Apr 24, 2005 / 22:00 pm
In the wake of the recent death of Terri Schiavo and the new national discussion on living wills, Bishop Robert Morlino of the Diocese of Madison, Wisconsin is trying to clarify the Church’s position on the wills and keep faithful out of mortal sin.
Bishop Morlino noted the question in his most recent Catholic Herald column that the Terri Schiavo case has raised “as to the human dignity of a person who is medically termed to be in a persistent or permanent vegetative state.”
He said, “I fear that the connotation is carried that a person is somehow reduced to a vegetable. The fact that a person is gravely ill and disabled could never make that person anything less than a person - such a person should never be treated as a vegetable.”
Noting that Schiavo was not terminally ill or necessarily close to death, the bishop said that, “Such a person has no "right to die" any more than any other person because there is no such right.”