suicide option and put an end to their lives.”
“People who are dying and their relatives must have a place in our normal everyday lives,” Archbishop Stephan Burger of Freiburg emphasised. The High Court ruling must on no account be allowed to make suicide “a normal occurrence”, he said. Ways must be sought of enabling everyone to die a dignified death, he said, reaffirming the Christian belief that human beings owe their lives to their Creator and that they therefore cannot arbitrarily end their lives.
Fr Karl Jüsten, the head of of the Katholisches Büro (Catholic Office) which is responsible for the Church’s relations with politicians, pointed out that the ruling was a watershed. Up to now, the German Church had always been able to assume that human life in all its phases was under the particular protection of the state and its laws. The new ruling meant that that protection had begun to shake. Just a few years ago he would never have imagined it possible for a German judge to allow such a ruling, he said in an interview.
In Germany, anything to do with euthanasia is a particularly sensitive subject as it recalls Hitler’s euthanasia policy during the Second World War, when thousands of handicapped and elderly people were exterminated because they were considered to be unworthy of life. The expression “unwertes Leben” was coined by the Nazis to describe people they judged as “lives that are not worthy of life”.
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