Medically Induced and Judicially Sanctioned Sorrow

Most people who are alive today go about their daily lives without giving a thought to the monstrous life and decisions that so-called “medical professionals” and judges render upon the fate of innocent human beings whose only “crime” is that they suffer from medical problems that make them “expendable.” Although it is anesthetized by the use of many different euphemisms, including “mercy” and “compassion” and “quality of life,” the plain fact of the matter is that the medical and judicial monsters who induce so much needless sorrow into the lives of parents and children is nothing other than rank utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism is a political ideology (i.e. secular “belief” system) that is based, at least loosely, on the “greatest good for the greatest number.” It is the same thing as Social Darwinism that has led governments around the so-called world in the try to create a world of the “fit,” a world where the “unfit” have to be killed because their care causes an expenditure of money and “human resources” that are said to be “better” used elsewhere.

The medical industry—and it is nothing other than a money-making industry—has been in the forefront of killing innocent human beings, starting with the chemical and surgical execution of the innocent preborn in their mothers’ wombs and continuing at all subsequent stages of life thereafter.

Victims of accidents or sudden medical traumas are declared to be “brain dead” even though this is profit-making myth that was invented by a team of supposed physicians at the Harvard Medical School in 1968 in order to provide an “ethical” justification for the vivisection of living human beings for their vital bodily organs so that they could be transplanted into other human beings.

The following report, written by the heroic apostle of Catholic truth, Dr. Paul Byrne (see No Room In The Inn For Jahi McMath, Every Once In A While, Dr. Paul Byrne on Brain Death, Stories That Speak For Themselves, Headless Corpses?, First-Hand Evidence Of Fraud, Why Should Death Of Any Kind Get In The Way?, Grand Illusion, Every Once In A While, Canada's Death Panels: A Foretaste of ObamaCare, Someone Was Killed To Keep "J.R." Alive, Trying To Find Ever New And Inventive Ways To Snatch Bodies, Dispensing With The Pretense of "Brain Death", Good Rule Of Thumb: Reject What Conciliarists Promote, To Avoid Suffering In The Name Of Compassion, Just Obey God, Death To Us All, Choosing To Live In States Of Apoplexy, ObamaDeathCare, Death Panels Really Exist, No Human Being Is A Vegetable, Dr. Byrne's Jahi is alive -- praise the Lord and pass the ammunition and an article that attorneys recently tried to use against Dr. Byrne in court in Reno, Nevada, Dr. Paul A. Byrne's Refutation), provides a history of “brain death” in the context of how it was applied to a sixty year-old man a few years ago:

Michael, 60 years old, had just finished eating. Michael and his family were watching television when Michael suddenly slumped and fell to the floor. His family called 911. The emergency medical team resuscitated Michael. On the way to the hospital, a pulse was detected. Medications to support blood pressure were used during the resuscitation.

A diagnosis of mental illness was made many years earlier. Michael had no known physical illness prior to his collapse. Michael lived with his mother and sisters. They were Catholic and lived in accord with the teachings of the Catholic Church. Michael did not use tobacco or drink alcohol. Michael took 2 medications for his mental illness. Both affect the brain; one of them "increases risk of death."

On admission to hospital, Michael was breathing, but unresponsive. He was anemic (Hemoglobin 8) and his white blood cells showed many young forms (occurs with infection). On admission, his temperature was normal, but the next morning was elevated to 103 degrees (occurs with infection).

One consultant wrote, "There has apparently been some discussion back-and-forth between the hospitalist team, the intensivist, and the organ donor people as to how to properly manage him." In less than 24 hours after admission to hospital the neurology consultant wrote, "Limited neurological examination. The patient is unresponsive. Pupils are fixed. Absent corneal reflex bilaterally. Absent doll's eyes. No purposeful movements of the extremities noted. No movements of extremities to noxious stimuli. Reflexes are absent throughout. Toes are mute. IMPRESSION:... clinically, the patient is brain-dead status post cardiac arrest, likely with severe anoxic damage to the brain. May consider, do not resuscitate."

EEG showed "intermittently fast background activity of very low amplitude. Anteriorly also record consist of an irregular fast activity of small amplitude. No focal slowing or frank epileptiform features noted throughout the recording."

Sodium was abnormally elevated to 157 mEq/L; repeat was 162. Two days after admission he was determined to be "brain dead" per neurology. During an apnea test, no breathing was observed.

No blood levels of drugs that were prescribed or any other drugs were obtained. No cause of collapse of Michael was overtly considered other than statements that Michael had suffered from lack of oxygen and that Michael was "brain dead." It didn't matter that there was brain wave activity and that his heart was beating 100,000 times per day and that circulation and respiration were occurring with support from the ventilator.

Michael's relatives were assured that the determination of "brain death" was done in accordance with the hospital policy of certification of death by neurological criteria, which is patterned after, and consistent with, the New York State Department of Health and New York State Task Force on Life & the Law, "Guidelines for Determining Brain Death," published November 2011. In this document "brain death" is defined as "irreversible loss of all function of the brain. The three essential findings are coma, absence of brainstem reflexes and apnea." It was determined by a neurologist, an intensivist, and a hospitalist that there were no "confounding clinical circumstances." Under New York State law, Michael was determined to be "brain-dead" and was legally dead.

A Catholic priest who is Chairman of the Ethics Committee at the hospital volunteered that the hospital operated in accordance with the Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Bishops. This man was legally "brain dead" and ventilator support of the vital activity of respiration would be stopped at a precise hour and Do Not Resuscitate (DNR), which was already in place over the objection of the relatives, would be carried out. The ventilator was then taken away at the precise hour, even though Michael's relatives strongly objected. Prior to removal of the ventilator Michael's heart was beating; blood pressure was normal. Michael had respiration supported by a ventilator that pushed air in. Michael had to push the air out before the ventilator could push the air in again. A ventilator can push air into a cadaver, also known as a corpse, but quickly after death, the air will not and cannot come out of a cadaver.

Michael was judged to be "brain dead" shortly after arrival at the hospital, which Michael's relatives and the general public expect to be a healing center. In the hospital Michael was sentenced without a trial to true death. How was true death imposed on Michael? The Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) includes "irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain." Note that the word "functions" is plural.

The statute in New York includes "total and irreversible cessation of brain function." Thus, the statute has reduced the plural "functions" to the singular "function." The brain has many functions; absence of any function as determined by the three doctors in the New York Hospital meant absence of "all function." Thus, the statute and Rules do not protect the life of the patient.

The Rules and Regulation call for providing "reasonable accommodation of a Surrogate Decision-maker's religious or moral objections to use of the brain death standard to determine death." Michael's mother and sisters pleaded with the administrator of the hospital not to take away the ventilator, but the judgment had been made; nothing could be done to stop the removal of the ventilator. It was the hospital's decision that they had provided "reasonable accommodation" to Michael's family's religious and moral objections to the "brain death" criteria used by the hospital. They had a Catholic priest, the Ethics Committee, and it was stated that they were operating in accordance with the Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Bishops. It was also stated that they had a judge who agreed with what they were doing and they would give no more time to Michael, not even one more hour or one more day!

Prior to 1968, ventilators were in use but there was no controversy. Patients died on ventilators. So how did all these issues that involve taking organs and stopping ventilators come about? The goal of medical practice used to be that a living person would not be declared dead. Until the advent of mechanical ventilators and other complex life supporting therapies, the mistake of judging a dead person as alive was practically impossible. Prior to these developments and the desire to do vital organ transplantation, medicine made every effort to judge the moment of death in the direction of preserving human life from a death-dealing mistake.

"Brain death" did not originate or develop by way of application of the scientific method. "Brain death" began with the appointment of the Harvard Committee to consider the issues. The results of their work were in the "Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death." [1] The first words of this report are as follows: "Our primary purpose is to define irreversible coma as a new criterion for death." Only persons who are alive can be in a coma, whether reversible or not. Was this the hubris of a few academicians or was it simply a surrender to fear of legal chastisement regarding perceived economic and utilitarian needs in 1968, especially the desire to get healthy living vital organs for transplantation? It seems that a predetermined agenda existed from the onset. There were no patient data and no references to basic scientific studies. In fact, there was only one reference, which was to Pope Pius XII. [2] While there was a reference to and a quotation from this Allocution of Pope Pius XII, they neglected to include the following: "But considerations of a general nature allow us to believe that human life continues for as long as its vital functions – distinguished from the simple life of organs – manifest themselves spontaneously or even with the help of artificial processes."

The primary purpose of the Committee was not to determine IF irreversible coma was an appropriate criterion for death but to see to it that IT WAS established as a "new criterion for death." With an agenda like that at the outset, the data could be made to fit the already arrived at conclusions. There was a serious lack of scientific method in the origination and development of "brain death."This has continued to the present time where there is no consensus as to which of the myriad of sets of criteria to use and criteria for "brain death" are not evidence based.

"Brain death" is not true death. Rather it is observing cessation of functioning of the brain, which is then translated into "brain death." The primary reason for the origination and propagation of "brain death" was and is the desire to obtain vital organs for transplantation. It can now be ascertained that a validly applied scientific method, sound reasoning, and available medical technology were not utilized in developing the new way of determination of death called "brain death" for the simple reason that death is the absence of life. Life and true death cannot and do not exist at the same time in the same person.

When a person has a head injury or, as in this case, sudden collapse, explainable or not, quickly the possibility of getting organs for transplantation is entertained. In Michael's case no attempt was made to get his organs. Why not? No reason was apparent to indicate that Michael's organs would not be suitable for transplantation. Was it related to mental illness? "Discussion with the organ donor people did occur." Quickly it was determined that Michael was "brain dead" and Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) was considered and later carried out over the objection of Michael's relatives.

Michael's mother and sisters wanted Michael to be treated. Why wouldn't they? They took care of Michael during his entire life. When Michael collapsed, they called 911 expecting to get help for Michael. Paramedics responded. During transport the pulse returned. At the hospital Michael was said to be "brain dead" based on absence of brain stem reflexes and no visual observation of breathing. The fact that Michael had electrical activity in his cerebral cortex, the largest part of his brain, meant nothing to the doctors who said all they needed was absence of the brain stem reflexes that they had tested and a positive apnea test (positive meaning that he did not show breathing efforts at that time sufficient for observers to see). I add that for these doctors at this New York hospital, they had all they needed to discontinue care! Yet, these doctors, quick to evaluate for "brain death," did not do basic diagnostic tests to rule out infection, identify causes of the metabolic derangements of his electrolytes nor did they test for the presence of obvious drugs or toxins as the reason for his sudden collapse. They did not provide basic supportive care more than 48 hours. Once they determined that he was not an organ donor, they seemed not only to want a "do not resuscitate order" in the event of another collapse, they were intent on withdrawing life-sustaining ventilator support making another collapse, anoxic events and death almost inevitable. They refused family wishes to continue to treat the patient and even denied them time to make transfer arrangements so that their loved one might have a chance at life at a different institution with different doctors. Michael, an innocent person, was effectively executed without trial in a New York hospital. (See: www.lifeguardianfoundation.org for information on how to protect and preserve your life.)

One will note the role played by a supposedly Catholic priest in this execution. So much for the conciliarspeak of "solidarity" with the "poor and the suffering," including the mentally ill. The counterfeit church of conciliarism has made its "official reconciliation" with each of the anti-Incarnational errors of Modernity, including the "progress" made by the medical industry. A false church based on false premises accepts the very false premises of separation of Church and State and "religious liberty" that the made the triumph of the contemporary Aztec body-snatchers inevitable.

Obviously, insurance companies already pay for the execution of the innocent preborn by chemical and surgical means and by means of the starvation and dehydration of living human beings and by the vivisection of living human beings for their vital body members and in cases such as Michael's above that was described so poignantly by Dr. Byrne. These killings are increasing under ObamaDeathCare, and each of us is going to be forced to finance them even if we only fork over an annual fine each year for refusing to sign up for the so-called "insurance exchanges,” which are failing badly to fulfill their stated purposes as insurance premiums keep rising and rising and rising.

Well, the thirst for the blood of innocent human beings has become so insatiable in the past forty-eight years that the medical-industry that the “definition” has had to be “expanded” considerably:

OTTAWA, Ontario, 4 September, 12 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As Ontario’s organ donation agency aggressively campaigns to grow a list of registered organ donors, a legal scholar has slammed the updated national guidelines for establishing the moment of death, arguing that the guidelines were deliberately loosened to “increase the proportion of donors eligible for organ harvesting”.

Jacquelyn Shaw, BSc, MSc, LLB, LLM, writing in the McGill Journal of Law and Health, wrote that the updated 2008 Canadian Council for Donation and Transplantation (CCDT) guidelines, “dramatically altered the criteria for brain death declaration with the goal of increasing organ supplies.”

In Canada the whole-brain criteria for death has been practiced since 1968, but the new “brainstem” criteria enables doctors to declare a patient brain dead “potentially weeks, or more, sooner than under a whole-brain criterion,” observes Shaw.

This enables the CCDT to hit donor increase targets by “making many more organs available sooner, and in a more transplantable state” – but this begs the question, is someone declared dead under the brainstem criterion really dead?

While organ and tissue donation agencies which operate on the CCDT guidelines, such as Ontario’s Trillium Gift of Life Network, stress that brain death is death itself, underscoring that neurological death is “permanent and irreversible and there can be no hope whatsoever of recovery”, Shaw argues that there are both medical and legal problems with this criteria.

The updated CCDT criterion of death requires that only the lower part of the brain which is responsible for breathing, wakefulness, and certain other reflexes be shown to be permanently non-functional. “Significantly, the CCDT’s criterion contains no requirement for non-functionality of the brain’s cortex, responsible for conscious awareness, voluntary movement, sensation (e.g. pain), and communication,” wrote Shaw.

“A brainstem criterion could declare dead some patients who are only super locked-in. With damaged brainstems, but intact cortices, such patients might retain pain-awareness, but could be declared brain-dead under CCDT standards, making them eligible for (unanaesthetised) organ harvesting.”

Because not all patients may be actually dead when their organs are harvested, Shaw argued that the CCDT’s brainstem criterion may “infringe patients’ rights to life and to physical and psychological security of the person.”

Shaw said that the USA and other nations have rejected the brainstem criterion of death due to a high risk of error.

Dr. John Shea, MD FRCP(C), who has written extensively about the highly controversial theory of brain death, told LifeSiteNews that respect for life means that “it’s important to determine that a person is actually dead before harvesting organs because if they are not dead, and you harvest the organs, you are essentially killing them.”

“With brain death criteria, there is no absolute certainty that the person is dead,” he said. “Criteria for establishing brain death have been deliberately developed in such a way so that even though a person is not biologically dead, they are declared dead so that their organs can be harvested and no one can be prosecuted.”

“The fact is that people have to be alive when their organs are harvested because their organs are harmed when death actually occurs,” he said.

The gruesome fact that organ donors are often alive when their organs are harvested — a necessary condition to produce healthy, living organs — prompted three leading experts last year to advise the medical community to adopt a more “honest” moral criteria that allowed for the harvesting of organs from “dying” or “severely injured” patients, with proper consent.

The experts argued that this approach would avoid the “pseudo-objective” claim that a donor is “really dead,” which is often based upon purely ideological definitions of death designed to expand the organ donor pool. They argued this would allow organ harvesters to be more honest with the public, as well as ensure that donors don’t feel pain during the harvesting process.

Dr. Paul Byrne, an experienced neonatologist, clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Toledo, and president of Life Guardian Foundation told LifeSiteNews at the time that “all of the participants in organ transplantation know that the donors are not truly dead.”

“How can you get healthy organs from a cadaver? You can’t,” he said.

Shaw called the CCDT’s updated guidelines for brain death determination in Canada “significant, dangerous, [and] under-the-radar” adding that they are “virtually unknown” and that they warrant “greater public attention.”

Meanwhile, numerous stories have emerged of awakenings following medical declarations of brain death. In one particularly chilling case, 21-year-old Zack Dunlap, who was in a locked-in state following an ATV accident, recounted hearing doctors discuss harvesting his organs in his presence. Zack showed signs of life mere moments before he was scheduled to be wheeled into the operating theater to have his organs removed, when one of his relatives tried to get him to react by digging a pocketknife under one of his fingernails.

These stories provide weight to the arguments of doctors, like Shea and Byrne who say that the declaration of brain death is not sufficient to arrive at a moral certitude of actual death and that the recovery of organs based on that declaration is immoral. (Canada’s new ‘brain death’ criteria slammed as scheme to increase organ donations.)

Some might protest by claiming that these "abuses" can be corrected, that a "strict adherence" to "brain death" needs to be maintained. What idiocy. What utter idiocy. Do we really expect those who believe in the killing of babies in their mothers' wombs to be honest about anything? Anything? Why believe these killers when the actual evidence proves them to be merchants of body-snatching who prey on unsuspecting relatives, filled with grief and confusion, by using a combination of sentimentality and guilt ("give the gift of life," "let your relative 'live on' in a recipient," "your relative would have wanted it this way even though he didn't sign up to be an 'organ donor'") to pressure bereaved human beings into agreeing to the execution of their loved ones.

This is monstrous. It is even more monstrous and scandalous beyond all telling that any Roman Catholic, no less members of clergy, could be party to encouraging parishioners to become accomplices in their own executions and that of their loved ones. Such men are not reliable moral guides. They have to be moral monsters to ignore the evidence presented in these stories and also willfully blind to the point of complete irresponsibility not recognize that cases above are not isolated instances whatsoever.

The medical industry has dispensed with the pretense of "brain death." Why does any Catholic, whether in or out of the conciliar structures, still keep to the pretense?

As I have noted before, some might object that "vital organ donations" should proceed as long as there is a "dispute" within the medical community as to whether "brain death" constitutes a true criterion or is what, in all truth, it is: a manufactured myth to harvest human body members for the sake of profit. Sure, the "dispute" exists. The dispute is based on false premises. And even those who claim that it is morally licit to proceed with a "vital organ donation" because the matter is in dispute and has not been pronounced definitively by a true pope forget one little-bitty qualification that blows their contention right of the water with that dead goldfish: if there is doubt as to what constitutes genuine death, the doubt goes in the favor of human life.

However, there is no doubt at al. The facts are plain. The medical-industry invented this false notion of "brain death" in 1968 to justify the killing of human beings for heart transplantation surgery, and the resort to this false “diagnosis” is applied rapidly by moral monsters who are determining for themselves who is “fit” to receive proper medical care. These monsters—and the judges who are in cahoots with them—induced much sorrow into the lives of parents, wives, husbands, and grown children.

Consider the case of Baby Israel Stinson, who is only the latest high-profile case of judicially ordered executions done at the best of the medical industry’s ghoulish fiends:

September 2, 2016 (Life Legal Defense Foundation) -- Just days ago, two-year-old Israel Stinson was forcibly removed from life support at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. I was on the phone with Jonee Fonseca, Israel's mother, when doctors disconnected his ventilator. 

I could hear Jonee begging the doctors to wait just a few more hours until her family arrived to say goodbye to Israel. They refused. Then I heard her begging her son to breathe.

It was a horrific end to an ordeal that began over four months ago. Israel suffered an asthma attack and stopped breathing while being treated at a Sacramento hospital on April 2 of this year. He was resuscitated, but was placed on a ventilator. 

Jonee called Life Legal for help when a second hospital declared Israel brain dead. Doctors at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Roseville, California said Israel's condition would soon deteriorate and that his heart would stop beating even if he were kept on life support. They refused to feed Israel for over five weeks, saying that giving him a feeding tube would be “catastrophic.”

Life Legal attorneys were able to obtain court orders in state and federal court keeping Israel alive until arrangements could be made to care for Israel at home. In order for that to happen, Israel needed two minor procedures to provide him with a breathing tube and feeding tube. Kaiser refused to perform those procedures.

A Catholic hospital in Central America agreed to accept Israel as a patient to do the procedures. In May, Israel was transported by air ambulance to Guatemala. He had to leave a hospital with state-of-the-art healthcare and travel thousands of miles to a developing nation to get the care he needed to survive. 

After the procedures, Israel's condition improved markedly. Doctors did two EEGs, which showed active brain waves. Three separate doctors reported that Israel was not brain dead! Moreover, the doctors were so committed to saving Israel's life that they agreed to treat Israel without cost during the last few weeks at the Guatemalan hospital.

Jonee then began the arduous process of finding a hospital that would accept Israel temporarily while she arranged for him to be cared for at home. Children's Hospital of Los Angeles agreed to admit Israel after speaking with Israel's doctors about his condition.

However, shortly after Israel arrived at Children's Hospital, doctors threatened to end Israel's life. They refused even to look at the EEGs or examine Israel's movements in response to his mother's voice. They did not consider that Israel's condition in Guatemala had stabilized such that he needed no artificial means to maintain his heart rate, blood pressure, or body temperature. Jonee asked that a Los Angeles neurologist be permitted to examine Israel, as California’s brain death statute requires an independent exam. The hospital refused.

Ten days ago, Jonee called me saying the hospital was going to remove Israel’s ventilator the following day. I flew to Los Angeles to assist her in obtaining a court order. The judge ordered that Israel be kept on life support for three weeks to allow the neurologist to complete his exam. We also found a local attorney to work with Jonee going forward.

But the hospital immediately filed a motion asking the judge to dissolve the court order so they could terminate Israel’s life as soon as possible. 

Again, Life Legal attorneys fought heroically alongside Jonee, but ultimately the fight for Israel's life was lost. 

So where do we go from here?

Last January, in a unanimous decision, the Nevada Supreme Court held that the state’s brain death guidelines should be reexamined after a young woman was declared brain dead even though several EEGs showed that she had active brain waves. In that case, the woman died because the hospital refused to feed or treat her.

We have no ethical obligation to fight nature every step of the way in the dying process. However, these cases continue a very disturbing trend of medical professionals actually facilitating a person’s death. Life Legal has represented people in several recent cases where hospitals and hospice facilities have tried to end the life of a patient with a brain injury because doctors or family members believed that person had no chance for recovery. In reality, however, the decision was made in haste, before the person's brain had a chance to heal. In two cases, young women were sentenced to death who, just weeks later, were on their way to a full recovery. This should NEVER be permitted to happen!  (Baby Israel Stinson Forcibly Removed From Life Support.)

My own stomach, which is pretty strong, churns every time that I have read this story in the past week since discovering it.

We had prayed for Israel Stinson and his family on a daily basis once Dr. Paul Byrne had informed me of his case. It is criminal that parents must raise hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of dollars to try to get proper medical care for their children. Yet it is that the heartless merchants of death who run this nation’s medical industry deny proper care in countless hundreds of cases that are never publicized because very few relatives ever bother to question the supposed “expertise” of those who wear white coats and are said to have the “best interests” of their loved ones.

The legal system imposes heavy fines for those who dare to provide medical care to a person who has been declared "brain dead," something that Dr. Paul Byrne wrote in a note to me last week in the context of the continuig saga of Jahi McMath, who is still very much alive.

Jahi McMath continues to do well. Her family, especially her mother love Jahi dearly as they continue to care for her. Her situation is proceeding through the courts. From the beginning an essential force in all of this is money. The liability for death of a child in California is $250,000 maximum, while the liability for continued life is five to $15 million or more. Much effort is concentrated on showing that the criteria used in the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA), which is the language for the statute of death in California and for all intents and purposes in every state, was fulfilled on December 12, 2013, with Death Certificate on December but is no longer fulfilled. Thus the argument is that Jahi was legally and accurately determined to be “brain dead” in 2013, but now she is alive.

Yes, you read that correctly. There is a legal liability "for continued life" that is five to fifteen miles or more. No election is going to redress this madness as the political candidates of both major organized crime families of naturalism are heavily funded by our contemporary Aztecs in white coats.

The medical body-snatching ghouls who walk around in white coats are very well trained to use emotional appeals such as “death with dignity,” “quality of life,” “compassionate care,” “prolonging life” and, among so many others, “giving the gift of life.” They have become so skilled at the use of these emotional appeals that they express shock and become indignant when anyone actually dares to question their supposedly infallible “diagnoses” or challenges them with documentation that “brain death” is a manufactured money-making myth.

The problems are far worse than that, however.

In addition to the countless numbers of human beings who are declared “brain dead” in hospitals within the United States of America and elsewhere around the world, more countless numbers of human beings are being dispatched in hospices, institutions that use a combination of drugs, including morphine and potassium chloride, to kill a supposed terminally ill human being in a precisely timed manner by stopping the heart on a gradual basis, usually over a course of two to three days. It is no accident that many merchants of death in hospices can tell loved ones precisely how many days one admitted to their “care” will live before they die. Hospices have become a big part of the American death industry that most people call the “medical profession,” and insurance companies, whose lobbyists line the coffers of political candidates of both organized crime families of naturalism at all levels of government (state, local, federal), are more than eager to see those who are “draining” their resources to receive supposedly “compassionate” “end of life care.”

An aversion to all pain and discomfort will lead many to seek the "Great Escape" represented by the self-annihilation that is suicide. The devil has convinced so many today that the "angels of death" who pose as false "angels of mercy" such as Jack Kevorkian have the "final solution": to their suffering. So much for the Holy Cross in this, our shallow, sick, perverted world of naturalism and emotionalism and sentimentality wrought by Protestantism's revolt against the Social Reign of Christ the King that was institutionalized by the multi-faceted and inter-related forces of Judeo-Masonry. Got a problem? Take a pill. Take lots of pills. Who wants to suffer?

Got a terminal illness?

Check into a hospice one day, leave as a corpse within a short time thereafter. Is it any accident that such prominent figures in the world of baseball as George "Sparky" Anderson and Harmon Killebrew entered hospices and died quickly thereafter. Indeed, Sparky Anderson, who managed the Cincinnati Reds to two successive World Championship titles (1975 and 1976) and the Detroit Tigers to one (1984), died the day after he was admitted to the killing center that is hospice. Killebrew died at home after having entered hospice to have his "meds" given to him to "ease his pain," a mere euphemism for euthanizing a human being as though he is but a dog suffering needlessly in pain for weeks on end with no relief in sight:

Anderson, who directed the Big Red Machine to back-to-back championships and won another in Detroit, died Thursday from complications of dementia in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He was 76. A day earlier, his family said he'd been placed in hospice care. (Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson dies.)

Just days after announcing that he would be entering hospice, Minnesota Twins Hall of Fame slugger Harmon Killebrew lost his battle with Esophageal Cancer at his home in Scottsdale, Arizona with his family by his side on Tuesday morning, May 17, 2011. He was 74. (A Friend of Hospice Dies.)

Killebrew's case was particularly sad as he spent the last decade of his life supporting the adult killing centers known as hospice:

"I have spent the past decade of my life promoting hospice care and educating people on its benefits. I am very comfortable taking this next step and experiencing the compassionate care that hospice provides. I am comforted by the fact that I am surrounded by my family and friends." (A Friend of Hospice Dies.)

Harmon Killebrew spent the last decade of his life promoting murder in the false belief he was aiding people to relieve their pain, becoming a victim of the very false compassion that he had convinced himself was such a service to the sick and the dying. Harmon Killebrew spent the last decade of his life promoting hospice, which is but a demonic end-of-life parallel to abortuaries, where innocent human life is snuffed out in the wombs of mothers. That's not a way to approach the Particular Judgment.

Make no mistake about it: "hospice care" involves the direct, intentional killing of innocent beings. Life ends when God wills it so, not as the dosage of various drugs is increased gradually so as to stop their hearts. No one can authorize the direct, intentional killing of themselves or of others. This is completely forbidden by the Fifth Commandment.

You doubt my word about hospice?

Well, consider this analysis from 2005:

Hospice has developed a good reputation for providing compassionate care for dying patients.  A key principle is that hospice care neither artificially prolongs life nor hastens death.  Unfortunately, this principle is no longer consistently followed in hospice care.  This lack of consistency requires a “buyer beware” attitude when evaluating which hospice might be appropriate to provide truly compassionate end-of-life care.

Illinois Right to Life offers a Hospice Checklist to help evaluate the underlying philosophy of care practiced by any specific hospice.  Seeking answers to the questions on this checklist should be helpful in that evaluation.

As with any new information, I was initially skeptical that hospice could be killing people.  Calls from two nurses no more than one week apart informed me that morphine overdoses are being used to kill hospice patients.  Once I started to investigate on my own, I was helped by receiving a copy of a book published by Hospice Foundation of America, entitled Living With Grief: Ethical Dilemmas at the End of Life.  Actions called ethical in this book are anything but ethical.  Buried in the middle of the book, in a chapter extolling the ethics of assisted suicide, are statements that reveal typical hospice care often hastens death.

Here is a telling sentence that summarizes the means used to hasten death: “It is well known that hastening death is practiced and approved in many ways in contemporary terminal care when suffering is extreme and irremediable – for example, by terminal sedation, by delivering pain relief sufficient to cause death by incidentally suppressing breathing, or by withdrawing nutrition and hydration.  Given the obligation to relieve suffering, such practices are not incompatible with the physicians’ oaths.”  

“Extreme and irremediable” suffering turns out to be nothing more than patient (or caregivers) concerns about “quality of life” and “dying with dignity.”  Tragically, abuses of patient rights are becoming more common at those hospices controlled by “right to die” leadership.  Actions may be taken to hasten death either against the wishes of relatives or of patients themselves.

I have received phone calls and emails from a number of people who witnessed occurrences of this practice.  In one case the wife made a decision to get hospice involved in her husband’s care during his recovery from both surgery and another medical procedure to remove a brain tumor.  Even though the brain tumor was declared to be in total remission by the surgeon and the patient was not in pain, pain medications were forced on the patient.  This was the initial stage of the process that too often leads to an eventual overdose on morphine.  I was asked for advice by the patient’s niece who witnessed the mistreatment of her uncle that was occurring. 

In another case, a mother was on a feeding tube and being cared for by one of the younger sons among her eight children.  The oldest daughter arrived one day to take their mother to hospice “because she would not want to live this way.”  Most of the siblings, who opposed this move to hospice, needed to get an attorney involved even to get the opportunity to learn where their mother was taken so they could visit her.  They learned that their mother was no longer being given food through her feeding tube.  Even though she had not been taking pain medication at home, she was now being given pain medication under hospice care. (Dangers of Hospice.)

Whether death is hastened by denial of food and water or suppression of breathing using overdoses of morphine, this is certainly not death with dignity!

The situation is even worse now than it was in 2005, something that is documented in a 2012 discussion of "hospice care":

Every day, thousands of families have a loved one of theirs placed in hospice care, thinking that hospice is simply a place where elderly people die a comfortable, peaceful death. Days later, their loved one dies, and their family assumes that the person’s death was due to complications from an ailment they had, or just “natural causes”. But what they don’t know is that their loved one was murdered. And an unfortunate majority of others don’t realize it, either.

Hospice is a type of care that “cares” for elderly people who have illnesses. Their motive is to make the end of their life as peaceful as possible. Or at least, that’s what they say their motive is.

The reality is that hospice is actually a tool of the New World Order. Just as abortion kills unborn babies, hospice kills off old people, as a means of what is known as “population control”. When a patient is placed in hospice, they are assigned not only nurses, but also a doctor, who is instructed to take all of their medications away. The only drug they take is morphine, which is used for pain management. Now, morphine is indeed a good drug to use to manage one’s pain, but it can be extremely dangerous if too much of it is administered to the patient. And that is precisely what happens, the patient is given enormous overdoses of the drug. After several days, they go into a coma as a result of the levels of morphine they received. This is most dangerous for the person’s soul, because the last few hours are when the battle between God and satan over a soul are greatest. Thus, the person needs this time to ask God forgiveness of their sins, and to prepare for their judgement. Being unconscious makes this impossible, thus giving the devil a better chance of stealing the soul because they didn’t repent of their sins in time. While in a coma, the person also suffers from starvation because neither the doctor nor the nurses feed the patient when they are in this state. Eventually, they die.

Contrary to what hospice will attempt to tell families, it is the overdoses of morphine that kills the patient. Hospice is essentially an euthanasia group, and in fact, the first hospice was opened in France as an OPEN euthanasia facility.

The nurses and doctors who work for these facilities, most of whom are ignorant Protestants or perhaps even atheists, are told that they’re “doing the old people a favor” by making their death more peaceful. The problem with this is that we don’t have the right to end the lives of other people, only God does. These hospice facilities, therefore, are committing a mortal sin by performing such despicable acts. It is a violation of the 5th Commandment: “Thy shall not kill”.

Matt Abbot, a Traditional Catholic writer for “RenewAmerica”, has written numerous articles on the dangers of hospice. In an article written in 2005, Abbot posted an e-mail he received from Ron Panzer, founder of Hospice Patients Alliance. Here is part of what Panzer had to say:

“What the public did not know is that the first hospice in our nation, the Connecticut Hospice, was founded by a major representative of the euthanasia movement, Florence Wald, MSN, who stated that assisted suicide should be available for just about any reason at all:

‘I’ll tell you the way I see it, and I know that I differ from Cicely Saunders, who is very much against assisted suicide. I disagree with her view on the basis that there are cases in which either the pain or the debilitation the patient is experiencing is more than can be borne, whether it be economically, physically, emotionally, or socially. For this reason, I feel a range of options should be available to the patient, and this should include assisted suicide.’ (JAMA. 281; 1683-1685, May 12, 1999, Hospice Care in the United States: A Conversation with Florence S. Wald, M. J. Friedrich)” The rest of Abbot’s article can be read here: http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/abbott/050330

The conclusion, therefore, is that hospice is not the caring, loving thing that it is portrayed to be. It is an invention of those who favor euthanasia, and its motive is to end the lives of elderly folks through overdoses of morphine. Hospice, therefore, should be avoided like the plague. Please do not give hospice access to any of your loved ones, or they will be another victim.

God Bless. (Current Dangers of Hospice.)

No, crazy, old, pro-life "extremist" and "idealist" Droleskey is not making any of this up. Hospice care involves the direct, intentional killing of innocent human beings. "Hospice care" has been and continues to be directly linked to the euthanasia movement, which, of course, is directly linked to the pro-baby-killing movement. Yet it is that this "care" is considered "loving" even by many Catholics despite all of the documented evidence that exists to prove what hospices today in today's un-Catholic world.

We have reached a point in this country where the killing of the preborn, both by chemical and surgical means, and of the chronically or terminally ill is considered to be normal enough to receive full protection under the cover of the civil law. This is why three states in the United States of America (Oregon, Washington and Vermont) permit "assisted suicides" under some conditions. Physicians in the State of Montana can use an "assisted "suicide" defense if they wind up being prosecuted for helping a patient to kill himself. After all, if the civil law can permit the dispatching of innocent human beings in their mothers' wombs, what's the logic of preventing people from killing themselves, with or without the "assistance" of co-conspirators? 

In reality, though, very few people are actually using "physician assisted" suicide as hospitals and hospices kill off the innocent even day, sometimes, as noted in the articles quoted just above, putting people into comatose states of drug overdoses to get them into hospice, whereupon they become ready prey for the harvesting of their vital body members. 

Far more dangerous than the infamous caricature named Doctor Death Jack Kevorkian, who died on June 3, 2011, are those men and women in white coats in hospitals and hospices who routinely dispatch human beings by various devices, including increasingly higher doses of Dilantin and potassium chloride and morphine. The same "profession" that gave us baby-killing, both by chemical and surgical means, under cover of law has given us, first in a de facto manner and now in a de jure manner in some states, the abject, direct, intentional killing of the infirmed and disabled and the chronically and terminally ill, using a variety of linguistic devices to anesthetize and/or justify the reality of these killings while at the same misrepresenting the true state of patients' health in order to expedite their deaths to take advantage of "living wills" and/or organ donation laws to harvest their bodies for "spare parts" before they are actually dead. (Please re-read Dr. Paul Byrne on Brain Death (From The Michael Fund Newsletter.)

Yes, false high priests and priestesses must reign supreme as the arbiters of right and wrong, of what is considered legal and illegal, of what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. Whether these high priests and priestesses serve in public office or in the health care industry or in the mass media or in education or business or a thousand other confused places in this world of chaos in which we live, large numbers of people are willing to trust them, the "experts," rather than the true God of Divine Revelation Who they themselves will meet in the face at the moment of their own Particular Judgments. The secular "magisterium" is infallible. Who cares about the magisterium of the one and only true Church that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order?

Yes, we must trust men and women who promote sin under the cover of the civil law and abroad in what passes for popular culture to guide us. We must trust the "doctors" when we are sick because they do know best, of course.

Right?

We must trust the word of "doctors" who are all too eager to carve up people for their vital body members while convincing patients and their relatives that there is such a thing as "brain death," which their industry manufactured in order to institutionalize a lucrative money-making scheme that preys on the pain of the ill and the desire of relatives to show "compassion."

We should take the word of the doctors?

Says who?

Take the word of those who believe in the killing of babies in the womb and who do not fear the judgment of God on their immortal souls at the moment of their deaths?

Take the word of those who use the same linguistic devices from Hell to dehumanize the elderly and the infirmed and the disabled and the chronically and terminally ill as they have done with the preborn?

Take the diagnosis of these proven killers and liars uncritically and at face value? Says who?

This report, written by Miss Mary Therese Helmueller, R.N., in 1997 and published in Homiletic and Pastoral Review in January of 1998, might, leaving aside references to the now "Beato Giovanni Paolo II il Grande" that are made in several places in the article, give you pause for reflection on taking the word of men and women who are committed to killing before birth and who engage in deceits of all kind before before and after birth:

In 1984, while working as charge nurse in the intensive care unit, a 20-year-old man asked, “Can you give my mother enough morphine to let her sleep away?” I was horrified. “I can not kill your mother,” I responded. That was only the beginning. Recently, an 80-year-old was admitted to the emergency room and the physician said, “LET’S DEHYDRATE HER”; one more patient was sentenced to die in hospice with NO TERMINAL DIAGNOSIS and once again, THE LIVING WILL determined the death of a 70-year-old man regardless of how he pleaded to live. I can no longer remain silent.

Your life may be in danger if you are admitted to a hospital, especially if you are over 65 or have a chronic illness or a disability. The elderly are frequently dying three days after being admitted to the hospital. Some attribute it to “old age syndrome” while others admit that overdosing is all too common. Euthanasia is not legal but it is being practiced. Last year the New England Journal of Medicine reported that 1 in 5 critical care nurses admit to having hastened the death of the terminally ill! I believe the percentage is much higher. I have worked with nurses who even admit to overdosing their parents. No one knows the exact euthanasia rate in the United States, however Dr. Dolan from the University of Minnesota states that 40 percent of all reported deaths is probably a conservative estimation. If this is true then the United States is executing euthanasia at a higher percentage rate than the Netherlands where it is also illegal but widely practiced.

Did you know that many doctors and nurses whom we trust are speaking openly about their desire to practice euthanasia? In fact they are even speaking about ending their OWN lives when they reach the age of 65 or BEFORE if diagnosed with an illness. Some even admit to stealing the drugs for their own lethal injection. Think about it. These are the same people who will determine the value of YOUR life. If they do not value their own, how can you expect them to value yours?

I am a registered nurse in the St. Paul/ Minneapolis area with 15 years experience in emergency and critical care. My knowledge of euthanasia not only comes from my experience working in the critical care units throughout the Twin Cities, but also comes from a personal tragedy and loss in 1995. This is my true story. My hope is that you will educate others and protect yourselves and loved ones.

On Monday, February 20th, my grandmother was admitted to a local Catholic hospital with a fracture above the left knee. She was alert and orientated upon admission but became unresponsive after 48 hours and was transferred to hospice on the fourth day and died upon arrival.

I was in Mexico City conducting a pilgrimage and unable to be at her side so there were many questions upon my return. The doctors could not tell me the cause of her death so I began to search for the answers and was fortunate to obtain the hospital chart. It then became very clear that my grandmother had been targeted for euthanasia!

Carefully tracing the events it was evident that my grandmother became lethargic and unresponsive after each pain medication. She would awaken between times saying “I don’t want to die, I want to live to see Johnny ordained”; “I want to see Greta walk.” Johnny was her grandson studying in Rome to be a priest and Greta was her new great-grandchild. Even though over-sedation is one of the most common problems with the elderly she was immediately diagnosed as having a stroke. When she became comatose a completely hopeless picture of recovery was portrayed by the nurses and doctors who reported that she had a stroke, was having seizures, going in and out of a coma, and was in renal failure.

The truth however can be found in the hospital chart which indicates that everything was normal! The CAT scan was negative for stroke or obstruction, the EEG states “no seizure activity” and all blood work was normal indicating that she was not in renal failure! How were we to know that the coma was drug induced and that all the tests were normal? Why would they lie?

Looking over the chart it is clear that obtaining a “no code” status was the next essential step in executing her death. This is an order denying medical intervention in emergency situations. The “no code” was aggressively sought by the medical profession from the moment of her admission but was not granted by my family until it appeared that she was dying and there was no hope. Minutes after obtaining the “no code” a lethal dose of Dilantin (an anti-seizure medication) was administered intravenously over an 18-hour period. It put her into a deeper coma, slowing the respiratory rate and compromising the cardiovascular system leading to severe hemodynamic instability. The following day she was transferred to hospice and died upon arrival. The death certificate reads “Death by natural causes.”

My grandmother had no terminal diagnosis but the hospice admitting record indicates two doctors signed their name stating that she was terminally ill and would die within six months. How was this determined? The first doctor, who was the director of hospice, never came to evaluate her or even read the chart. More interesting is the fact that the second doctor was on vacation and returned three days after her death! Obviously these signatures were not obtained before or even upon her admission to hospice. How can this be professionally, morally or even legally acceptable? Can anyone therefore be admitted to hospice to die? It certainly seems possible especially if sedated or unresponsive. In fact, this hospice has recently been under investigation for accepting hundreds of patients who had no terminal illness.

It could happen to you

How can this happen? A serious problem lies in the definition and interpretation of “terminal illness” which permits the inclusion of chronic illnesses and disabilities. Terminal illness is defined as “an incurable or irreversible illness which produces death within six months.” The fact is that many chronic illnesses such as diabetes and high blood pressure are incurable and irreversible and without medical treatment such as insulin and other medications these illnesses would also produce death within six months. Therefore, those with chronic illnesses or disabilities can be conveniently denied medical treatment and even food and water to make them terminal. Typically it is the elderly who arrive in the hospital that are at the greatest risk. But it could be ANYONE! Especially those whose life and suffering is viewed as useless and burdensome.

Difficult to believe? Well it was for our prolife lawyer until his mother-in-law was admitted to a hospital several months later for a stroke. She became “unresponsive” and “comatose” a few days after her admission. The neurologist wrote an order to transfer her to hospice refusing an I.V. and tube feeding stating “this is the most compassionate treatment.” Remembering my story, our lawyer requested the removal of all narcotics and demanded an I.V. and tube feeding. This infuriated the neurologist. He began to accuse the family of being uncompassionate and inhumane. To prove his point he began a neurological assessment on the patient. Just then she opened her eyes and pulling the physician’s neck tie, forced his face to hers and said very clearly “Give me some water!” It was obvious that she was awake, alert and orientated. He angrily cancelled the transfer to hospice and ordered a tube feeding and intravenous. Several weeks later she was discharged and was exercising on the treadmill! She escaped the death sentence. Unfortunately many others like my grandmother have not. A stroke does not make you terminal but not receiving food and water does!

A clear understanding and definition of euthanasia is essential for a correct and moral judgment. Unfortunately the meaning is being altered by those who hold society’s values and by those who seek financial gain. According to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and reaffirmed by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae euthanasia is defined as “an action or omission which of itself and by intention causes death, with the purpose of eliminating all suffering

The killing in hospitals today is commonly referred to as “the exit treatment” and disguised by the word “compassion.” Many doctors and nurses honestly believe that this is the most compassionate treatment for the elderly, the chronic and terminally ill, especially those whose suffering is seen as hopeless, inconvenient and a waste of time or money. Those who hold this twisted and corrupted idea of compassion actually believe they are doing good because suffering has no value and materialism is their god. For instance, how often have we heard that Medicare and Medicaid are “running out?” “So why not relieve pain and lighten the financial burden of our families and society?”

As a result, many patients are intentionally oversedated and forced to die from dehydration, starvation or over medication. “Death by natural causes” will be officially documented on the death certificate. Did you know that this is the exact same proclamation on the death certificate of St. Maximillian Kolbe? Everyone knows however that he died from a lethal injection in Auschwitz concentration camp after many days of dehydration and starvation!

Pope John Paul II states clearly in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae: “Here we are faced with one of the more alarming symptoms of the ‘Culture of Death’ which is advancing above all in prosperous societies, marked by an attitude of excessive preoccupation with efficiency and which sees the growing number of elderly and disabled as intolerable and too burdensome.”

Many souls are being denied the opportunity to reconcile with God and family members because their death has been hastened or deliberately taken. This is a grave and moral injustice. Pope Pius XII in his Address to an International Group of Physicians on February 24, 1957 stated, “It is not right to deprive the dying person of consciousness without a serious reason.” Pope John Paul II confirmed this in Evangelium Vitae saying, “as they approach death people ought to be able to satisfy their moral and family duties, and above all they ought to be able to prepare in a fully conscious way for their definitive meeting with God.”

Recently the Carmelite Sisters shared this tragic story of a friend whose husband was euthanized. Her husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer but was not expected to die for several months to a year. He had been away from the Catholic Church and the sacraments. He also was estranged from his children. One day he complained of pain that was not relieved by medication. The wife spoke to the nurse who then called the doctor. When the doctor arrived he gave an injection through the intravenous line. The husband took three breaths and died! The wife screamed, “I did not ask you to kill my husband!” “We needed time to reconcile our marriage and family.” She continued to cry, “He needed time to reconcile with God and the Church!”

It is evident that euthanasia is being even more cleverly planned and executed. A very holy priest from St. Paul was called to the hospital by a nurse to administer the last sacraments to a hospice patient. When the priest arrived he was surprised to find the patient sitting up in the chair! He visited with the patient approximately a half hour then heard his confession and administered the last sacraments. Just before he left the room the patient jumped up in bed and the nurse administered an injection. Perplexed and concerned, the good priest called the hospital upon returning to the rectory. The patient had already expired!

There is a good and legitimate purpose for hospice units, but how can it ever be morally acceptable to transfer patients to a unit to die when they have NO TERMINAL ILLNESS? How can sedating a patient and refusing a tube feeding and intravenous be considered compassionate? Dehydration and starvation is not a painless death! Has this become the Auschwitz of today? A convenient and economically efficient place to dump the unwanted, imperfect, and burdensome of our society?

Would a “living will” prevent these tragic events? The living will makes you a clear and easy target to be euthanized. A “living will” has nothing to do with living. It is your death warrant. It actually gives permission to facilitate your death by denying medical treatment. Did you know that it was originally developed by Luis Kutner in 1967 for the Euthanasia Society of America? It is the most cost effective tool for hospitals, insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid. Therefore, since 1990 it has been deceptively packaged and promoted as a patient’s right known as “the Patient Self-determination Act.” If cutting care for those patients who ask for it wasn’t so successful in saving money and controlling the budget, why then did it originate in the Senate Finance Committee and why was it supported by the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health? These are finance committees whose only interest is controlling the budget! It is obvious that the living will is all about saving money, not your life!

Many people fear the loss of control that comes with illness and hospitalization. Tragically, they are deceived in thinking that the “living will” protects them and restores this control in their lives. Nothing could be further from the truth. No one knows the exact condition in which they will be admitted to the hospital. The “living will” is written in very broad terms leaving it open to the interpretation of medical professionals and others who stand to benefit from your demise. Remember your best interests or your interpretation may not be theirs! Can you imagine writing general instructions or signing a legal contract for the care of your Mercedes Benz several years before any problem occurs? “Please do not give oil or gas”; “If in three days it can not be fixed stop everything and trash the car.” How absurd and ridiculous! It takes time to diagnose and treat even car problems! If we would not foolishly demand this for a car then how can we demand it for a human life which has an eternal value?

Recently, a 70-year-old was admitted through the emergency room in respiratory distress. He was placed on a ventilator and transported to the intensive care unit. He was awake, alert and orientated anxiously writing notes: “I don’t want to die”; “I changed my mind”; and “Please don’t take me off the machine.” He was very persistent and urgent with his pleading. I soon understood why! His family and physicians were meeting to discuss a serious problem. He had signed a “living will” declaring that he did not want “any extraordinary measures.” He was now viewed as “incapable” of making any decisions and they wanted to follow his wishes as stated in the legal document! Very convenient for those who do not want their inheritance spent on hospital costs and for those who do not want to be bothered with a “useless burden” to our society!

Today hospitals and health care facilities are required to ask patients if they have a living will or lose government funding! The question is proposed in such a way to create pressure on patients so that they think it is something good, desirable and necessary. “Do you know that you have a right in the state of Minnesota to possess a living will?” Please remember that the living will targets you for euthanasia by denying you medical treatment. Living wills kill; they do not protect you. Instead, I urge you to obtain a copy of “The Protective Medical Decisions Document” (PMDD) from the International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force, P.O. Box 756, Steubenville, Ohio 43952. Sign it and keep it among your records. Please get rid of your living will!

Can you or a loved one be targeted for euthanasia without a living will? The course of events and treatment in my grandmother’s short hospitalization are documented. She did not have a living will. Please know the following steps—it could save your loved one’s life.

1)    Oversedation causing lethargy and unresponsiveness. Difficulty or inability to awaken a patient.  Some patients, especially the elderly, are very sensitive to pain medications which are slowly metabolized by the liver. Toxic levels build quickly with very small doses commonly producing lethargy and unresponsiveness. Elderly patients require approximately 20% less of the normal adult doses.

2)    A hopeless picture of any recovery. The patient appears to be comatose and dying. The medical staff affirms this with overwhelming reports and statements.

3)    No code status also referred to as DNR/DNI (do not resuscitate/ do not intubate)—The consent is obtained from the family.
It is a request to deny a patient delivered emergency care in a life-threatening situation.

4)    Lethal doses of Dilantin or narcotics —(morphine)  This will hasten the death, shortening the hospital stay and expenses.

5)    Transfer to hospice without tube feeding or intravenous. Due to sedation and inability to eat or drink the patient will die of dehydration and starvation. (Life Matters: Are You Being Targeted for Euthanasia?).

Yes, of course, the preservation of physical life is not an ultimate end in and of itself. We must, however, see in the disabled and the infirmed the elderly and the chronically and terminally ill the very image of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, considering it to be our privilege to serve them, perhaps even for years on end, as we would serve Our Lord Himself. Those who are dependent upon others for their daily needs can thus serve as a source of grace for those who treat them with the genuine compassion as shown by Saint Camillus de Lellis to the incurables and the hopeless of his own day. How many graces are being thrown away by relatives who refuse to suffer along with their loved ones until God chooses to take them unto Himself in His good time, no matter how long a time may be involved?

The care provided by Catholic physicians and consecrated men and women in the religious life is not what inspires the modern hospice industry, whose practitioners, no matter their intentions, do indeed play God in the name of "compassion" and "mercy."

It has been given only to a few authentic mystics and those sentenced to die on a certain date and time as a just penalty for the commission of heinous crimes after having been adjudged guilty after the discharge of due process of law know for certain when it is they are to meet the moment of their Particular Judgment. If the modern hospice industry is being run in accordance with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law, which it is not, of course, then how is it possible for them to predict with complete accuracy "how long" a certain "patient" has to live?

To wit, we know of a situation last year when a woman telephoned a hospice facility to check on the condition of her paternal uncle, whereupon the attending nurse told her, "It won't be long now."

How is it possible to know this unless one is monitoring the effects of the drugs being pumped into a living human being to induce death?

It is not.

Consider how bad the situation is in the land in the United Kingdom, the land that gave us socialized medicine in a supposed "free" society:

LONDON, June 21, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - An eminent British doctor told a meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine in London that every year 130,000 elderly patients that die while under the care of the National Health Service (NHS) have been effectively euthanized by being put on the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), a protocol for care of the terminally ill that he described as a “death pathway.”

Dr. Patrick Pullicino, a consultant neurologist for East Kent Hospitals and Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Kent, claimed that doctors are putting people on the LCP without proper analysis of their condition, citing “pressure on beds and difficulty with nursing confused or difficult-to-manage elderly patients” as factors.

According to the Daily Mail, the doctor sounded the alarm that of the approximately half million deaths in Britain each year of elderly people who are in hospital or under NHS care, about 29 percent, or 130,000, are patients who were on the LCP.

The Liverpool Care Pathway, developed by the Royal Liverpool Hospital and the Marie Curie hospice in the 1990s, and described by its formulators as a “template” to guide the care of the dying, was approved in 2004 by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the government’s health scrutiny body in charge of rationing health services. 

The LCP, reportedly adopted nationwide by more than 300 hospitals, 130 hospices and 560 care homes in England, allows for withdrawal of water and nourishment, and “continuous deep sedation” for patients judged to be incurable. Combined with withdrawal of fluids, deep sedation leads quickly to death.

Pullicino related the personal experience of removing a man from the LCP who went on to live another 14 months, proving that the claim of the diagnosing doctor that the man had only hours to live was “palpably false.”

“I found him deeply unresponsive on a Monday morning and was told he had been put on the LCP. He was on morphine via a syringe driver. I removed the patient from the LCP despite significant resistance,” Pullicino told the Royal Society of Medicine. “His seizures came under control and four weeks later he was discharged home to his family.”

“The lack of evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway makes it an assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway,” Pullicino stated. “Very likely many elderly patients who could live substantially longer are being killed by the LCP.

“Predicting death in a time frame of three to four days, or even at any other specific time, is not possible scientifically. This determination in the LCP leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The personal views of the physician or other medical team members of perceived quality of life or low likelihood of a good outcome are probably central in putting a patient on the LCP.”

“If we accept the Liverpool Care Pathway we accept that euthanasia is part of the standard way of dying as it is now associated with 29 per cent of NHS deaths,” Dr. Pullicino concluded.

According to the Daily Mail, a Department of Health spokesman panned Dr. Pullicino’s assertions. “The Liverpool Care Pathway is not euthanasia and we do not recognise these figures. The pathway is recommended by NICE and has overwhelming support from clinicians – at home and abroad – including the Royal College of Physicians,” the unnamed spokesman said.

However, Pullicino’s claims echo a similar statement last year by Dr. Clare Walker, President of the Catholic Medical Association in the UK, where she said, “euthanasia is being widely practiced in the NHS in an official way” under the LCP protocol.

Dr. Walker explained that “she is regularly contacted by distressed healthcare professionals and managers who describe their experience of witnessing repeated instances of unofficial active euthanasia in their local areas,” adding that, “in some hospitals the LCP has become known as the Lazarus Care Pathway due to the number of people who have been put on it inappropriately, are not moribund and subsequently need to be actively treated.”

Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director of Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, responded to Dr. Walker’s statement at the time, saying, “Whether active euthanasia is actually widespread is unknown and anecdotal at best but the reality is that the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition regularly receives phone calls and emails from family members and friends of people whose medical care-givers appear to be intentionally causing their death.

“Many of these cases are concerned family members reacting to end of life decisions that are made because the person is actually dying, whereas, sometimes these cases appear to be euthanasia.” (130,000 elderly patients killed every year by 'death pathway')

Finally, consider the plea that a daughter had made to a district attorney's office after her own father, who was suffering from Parkinson's Disease and was not nearing death, was killed by the use of morphine in a hospice:

Message to prosecutors:

If I had called you saying that a young man had provided a teenage girl with a gun to carry out a suicide pact, you would have immediately reacted and called an investigation. You would have found that young man guilty.

But I called to say that my father was medically killed (euthanized) against his will by a hospice and I'm told to call an investigator myself. And he tells me to call more people, other agencies. And they tell me call other people and other agencies. And no one listens. So, this hospice is free to continue ending the lives of people who are unaware of what is happening or too drugged to stop what is being done to them.

I can no longer save my father's life, but I can certainly try to help the next innocent parent from being starved and drugged to death. But I would like you to explain to me how it is that when the hospice plainly killed my father it was not murder. The nurse knew that my father had no medical need for morphine, no pain, and gave him more morphine even when my father was already in a coma ... a coma caused by the sedative Haldol and morphine the hospice gave him against his will.

My father was stable, alert and conscious and refused to go to hospice. He was not even terminal; he had Parkinson's disease and was not declining at all. The hospice chose to stop allowing my father to have any food or water, but he wanted to live and pleaded and begged not to be forced into hospice. He knew what they would do.

The nurse increased the dosage of morphine when there was no medical need. She chose to kill my father! She knew exactly what she was doing.

Why do you do nothing, Mr. District Attorney? Why? Who are you to judge that my father's life is not as valuable as any other U.S. citizen? How dare you do nothing when my father was murdered! Because of your decision not to act, and the decisions of other DAs just like you all across the USA, thousands and thousands of US citizens are being killed with impunity. You know the cases gathering dust on your desk, in that file cabinet. You know what I am writing to you about.

I have now learned of other cases of medical killings. Other families have had their loved ones killed, and they report the same response by other DAs, just like you. They do nothing ... act sympathetic ... but in the end, they allow some hospice staff nurse or physician to kill their patients without even a slap on the wrist ... without even a reprimand. Your actions show that you agree that these US citizens should be killed. If you believed otherwise, you would be acting to prosecute these cases. The shame is on you, for you are now responsible. Can you live with that knowledge?

Why are you responsible? Because those who perpetrate these killings know that you have done nothing, and they count on your complicity in the killing. That's what you have given them up to this point: a legal atmosphere where "the culture of death" allows these medical killings to continue, where they are routine, and where US citizens are killed with no punishment at all for the killers! (Daughter of Father Killed in Hospice Complains to District Attorneys.)

No one wants to investigate the murder of innocent human beings in hospices as there is "gold in them thar hills." That is, the hospice industry is a money-maker, and money-makers donate to the electoral campaigns of district attorneys.

Remember, George Greer, the Florida judge who sentence the late Mrs. Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo to a cruel execution by starvation and dehydration, received a campaign donation from the pro-euthanasia attorney, George Felos, who represented Mrs. Schiavo's faithless, adulterous husband, Michael Schaivo:

As if the circumstances surrounding Terri Schiavo could not get any more suspicious, the Center for Reclaiming America has uncovered evidence that Pinellas-Pasco County Circuit Judge George W. Greer accepted a campaign contribution from the law firm of Michael Schiavo’s attorney only one day after "Terri’s Law” was declared unconstitutional by a Pinellas county court. This appears to establish a clear conflict of interest between Judge Greer and the best interests of Terri Schiavo.

Judge Greer has been responsible for establishing "the facts” in the case of Terri Schiavo. Sadly, he has dismissed or ignored testimony from 33 physicians (15 neurologists) who are willing to testify that Terri is not in a persistent vegetative state and can improve, he has refused to allow the Florida Department of Children and Families to conduct a criminal investigation of Michael Schiavo, he has refused to honor a subpoena from the U.S. Congress, and he has blocked virtually all efforts from the Schindler family to save the life of their daughter.

According to public records available from the Florida Department of State: Division of Elections, Judge George W. Greer received a campaign contribution from the law firm of Felos & Felos during his re-election efforts in the spring of 2004.

Of course, no direct evidence suggests collusion between the two parties, but the timing of the campaign contribution is highly suspect. (Greer Got Donation From Michael Schiavo's Attorney, George Felos. See also the appendix below for more information.)

The killing of innocent human beings is a profit-making industry today, and it has gained support from Catholics and non-Catholics under the banners of "choice," "freedom," "dignity," "mercy" and "compassion."

While they are indeed many individual Catholics who seek to provide authentic compassion to their dying relatives, such brave souls are relatively few in number today.

Far more common are those situations where patients are told lies by their attending physicians and accept heavy sedation even though they do not realize that they are being advised to authorize the beginnings of efforts to kill them by positive, pro-active means that are always proscribed by the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. 

No, I am just not making any of this up. It is real. Be forewarned not to be deceived by the medical industry as was my own late mother, who authorized the use of heavy sedation as she was in the final throes of quickly spreading stomach and esophageal cancer in March of 1982.

My mother was not well-formed in the Holy Faith, asking me at one point during her suffering if she could be given a "pill" to put her "to sleep." I told her that she could not authorize her own killing and had to embrace the Holy Cross. I was speaking a different language to her than she understood. I love my mother dearly. I pray for the repose of her immortal soul every day. She did not, however, know anything about offering her sufferings, which were indeed very intense, to Christ the King through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary in reparation for her sins and for those of the whole world.  In other words, she wasted her suffering.

Catholics must see in their sufferings as gifts fashioned for them from all eternity by the loving hand of God to prepare them better for the Particular Judgment as they do their Purgatory time as members of the Church Militant on earth. Heavy sedation, given in the name of "compassion" and "mercy," of course, makes this less possible, and it prevents many souls who might have had deathbed conversions from being lucid enough to even think about doing so. Thus it is that heavy sedation given in the name of "compassion" winds up serving as the pathway for the killing of human beings and as a means of preventing many of those so killed from saving their souls.

We cannot, as mentioned above, live in a vacuum and think the "doctors know best."

The "doctors" don't have the interests of Christ the King at heart, do they?

Why should we take their word at face value, perhaps even going so far as to dismiss the efforts of believing Catholics to come to the rescue of people whose very humanity has been dehumanized and thus targeted for execution because they are said to be "living corpses"?

This has application of course in the specific instances of the care of the disabled that have been in the news in recent years, including that of the late Mrs. Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo, whose death on March 31, 2005, as a result of a court-ordered dehydration and starvation has been the subject of numerous articles on this site (see Ten Years Later). It is vital to get our facts right and to quit relying upon the "word" of those who are committed to the killing off of human beings under various euphemisms and all too frequently under totally false pretenses.

Bishop Clemens von Galens of Munster, Germany, condemned the Nazi eugenics laws in 1939 and thereafter. His words speak to us prophetically today just as strongly as they did to his own people sixty-nine years ago:

It is a deeply moving event that we read of in the Gospel for today. Jesus weeps! The Son of God weeps! A man who weeps is suffering pain pain either of the body or of the heart. Jesus did not suffer in the body; and yet he wept. How great must have been the sorrow of soul, the heartfelt pain of this most courageous of men to make him weep! Why did he weep? He wept for Jerusalem, for God's holy city that was so dear to him, the capital of his people. He wept for its inhabitants, his fellow-countrymen, because they refused to recognise the only thing that could avert the judgment foreseen by his omniscience and determined in advance by his divine justice: “If thou hadst known . . . the things which belong unto thy peace!" Why do the inhabitants of Jerusalem not know it? Not long before Jesus had given voice to it: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!" (Luke 13,34).

Ye would not. I, your King, your God, I would. But ye would not! How safe, how sheltered is the chicken under the hen's wing: she warms it, she feeds it, she defends it. In the same way I desired to protect you, to keep you, to defend you against any ill. I would, but ye would not!

That is why Jesus weeps: that is why that strong man weeps; that is why God weeps. For the folly, the injustice, the crime of not being willing . And for the evil to which that gives rise which his omniscience sees coming. which his justice must impose if man sets his unwillingness against God's commands, in  opposition to the admonitions of conscience, and all the loving invitations of the divine Friend, the best of Fathers: “If thou hadst known, in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! But then wouldst not!.: It is something terrible, something incredibly wrong and fatal. when man sets his will against God's will. I would) than wouldst not! It is therefore that Jesus weeps for Jerusalem.

Dearly beloved Christians! The joint pastoral letter of the German bishops, which was read in all Catholic churches in Germany on 26 June 1941, includes the following words.

“It is true that in Catholic ethics there are certain positive commandments which cease to be obligatory if their observance would be attended by unduly great difficulties; but there are also sacred obligations of conscience from which no one can release us; which we must carry out even if it should cost us our life. Never, under any circumstances, may a man, save in war or in legitimate self-defence, kill an innocent person.”

I had occasion on 6th July to add the followings comments on this passage in the joint pastoral letter:

“For some months we have been heating reports that inmates of establishments for the care of the mentally ill who have been ill for a long period and perhaps appear incurable have been forcibly removed from these establishments on orders from Berlin. Regularly the relatives receive soon afterwards an intimation that the patient is dead, that the patient's body has been cremated and that they can collect the ashes. There is a general suspicion, verging on certainty. that these numerous unexpected deaths of the mentally ill do not occur naturally but are intentionally brought about in accordance with the doctrine that it is legitimate to destroy a so-called “worthless life” ” in other words to kill innocent men and women, if it is thought that their lives are of no further value to the people and the state. A terrible doctrine which seeks to justify the murder of innocent people, which legitimises the violent killing of disabled persons who are no longer capable of work, of cripples, the incurably ill and the aged and infirm!”

I am reliably informed that in hospitals and homes in the province of Westphalia lists are being prepared of inmates who are classified as “unproductive members of the national community” and are to be removed from these establishments and shortly thereafter killed. The first party of patients left the mental hospital at Marienthal, near Munster, in the course of this week.

German men and women! Article 211 of the German Penal Code is still in force, in these terms: “Whoever kills a man of deliberate intent is guilty of murder and punishable with death”. No doubt in order to protect those who kill with intent these poor men and women, members of our families, from this punishment laid down by law, the patients who have been selected for killing are removed from their home area to some distant place. Some illness or other is then given as the cause of death. Since the body is immediately cremated, the relatives and the criminal police are unable to establish whether the patient had in fact been ill or what the cause of death actually was. I have been assured, however, that in the Ministry of the Interior and the office of the Chief Medical Officer, Dr Conti, no secret is made of the fact that indeed a large number of mentally ill persons in Germany have already been killed with intent and that this will continue.

Article 139 of the Penal Code provides that “anyone who has knowledge of an intention to commit a crime against the life of any person . . . and fails to inform the authorities or the person whose life is threatened in due time . . . commits a punishable offence”. When I learned of the intention to remove patients from Marienthal I reported the matter on 28th July to the State Prosecutor of Munster Provincial Court and to the Munster chief of police by registered letter, in the following terms:

“According to information I have received it is planned in the course of this week (the date has been mentioned as 31st July) to move a large number of inmates of the provincial hospital at Marienthal, classified as ‘unproductive members of the national community’, to the mental hospital at Eichberg, where, as is generally believed to have happened in the case of patients removed from other establishments, they are to be killed with intent. Since such action is not only contrary to the divine and the natural moral law but under article 211 of the German Penal Code ranks as murder and attracts the death penalty, I hereby report the matter in accordance with my obligation under article 139 of the Penal Code and request that steps should at once be taken to protect the patients concerned by proceedings against the authorities planning their removal and murder, and that I may be informed of the action taken".

I have received no information of any action by the State Prosecutor or the police.

I had already written on 26th July to the Westphalian provincial authorities, who are responsible for the running of the mental hospital and for the patients entrusted to them for care and for cure, protesting in the strongest terms. It had no effect. The first transport of the innocent victims under sentence of death has left Marienthal. And I am now told that 800 patients have already been removed from the hospital at Warstein.

We must expect, therefore, that the poor defenceless patients are, sooner or later, going to be killed. Why? Not because they have committed any offence justifying their death, not because, for example, they have attacked a nurse or attendant, who would be entitled in legitimate self-defence to meet violence with violence. In such a case the use of violence leading to death is permitted and may be called for, as it is in the case of killing an armed enemy.

No: these unfortunate patients are to die, not for some such reason as this but because in the judgment of some official body, on the decision of some committee, they have become “unworthy to live,” because they are classed as “unproductive members of the national community”.

The judgment is that they can no longer produce any goods: they are like an old piece of machinery which no longer works, like an old horse which has become incurably lame, like a cow which no longer gives any milk. What happens to an old piece of machinery? It is thrown on the scrap heap. What happens to a lame horse, an unproductive cow?

I will not pursue the comparison to the end, so fearful is its appropriateness and its illuminating power.

But we are not here concerned with pieces of machinery; we are not dealing with horses and cows, whose sole function is to serve mankind, to produce goods for mankind. They may be broken up; they may be slaughtered when they no longer perform this function.

No: We are concerned with men and women, our fellow creatures, our brothers and sisters! Poor human beings, ill human beings, they are unproductive, if you will. But does that mean that they have lost the right to live? Have you, have I, the right to live only so long as we are productive, so long as we are recognised by others as productive?

If the principle that men is entitled to kill his unproductive fellow-man is established and applied, then woe betide all of us when we become aged and infirm! If it is legitimate to kill unproductive members of the community, woe betide the disabled who have sacrificed their health or their limbs in the productive process! If unproductive men and women can be disposed of by violent means, woe betide our brave soldiers who return home with major disabilities as cripples, as invalids! If it is once admitted that men have the right to kill “unproductive” fellow-men even though it is at present applied only to poor and defenceless mentally ill patients ” then the way is open for the murder of all unproductive men and women: the incurably ill, the handicapped who are unable to work, those disabled in industry or war. The way is open, indeed, for the murder of all of us when we become old and infirm and therefore unproductive. Then it will require only a secret order to be issued that the procedure which has been tried and tested with the mentally ill should be extended to other “unproductive” persons, that it should also be applied to those suffering from incurable tuberculosis, the aged and infirm, persons disabled in industry, soldiers with disabling injuries!

Then no man will be safe: some committee or other will be able to put him on the list of “unproductive” persons, who in their judgment have become “unworthy to live”. And there will be no police to protect him, no court to avenge his murder and bring his murderers to justice.

Who could then have any confidence in a doctor? He might report a patient as unproductive and then be given instructions to kill him! It does not bear thinking of, the moral depravity, the universal mistrust which will spread even in the bosom of the family, if this terrible doctrine is tolerated, accepted and put into practice. Woe betide mankind, woe betide our German people, if the divine commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”, which the Lord proclaimed on Sinai amid thunder and lightning, which God our Creator wrote into man's conscience from the beginning, if this commandment is not merely violated but the violation is tolerated and remains unpunished!

I will give you an example of what is happening. One of the patients in Marienthal was a man of 55, a farmer from a country parish in the Munster region I could give you his name who has suffered for some years from mental disturbance and was therefore admitted to Marienthal hospital. He was not mentally ill in the full sense: he could receive visits and was always happy, when his relatives came to see him. Only a fortnight ago he was visited by his wife and one of his sons, a soldier on home leave from the front. The son is much attached to his father, and the parting was a sad one: no one can tell, whether the soldier will return and see his father again, since he may fall in battle for his country. The son, the soldier, will certainly never again see his father on earth, for he has since then been put on the list of the “unproductive”. A relative, who wanted to visit the father this week in Marienthal, was turned away with the information that the patient had been transferred elsewhere on the instructions of the Council of State for National Defence. No information could be given about where he had been sent, but the relatives would be informed within a few days. What information will they be given? The same as in other cases of the kind? That the man has died, that his body has been cremated, that the ashes will be handed over on payment of a fee? Then the soldier, risking his life in the field for his fellow-countrymen, will not see his father again on earth, because fellow-countrymen at home have killed him.

The facts I have stated are firmly established. I can give the names of the patient, his wife and his son the soldier, and the place where they live.

“Thou shalt not kill!” God wrote this commandment in the conscience of man long before any penal code laid down the penalty for murder, long before there was any prosecutor or any court to investigate and avenge a murder. Cain, who killed his brother Abel, was a murderer long before there were any states or any courts of law. And he confessed his deed, driven by his accusing conscience: “My punishment is greater than I can bear . . . and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me the murderer shall slay me” (Genesis 4,13-14).

“Thou shalt not kill!” This commandment from God, who alone has power to decide on life or death, was written in the hearts of men from the beginning, long before God gave the children of Israel on Mount Sinai his moral code in those lapidary sentences inscribed on stone which are recorded for us in Holy Scripture and which as children we learned by heart in the catechism.

“I am the Lord thy God!” Thus begins this immutable law. “Thou shalt have not other gods before me.” God ” the only God, transcendent, almighty, omniscient, infinitely holy and just, our Creator and future Judge ” has given us these commandments. Out of love for us he wrote these commandments in our heart and proclaimed them to us. For they meet the need of our God-created nature; they are the indispensable norms for all rational, godly, redeeming and holy individual and community life. With these commandments God, our Father, seeks to gather us, His children, as the hen gathers her chickens under her wings. If we follow these commands, these invitations, this call from God, then we shall be guarded and protected and preserved from harm, defended against threatening death and destruction like the chickens under the hen's wings.

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” Is this to come about again in our country of Germany, in our province of Westphalia, in our city of Munster? How far are the divine commandments now obeyed in Germany, how far are they obeyed here in our community?

The eighth commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness, thou shalt not lie.” How often is it shamelessly and publicly broken!

The seventh commandment: “Thou shalt not steal”. Whose possessions are now secure since the arbitrary and ruthless confiscation of the property of our brothers and sisters, members of Catholic orders? Whose property is protected, if this illegally confiscated property is not returned?

The sixth commandment: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Think of the instructions and assurances on free sexual intercourse and unmarried motherhood in the notorious Open Letter by Rudolf Hess, who has disappeared since, which was published in all the newspapers. And how much shameless and disreputable conduct of this kind do we read about and observe and experience in our city of Munster! To what shamelessness in dress have our young people been forced to get accustomed to” the preparation for future adultery! For modesty, the bulwark of chastity, is about to be destroyed.

And now the fifth commandment: “Thou shalt not kill”, is set aside and broken under the eyes of the authorities whose function it should be to protect the rule of law and human life, when men presume to kill innocent fellow-men with intent merely because they are “unproductive”, because they can no longer produce any goods.

And how do matters stand with the observance of the fourth commandment, which enjoins us to honour and obey our parents and those in authority over us? The status and authority of parents is already much undermined and is increasingly shaken by all the obligations imposed on children against the will of their parents. Can anyone believe that sincere respect and conscientious obedience to the state authorities can be maintained when men continue to violate the commandments of the supreme authority, the Commandments of God, when they even combat and seek to stamp out faith in the only true transcendent God, the Lord of heaven and earth?

The observance of the first three commandments has in reality for many years been largely suspended among the public in Germany and in Munster. By how many people are Sundays and feast days profaned and withheld from the service of God! How the name of God is abused, dishonoured and blasphemed!

And the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” In place of the only true eternal God men set up their own idols at will and worship them: Nature, or the state, or the people, or the race. And how many are there whose God, in Paul's word, “is their belly” (Philippians 3:19)” their own well being, to which they sacrifice all else, even honour and conscience ” the pleasures of the senses, the lust for money, the lust for power! In accordance with all this men may indeed seek to arrogate to themselves divine attributes, to make themselves lords over the life and death of their fellow-men.

When Jesus came near to Jerusalem and beheld the city he wept over it, saying: “If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the day shall come upon thee, that thine enemies . . . shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.” Looking with his bodily eyes, Jesus saw only the walls and towers of the city of Jerusalem, but the divine omniscience looked deeper and saw how matters stood within the city and its inhabitants:       “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings ” and ye would not!" That is the great sorrow that oppresses Jesus's heart, that brings tears to his eyes.   I wanted to act for your good, but ye would not!

Jesus saw how sinful, how terrible, how criminal, how disastrous this unwillingness is. Little man, that frail creature, sets his created will against the will of God! Jerusalem and its inhabitants, His chosen and favoured people, set their will against God's will! Foolishly and criminally, they defy the will of God! And so Jesus weeps over the heinous sin and the inevitable punishment. God is not mocked!

Christians of Munster! Did the Son of God in his omniscience in that day see only Jerusalem and its people? Did he weep only over Jerusalem? Is the people of Israel the only people whom God has encompassed and protected with a father's care and mother's love, has drawn to Himself? Is it the only people that wou1d not ? The only one that rejected God's truth, that threw off God's law and so condemned itself to ruin?

Did Jesus, the omniscient God, also see in that day our German people, our land of Westphalia, our region of Munster, the Lower Rhineland? Did he also weep over us? Over Munster?

For a thousand years he has instructed our forefathers and us in his truth, guided us with his law, nourished us with his grace, gathered us together as the hen gathers her chickens under her wings. Did the omniscient Son of God see in that day that in our time he must also pronounce this judgment on us: “Ye would not: see, your house will be laid waste!” How terrible that would be!

My Christians! I hope there is still time; but then indeed it is high time: That we may realise, in this our day, the things that belong unto our peace! That we may realise what alone can save us, can preserve us from the divine judgment: that we should take, without reservation, the divine commandments as the guiding rule of our lives and act in sober earnest according to the words: “Rather die than sin”.

That in prayer and sincere penitence we should beg that God's forgiveness and mercy may descend upon us, upon our city, our country and our beloved German people.

But with those who continue to provoke God's judgment, who blaspheme our faith, who scorn God's commandments, who make common cause with those who alienate our young people from Christianity, who rob and banish our religious, who bring about the death of innocent men and women, our brothers and sisters with all those we will avoid any confidential relationship, we will keep ourselves and our families out of reach of their influence, lest we become infected with their godless ways of thinking and acting, lest we become partakers in their guilt and thus liable to the judgment which a just God must and will inflict on all those who, like the ungrateful city of Jerusalem, do not will what God wills.

O God, make us all know, in this our day, before it is too late, the things which belong to our peace!

O most Sacred Heart of Jesus, grieved to tears at the blindness and iniquities of men, help us through Thy grace, that we may always strive after that which is pleasing to Thee and renounce that which displeases Thee, that we may remain in Thy love and find peace for our souls!

Amen.

Anyone who does not think that the situation in Nazi Germany that was described so clearly and condemned so forcefully by the late Bishop Clemens von Galens in 1941 obtains in the United States of America and elsewhere in the world at the present time is spiritually blind. We are living through the precise situation now as that described and condemned by Bishop Clemens von Galens.

Please do yourself a favor and re-read the late bishop's remarks again.

Yes, I have included these remarks before, at the end of the interview on brain death that Dr. Paul Byrne gave to Mrs. Randy Engel. It is important to do so again as Bishop von Galens's remarks resonate with Catholic truth and serve as prophetic warnings to us not to trust in the diagnoses and judgments of doctors who have accustomed themselves to lying and killing.

Bishop von Galens's sermon from the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost in 1941 also discussed the cogent point that it is easier for men to break the Fourth through Tenth Commandments under cover of law when they have violated the First through Third Commandments. Consider this passage once again:

And the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” In place of the only true eternal God men set up their own idols at will and worship them: Nature, or the state, or the people, or the race. And how many are there whose God, in Paul's word, “is their belly” (Philippians 3:19)” their own well being, to which they sacrifice all else, even honour and conscience ” the pleasures of the senses, the lust for money, the lust for power! In accordance with all this men may indeed seek to arrogate to themselves divine attributes, to make themselves lords over the life and death of their fellow-men.

Although admitting, as noted above, that the proximate causes for the astounding advances in evil that we have seen before our very eyes in the past fifty years is the result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King in the Sixteenth Century and the contempt that this has bred for His Deposit of Faith and the authority of His true Church, it is nevertheless also true that the astounding advances in evil that we have seen before our very eyes in the past fifty years have resulted at least in part as the result of a chastisement that God is permitting us to endure as a punishment for our failure to seek to restore all things in Him. How can we stop the advance of evil on the devil's own terms of naturalism, no less think and speak naturalistically about the state of disabled, dependent human beings?

Moreover, it is not unreasonable at all to consider that this advance of evil has been made more possible by the fact that the conciliar "pontiffs" have dared to arouse the wrath of God by having "other gods" before them. All of the conciliar "popes’” supposed opposition to the evils of the day, including abortion and euthanasia, have come to nothing because they continue to offend God by giving respect publicly to false religions, failing to recognize that as serious as abortion and euthanasia and other crimes are as sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance they are ultimately lower on the scale of the hierarchy of evil than violations of the first three Commandments, especially violations of the First Commandment by the respect shown publicly to false religions. "Nature, or the state, or the people, or the race" must therefore triumph as God is so blasphemed and mocked, resulting in the degradation of the inviolability of innocent human life.

After all, it is a pretty easy thing to kill off innocent beings by dehumanizing them when one grows accustomed to offending God by having a steady diet of "other gods" before one. God will not let such offenses go unpunished. More to the point perhaps is this: How can Catholics in the conciliar structures be expected withstand the Americanist culture of emotionalism and sentimentality born of the Protestant Revolt and the rise of Judeo-Masonry when the conciliar church's liturgical rites are sacramentally barren and are a celebration of the very world that has produced so much needless carnage and sorrow.

Father Edward Leen noted the course of the so-called “development” of Modernity in Why the Cross?

The unrest, so characteristic of the lives of many, is universal, not merely in the sense that it is widespread, but also in this, that it belongs to all ages and generations of mankind. It is not more a feature of our age than it has been of those that have preceded. If there be a difference between former and modern times, it lies only in this, that the incessant endeavor, to which men feel themselves committed, tends more and more to express itself in violent and rapid motion, in which they hurl themselves from one end of the earth to the other with vertiginous speed. They do this as though they had some secret hope that life would discover its purpose and achieve its utmost expression in compassing the greatest distance in the shortest possible space of time. Life is in movement, it is true, but not in movement of this kind. Because the earth is round, the more rapid men can propel themselves mechanically, the more quickly they will arrive at their starting point! What a barren achievement!

The craze for even greater speed in transport gives this generation an appearance of being more feverish and restless than those that have gone before. This is only an appearance. The unrest has, probably, been as profound during any period in the last four centuries as it is now. Yet there is a difference that can be detected by the thoughtful. An unwanted note is discernible in the utterances that voice the discontent of humanity as—dissatisfied with and relinquishing what it has attained—it presses forward toward a more alluring future. A tone of hopelessness is making itself audible in the words of those who express the strivings of the modern man. The efforts, directed along the lines of what was regarded as human progress, were buoyant and optimistic. A goal, worth man’s endeavors and an adequate compensation for actual present sacrifices, was deemed ultimately attainable. This note of hopefulness, of confident expectancy, of moral certainty of achieving eminently satisfactory conditions has generally, but in recent times more rapidly, grown fainter. Mankind’s efforts after “progress” are becoming less assured; they are obviously becoming more haphazard, they have come to be almost despairing. There is a growing misgiving, hardening into a certainty, that the confidence, swinging march of post-medieval man along the road of “progress” has brought him, not to the border of the looked-for Utopia, but to the verge of a howling sense peopled by nameless powers of evil. The toilsome struggle onward of the last four centuries has bought man nowhere. It has left him exhausted, disillusioned, bewildered, and too dispirited to retrace his steps. To do this to some purpose, he would need to be able to discover where he had taken the wrong turning. He has no assurance from his prophets that this would be possible for him,

Two great evils followed the revolt in the sixteenth century of the greater part of Christendom against the authority of Christ, living in His Church. The portions of the Christian world that were affected by the revolt (and what part wholly escaped its influence?) lost, first, the true sense of the supernatural life, and then became vague and hesitant even with regard as to the natural. Blindness as to the meaning of that transformation of man’s being which it was the Redeemer’s task to achieve was followed by blindness as to the constituent elements of the true common good on which that transformation was to work.

A loss of the right sense of eternal values was immediately followed by a progressive darkening of the sense of temporal values.

The supernatural good of man is the elevation and sublimation of the natural good of man. Having ceased to understand the real meaning of the supernatural, the men of the revolt rapidly lost firmness in their grasp of the scheme of nature. Europe suffered grievously from this loss. Owing to the political power and wealth and wide influence of the countries that broke away from the unity of Christendom, the literature of the peoples of these countries came to mold and to fix the thought of vast masses who once formed part of the true Church. And what is more, the minds of the faithful themselves have been seriously tainted by the prevailing errors concerning questions of a social, economic, artistic, and political kind. Clear ideas as to the manner in which the domestic, economic, and civil life of man should be organized as to yield true temporal prosperity and well being have been lost for those who have abandoned the true faith, and have become obscured for those who have maintained contact with the source of unity. Christians, in vast numbers, have lost the knowledge of how to live, not only the divine life of grace, but even the life of reason. “The good for man,” says St. Thomas, “is to live according to reason.” This is what is truly natural for him. Now, as things are, it is only by striving to live a supernatural life that man will succeed in living a truly natural life. Grace, in perfecting nature, keeps nature true to itself. It is only by living as supernatural men that we shall succeed in living as natural men. Fallen man, to be humanized, must be, by grace, in a sense, “divinized.”

Men, having wandered from the city of God in search of a city of their own making, are beginning to awake to the fact that they have become homeless. The naturalistic civilization that they have labored to build up after plans of their own devising is crumbling into ruins. They should have known that “unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. Unless the Lord keep the city, he that watcheth in vain that keepeth it” (Psalm 127: 1). How aptly do the secret misgivings, gnawing at the hearts of the men who sense that the civilization they have known is trembling to its fall like a dead leaf, find their expression in the words of the inspired writer of the Book of Wisdom. “Therefore we have erred form the way of truth, and the light of justice hath not shined upon us. We wearied ourselves in the way of destruction and have walked through hard ways, but the way of the Lord we have not known. What hath pride profited us? All these things have passed away like a shadow, and like a post that runneth on, and as a ship that passeth through the waves, whereof when it is gone by, the trace cannot be found, nor the path of the keel in the waters” (Wisdom: 6-10). What bitter deception breathes through these words, ergo erravimus (and so we have gone astray)? How perfectly they express the icy despair that, in moments of deep reflection, grips the souls of millions caught up in the inextricable tangle and pathless chaos of modern life! For the words “what hath the boasting of riches brought us?” substitute the paraphrase, “whither thou has or much wanted ‘progress’ conducted us?” Europe is a prodigal son that some centuries ago left the Father’s house, to enjoy untrammeled freedom of thought and will. It has fed on the husks of swine and finds itself devoured by a spiritual hunger, of which the material want from which it suffers is but a false symbol. (Father Edward Leen, S.J., Why the Cross?, originally published by Sheed & Ward in 1938, and republished in 2001 by Scepter Publishers, Princeton, New Jersey, pp. 22-26.)

The passages above from Father Leen’s Why the Cross? perfectly describe the proximate roots of why the world is in the mess that it is in at this time. Father Leen understood that the Protestant Revolution’s first result was the spiritual death of millions, and it was this spiritual death that made possible the triumph of the bodily deaths of hundreds upon hundreds of millions of innocent human beings by men who are lost because their ancestors cut them off from the Chair of Unity nearly five centuries ago now.

Men are eager to believe in false religions, including Protestantism, and/or to believe in this or that naturalistic political ideology or program. They are unwilling to examine the deeper, supernatural causes of problems they seek to “solve” but which must worsen over time because they believe in the diabolical lie of human self-redemption, which is nothing other than Pelagianism. And thus it is that even Catholics participate accept advice of naturalists and atheists rather than to realize that a world where Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is not recognized as its King and His Most Blessed Mother honored as its Immaculate Queen must degenerate more and more over time. Such a world, based on a revolution from the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man’s return to Him through His Catholic Church, must result in the daily execution of innocent human beings in the quest for a “quality of life” that must be purchased by doing the bidding of the devil himself.

The execution Israel Stinson is simply the latest high-profile example of that which takes place on a daily basis without so much as a peep from the conciliar “pope” and his “bishops.” 

Yes, we have returned to a world that looks very much like the one that existed before Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Incarnation, Nativity, Hidden Years, Public Life and Ministry, and His Passion, Death and Resurrection, a world described by the same Father Edward Leen as one where people lived lives that alternated between pleasure and cruelty:

With the exception of that comparatively small number of heroic men and women who have, from the dawn of consciousness, pursued unfalteringly the path of perfection, Christians as a rule belie the promises of their baptism and continually present obstacles to the increase of divine grace in their souls. Differing in many respects, we are alike in this, that we are all sinners, and that we have not only once, but perhaps several times in our lives disappointed God.

Under the reign of Satan men were hard and unfeeling, without pity or tenderness. The one thing they looked up to was the physical power to dominate, and the one thing they feared was the helplessness of poverty. Their life was divided between pleasure and cruelty. Pride and haughtiness instead of being regarded as defects were regarded as manly virtues. Weakness was almost synonymous with vice, and all this tended to fashion hearts imperverious to the grace of God and to every human feeling. Conversion of heart was for them extremely difficult. What God required on the part of man as a necessary condition of their friendship with Him was to them abhorrent, for the practice of the Christian virtues of submission, humility, and patience would be regarded by them as degrading. They had to learn that what was not degrading to God--since nothing could degrade Him in reality--could not be degrading to them. Turning to God postulated on their part not only a change of heart, but also a change of mentality. Their human values were almost all wrong. In the terse words of St. Ignatius describing the pagan world" "They smite, they slay and they go down to Hell". (Father Edward Leen, S.J. In The Likeness of Christ, Sheed and Ward, 1936, pp, 17-18.)

Behold the false "pity" and "tenderness" represented by the likes of those who believe in hospice and/or in the starvation of dehyradtion of innocent human beings or the medical industry's manufactured, profit-making scheme known as "brain death," a false pity and tenderness that has resulted in actual euthanasia, as opposed to the eupehemized euthanasia practiced in hospices, whether on a de facto or de jure basis, in several nations around the world, including in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, which also permits the "involuntary" euthanasia of children according to the Groningen Protocol (Newborns Who Suffer are “Better off Dead” and Netherlands grapples with euthanasia of babies). Readers would do well also to remember the fact that the Belgian Parliament authorized the "euthanizing" of children up to the age of eighteen under certain conditions if they requested it, doing so without a word of protest from the man who is concerned about the "environment," Jorge Mario Bergoglio (see Hitler Prevails After All).

What are the organized crime families of naturalism in Washington, District of Columbia, concerned about these days?

The money, the money, the money.

What about the debt that this "civilized" nation and other "civilized" nations owe to God for the promotion of sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance under cover of the civil law?

We must lift our minds and hearts to Heaven as we embrace the Holy Cross, ever conscious of the price that Our Lord paid to redeem us thereon, a price that was shared by His Most Blessed Mother as she stood so valiantly under It. We do not not need hospice or end-life "counseling" sessions. We need the Holy Cross and Our Most Blessed Mother. Period!

Father Benedict Baur, O.S.B., explained how deeply we must always united ourselves to Our Lord's sufferings:

Christ and His members must be one. They must walk the same road, not only during the liturgical service, when they are lifted up together in the mysteries of the sacrifice, but also in every event of life. Christ welcomed suffering, and accepted it freely; He did not flee the hardships of life. He makes suffering in us, His members, serve the spirit; He uses it as a means of freeing us from the world and all that is temporal and thus raises us from things of his world to the thins that are eternal.

Now, during Passiontide, we must begin to live and treasure pain and suffering. In the cross, in suffering, in or crucifixion with Christ, we shall find salvation. For Him and with Him we should bear all the slight injustices committed against us. For Him we should suffer freely and willingly the unpleasant and disagreeable things that occur to us. But our faith is weak. We flee from from the cross instead of holding it dear, instead of loving it and welcoming it our as Savior did.  (Father Benedict Baur, O.S.B., The Light of the World, Volume I, B. Herder Book Company, 1954, p. 595.)

Father Robert Mader offered words of great inspiration in this regard eighty years ago now in the very country, Germany, where Bishop Clemens von Galens was to preach against the Hitlerian practices, most of which had originated during the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, that have become accepted as normal and nature in the "developed" world at this time, including here in the United States of America:

Following the destruction of Jerusalem, the Romans covered the places of hallowed memory to he Christian with rubble. The cave of the Holy Sepulchre was buried under such rubble, and over as well Golgotha pagan images and temples were erected in honor of Venus and Jupiter. For this reason the Christians did not go there anymore, in order not to be mistaken for idol-worshippers. Emperor Constantine ordered the temples and images torn down and the rubble carried away. After long and hard work the cave of the Holy Sepulchre was found. Not found away three crosses with nails were discovered, and along with them the superscription, which, however, lay separate from the cross.

Without doubt one of the these must be the Cross of the Savior, but there was no certain sign that would differentiate it from the crosses of the two thieves. This was given when a mortally il woman was suddenly cured by touching the true Cross. The Holy Cross was then encased in silver and precious gems, and a church was built over it, which according to Emperor Constantine's order was to be more magnificent than anything ever seen before. In memory of these events, the Church recalls the Finding of the Most Holy Cross on May 3, in order that on every day until the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14), land and people with be blessed with a splinter, a particle of the Cross.

We have every reason to remember these events. Christianity is the religion of the Crucified One. In his first letter to the Corinthians the Apostle of the Nations, St. Paul, declares: "For I judged not myself to know anything among you, but Jesus Christ, and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2). St. Paul's preaching, no matter how many-sided it appears, always returns to the central Sun of Christendom: Jesus on the Cross, King of the World! Everything else is either a ray from this Sun, or it is nothing. In the Crucifix lies our entire dogmatic and moral theology, our entire teaching on faith and morals, our catechism. The Cross is our library. Every other book has value only inasmuch as the spirit of the Cross speaks in it.

Modernists have attempted to ban the old preaching of St. Paul, the Gospel of the Cross, to oblivion. The Cross means the teaching of the necessity of sacrifice and of grace, and this now lies under the rubble on which a new paganism has erected once again the pagan images and temples of Jupiter, Mercury, Venus and Bacchus--in other words, the absolutist state, capitalism, immorality, and addiction to pleasure. A certain superficial Christianity, which puts more value on being modern than on being Catholic and Biblical, and for which the imitation of the spirit of the times is more understandable than the imitation of Christ, has made itself a willing accomplice.

We have lost the Cross. We have a Christianity that no longer understands sacrifice and there is no Christianity or only a soulless version of Christianity. We need Constantines and Helens who will once again dig out the the Cross from under the rubble and make it their shrine and their sign, and who believe that the King's throne is the Cross.

The crucified King! In the family we must have a Finding of the the Most Holy Cross! The modern family has lost the crucifix, and in its place it has raised up the political hero, the artist, old pagan gods, nudity and the prostitute. The crucifix does not fit into the modern home. The modern living room preaches money-grabbing, pride, vanity, lasciviousness, laziness. The modern living room is the exaltation of the seven deadly sins. At least one is honest enough to feel the Cross no longer fits into this milieu and has got rid of it because in the long run the crucifix can only remain there where the spirit of the Crucified One remains, and the spirit of the Crucified is no longer there.

The spirit of the Crucified is the spirit of love and sacrifice, but the spirit of the modern family is the spirit of selfishness and enjoyment. The speech of the Crucified says: First the others, I come last! The speech of selfishness is: First I, then again I, the others come last! The Christian family is built on the notion of sacrifice and devotion. The concept of the Christian father is: Work from morning to evening for others. The concept of the Christian mother is: Care for others! Let the self always come last! The concept of the Christian child is: Respect, love, obedience. Father and mother first, only then I!

The notion of sacrifice is dying out in the modern family. The modern family is built upon the law of egotism. The modern family takes as its motto: "As much enjoyment and as little sacrifice as possible!" This is the source of Malthusianism. That is where characterless education comes from. And that is the doom of the family. Only the Cross and its sermon of self-discipline, self-denial and devotion can save the dying family. (Father Robert Mader, Cross and the Crown, edited and translated by Dr. Eileen Kunze, Sarto House, 1999, pp. 117-119.) 

The myth of “brain death” and the practices of the modern hospice industry areS founded upon a rejection of the Holy Cross. So is most of modern medicine, especially for the chronically or terminally ill. We must embrace the Holy Cross of the Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, not flee from It, the very instrument of our salvation.

May we always trust in the tender mercies of the Sacred Heart of Jesus as we fly unto It through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary so that we can embrace suffering with love, knowing that a safe and sure shelter awaits us in the love of these two Hearts if only we persevere until the end in states of Sanctifying Grace as members of the Catholic Church.

We do not play God in life. We want to know, love and serve Him as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His Catholic Church so that He will greet us when we meet Him at the Particular Judgment with these consoling words:

Well done, good and faithful servant, because thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will place thee over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. (Matthew 25: 21.)

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary of reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary?

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us, now and the hour of our death.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us. 

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Appendix

Hospice care delivers Hemlock nightcap

by Debi Vinnedge

Celebrate Life magazine

(See Hospice care delivers Hemlock nightcap)

After piecing together the players involved in Terri Schiavo’s death, it’s crystal clear that she was merely a pawn in a much larger agenda, one intently focused on the legalization of physicianassisted suicide and euthanasia in America. The plan was simple: sell the idea that no one should have to live with disabilities; sugarcoat the organization’s name and intent; secure funding; and last but not least, infiltrate the legislature, the healthcare network and even the Catholic Church to the point that Margaret Sanger would’ve been proud.

A rose by any other name…

Beginning in the 1930s, a group intent on advancing legalized suicide founded the Euthanasia Society of America. To make their cause more socially palatable, they would eventually change their name in the mid-sixties to Choice in Dying and then infiltrate the hospice industry with the so-called right-to-die agenda. That goal would be realized decades later through their merger with Partnership for Caring and Last Acts, a coalition of hospices worldwide.

In 1980, euthanasia advocate Derek Humphry founded the Hemlock Society of America in Santa Monica, California. It grew to over 50,000 members with 90 U.S. chapters. Humphry’s group provided substantial financing for physician-assisted suicide legislation, including the eventual enactment of Oregon’s 1997 law. But to advance euthanasia nationwide, a more subtle approach would be needed.

In 2003, Hemlock chapters across the country renamed themselves Death with Dignity, Compassion and Choices, Caring Friends, Compassion in Dying and End of Life Choices. While their names changed, their motives most certainly did not. Consider Humphry’s words from a 2004 speech: “For too long, the Judeo-Christian religions have dominated ethical thinking in the West... Unfortunately, Anglo-American law makes no distinction on these grounds: A person cannot ask to be killed. We must get this modified.” Humphry’s latest book, Good Euthanasia Guide 2004, godlessly attests: “Don’t bother to acquire this book if you are a person who believes that a religious deity is in sole charge of your life and dying.”

Financial backing

Meanwhile, pro-death foundations invest unprecedented funding to rid the world of those deemed a burden to society. With the 1994 formation of Project Death in America, for example, multi-billionaire founder George Soros stoked $15 million to promote euthanasia in healthcare facilities nationwide.

Soros’ fixation on death is both intimate and appalling. In a January 1995 interview with The New Yorker, Soros spoke of his own father’s struggle with cancer and his apparent irritation that his father did not wish to die. “Unfortunately he wanted to live,” Soros stated. “I was kind of disappointed in him... I wrote him off.

In 2002, the PDIA gave $1.2 million to fund the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, whose position states: “Were euthanasia and PAS [physician assisted suicide] being practiced in a regulated fashion, the hospice and palliative care approach should be that of non-interference in the receipt of these services, and non-abandonment of the person seeking assistance in suicide.”

Similarly, the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation has given the Hemlock/Partnership for Caring and Last Acts merger, now known as Last Acts Partnership, over $1 million. According to the foundation, a longtime supporter of Planned Parenthood and euthanasia, Last Acts was the launching pad for an $11.25 million grant to “elevate awareness” and “inspire improvements” on end of life health care. The Johnson Foundation stated, “The program works at a number of clinical sites to encourage doctors to introduce palliative care earlier in patients’ diagnoses and to change the culture of medical institutions, which often focus exclusively on cure.” In other words, promote euthanasia, but do it deceptively.

The connection

The stage was set; the money was in. The pro euthanasia groups had new names. Many board members of Last Acts Partnership also served on the National Hospice and Palliative Care’s (NHAPC) board, which proclaims itself “the largest nonprofit membership organization representing hospice and palliative care programs and professionals in the United States.” Enter Mary Labyak, CEO of the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast, who also was on the boards of Partnership for Caring, Last Acts and the NHAPC. While there are over 100 Hospice corporations in Florida, the Suncoast Hospice directly operates Woodside Hospice, where Terri Schiavo spent the last five years of her life. If you don’t smell a rat yet, keep reading.

The cast of characters in Terri Schiavo’s case who had direct ties to Hospice is both astonishing and frightening. Remember, Terri never should have been in hospice at all, since it is a federally funded program for dying patients. But the court decided she was PVS and, therefore, terminally ill. Now if a condition misdiagnosed as much as 43 percent can be considered “terminal,” patients can be brought to hospice for feeding tube removal while the government pays the tab. How very convenient.

And when Terri was placed there in April 2000, Michael Schiavo’s attorney George Felos was an active Suncoast Hospice board member and former chairman. No conflict there, right?

Now enter Everett Rice, Pinellas County Sheriff from 1988 through 2004, who was charged with investigating Terri’s 1990 collapse, but neglected to turn the case over to the homicide division. Rice, a close friend and campaign backer of Judge George Greer, was also a Florida Hospice board member.

Was it mere coincidence that John Lenderman, brother to Woodside board member Martha Lenderman and fellow judge of George Greer in the Sixth Judicial Circuit Court, also served on the advisory board for Suncoast Hospice in 2000—the same year Terri was admitted? He was a key member of the Pinellas County Domestic Violence investigation committee, but surely he would not have hindered an investigation into complaints against Michael Schiavo, or would he?

Perhaps we should question Martha Lenderman herself, who served on the Suncoast Hospice board with Felos in 2000 and later became chairman in 2002-03, during Michael’s second attempt to starve Terri. Ms. Lenderman was a consultant with the Florida Department of Children and Families, putting her in a position to influence the DCF investigation on Terri’s abuse and neglect.

And what about the glaring collusion between intertwined Hospice affiliations and prominent Florida lawmakers?

Not only do both state Rep. “Gus” Michael Bilirakis (R) and Senator Jim King (R) tout themselves as former board members of Florida Hospice, but they both lobbied for the fateful 1999 legislation that ruled feeding tubes were artificial life support. During pro-life pressure over Terri’s case in the 2004- 2005 legislative sessions, Florida lawmakers scrambled to amend that, but Senate president King quashed the motion. “As soon as you put something on the floor, as well-intended as it may be, anybody can amend it,” King stated. “Then all of a sudden I’m sitting there facing a bill or bills that can dismantle what I consider to be my legacy.”

That “legacy” began in 1998 with King’s creation of the Florida Panel on End of Life Care for the purpose of amending Florida statutes on end-of-life issues. Among the notables on that panel was Suncoast Hospice’s CEO, Mary Labyak.

Project disGrace

In the background another quietly sinister group became formal advisors to the End of Life Panel. Known as Project Grace, their board members include none other than Mary Labyak, Schiavo attorney George Felos and one more link in the Florida corruption: Sister Pat Shirley, O.S.F., officially representing the St. Petersburg diocese.

Project Grace’s motive was to use religion and the clergy to convince the patient or family that withdrawal of medical care, including food and water, was morally acceptable, even in non-terminal patients. Indeed, Sr. Pat began promoting the Project Grace advance directives agenda at Catholic parishes around the diocese. When staunchly pro-life R.N. Jana Carpenter, a known activist, discovered a scheduled seminar at her own parish, she confronted her pastor, arguing that Project Grace did not conform to Catholic teaching. Despite assurance that the project had Bishop Robert Lynch’s approval, Carpenter persuaded him to postpone the workshop.

In a subsequent meeting where Ms. Carpenter pointed out the deep flaws of Project Grace, Sr. Pat smugly responded that Fr. Kevin O’Rourke, bioethicist at Loyola University in Chicago, enthusiastically supported their philosophy. Fr. O’Rourke is the same priest who later called the March 2004 Vatican statement requiring artificial hydration and nutrition “irresponsible.” According to O’Rourke, “If a person does not have the potential for cognitive-affective function it means that the person cannot pursue the friendship of God, the purpose of life, through his or her free actions. Therefore, the moral imperative to help the person toward health and existence is no longer present.”

O’Rourke was outwardly hostile toward pro-lifers in the Terri Schiavo case, calling their attempts for interceding “despicable.” “The government of Florida is a laughingstock for the rest of the country,’’ O’Rourke said in a November 2003 statement to the Miami Herald. “Anyone who knows the law knows this is an abuse of personal rights.”

Using such statements from “Catholic” ethicists, Project Grace member and euthanasia author Lofty Basta, M.D., who openly campaigned for Terri Schiavo’s death, described how they convinced the End of Life Panel to include PVS in legislative amendments. More disturbing, Project Grace held that advanced directives requesting medical treatment should not oblige the physician to provide it—a statement right out of O’Rourke’s own writings.

With a program so blatantly in opposition to Catholic tenets, both the Catholic Medical Association and the National Catholic Bioethics Center quickly denounced it. But that did not stop the Diocese of St. Petersburg from continuing to promote the program to its parishes and Catholic healthcare facilities.

Former St. Petersburg Diocesan Respect Life director Sharon Iler was obviously mesmerized by the Project Grace philosophy. In October 2003 the St. Petersburg Times quoted her saying: “Christians partner with God in the sense that [H]e grants free will and autonomy over their bodies... Family members may decide to stop efforts that prolong a loved one’s life. That’s all right with God.”

Was it this O’Rourke/Project Grace mentality that caused Bishop Lynch to ignore the Schindlers’ pleas to save their daughter? Or perhaps the persuasion of another nun, Sr. Karen Burns, O.S.F., another former board member of Suncoast Hospice on staff at St. Anthony’s Hospital, where Project Grace was implemented?

Should we not question why, despite pro-life pleas, the diocese refused to encourage Catholics to “get out and vote” in the 2004 Greer reelection, especially when his opponent openly supported the Vatican position? Instead, sadly enough, the diocesan attorney firm, Devito and Higham, shelled out maximum financial contributions to Judge Greer’s reelection campaign.

Whatever conclusion is drawn, it is certain that Terri’s fate was sealed as the deposits hit the bank and the co-conspirators basked in their success. Meanwhile, a chilling pattern has descended on America. From Griswold to Roe to Browning to Schiavo, the legal precedent for “privacy” has swelled into an ugly demonic entity that will launch the right to die movement into full-blown euthanasia in this country within the next decade. It happened with abortion in less than eight years and it will happen again. The question remains: Will we be able to stop it?

Debi Vinnedge is executive director of Children of God for Life (COGForLife.org) in Largo, Florida.