The local branch of the British Medical Society said that support for aid in dying could have an impact on recruiting and retaining doctors to the island, home to about 63,000 people.
The national organization has opposed assisted suicide since 2006 and supports the current law. The U.K.'s General Medical Council is also clear that encouraging or assisting in a suicide is illegal.
Because the council registers doctors to practice medicine, it is unclear how legal assisted suicide in Guernsey could be carried out by registered doctors, the Jersey Evening Post said.
For Bishop Egan, the proposal was an opportunity to reflect on the hardships at the end of life and what Christians believe about suffering and death.
"Frailty, pain and infirmity are a difficult trial for anyone," he said. "Those who are mentally ill may experience despair and gloom at the problems they face. Others, the terminally ill, become anguished at the loss of function and mobility, feeling keenly a sense of burden on family and even a financial burden on society."
"Yet let us thank God for the amazing advances that medical science has made and the level of true loving care that can now be given," Egan added, noting advances in palliative care and pain management.
Further, the bishop said Christians believe in "assisted living, not assisted dying."
"Death is not pain relief but the beginning of a new, resurrected life with God our Father and Creator," he said. "This future depends on the state of our soul when we die and this perspective rightly affects our decisions on end of life care and how best to uphold a patient's personal dignity."
To help someone to commit suicide or to die prematurely, even when they request it, "can never ever be a compassionate action," he emphasized. "It is a grave sin."
Egan's Holy Week letter stressed the importance of uniting one's suffering with Christ and finding in him "all the strength, patience and energy we need to sustain our suffering – to 'carry the cross' and to turn it to a positive good for others. That is the meaning of Holy Week, when Jesus Christ willingly underwent death at the hands of those who had decided it was better for society for Him to be extinguished."
"We must not yield to the temptation to apply rapid or drastic solutions, moved by a false compassion or by criteria of efficiency and cost-effectiveness," he said.
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The seriously ill deserve respect, understanding and tenderness "so that the sacred value of their life can shine forth with splendor in their suffering."