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ENGLARO-VATICAN Nov-14-2008 (220 words) With photo posted July 23. xxxi
Withholding nutrition, hydration kills life, say Vatican officials
By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Withholding nutrition and hydration from a woman in a persistent vegetative state is a serious, inadmissible attack on life, said two Vatican officials.
Italy's top appeals court refused Nov. 13 to overturn a lower-court decision allowing the withdrawal of the nasogastric tube that has kept Eluana Englaro alive for more than 16 years.
For years, Englaro's father had been pursuing a legal battle to allow his daughter to die. She was injured in a car accident in 1992.
Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, told reporters: "It is a very serious decision. It is a big defeat for everyone."
Englaro "is a 37-year-old woman, a living person who is not attached to any machine, who breathes, who wakes and sleeps," he said. "And water and nourishment will be withheld from her, condemning her to a certain death with serious suffering and pain," he said.
Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry, told reporters that, while the Catholic Church does not insist that extraordinary measures be taken to keep a dying person alive, nutrition and hydration "are not extraordinary therapies that can be suspended. Interrupting them is equivalent to killing her."
END
Copyright (c) 2008 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
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