Catholic Order Embraces Euthanasia In The Name Of Alleviating ‘Mental Suffering’

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The Brothers of Charity is a religious order that has served the mentally ill with tender vigilance for 200 years. This year, its Belgian base announced intentions to include euthanasia under the umbrella of medical care. The Belgian group will recognize a physician’s “therapeutic freedom” to practice euthanasia in all 15 of its care facilities. In addition, it will practice it on psychiatric patients who are not terminally ill. Going forward, mental suffering alone will justify annihilation of the sufferer in the name of medicine.

Active worldwide, the Brothers of Charity is a distinguished community. In 1807, during the post-Napoleonic flowering of new religious orders, Fr. Petrus Joseph Triest—now proposed for canonization—gathered around him in Ghent a handful of young men consecrated to the care of the elderly poor. Their particular concern was for the mentally ill. This small assembly gradually developed into an international congregation with houses in 30 countries, including the United States. [They maintain a home in Philadelphia for intellectually disabled adults; and are planning a project in DC for veterans with mental problems.]

Today, the order is considered the most important provider of mental health care services in Flanders—the Dutch-speaking region of northern Belgium—where they minister to about 5,000 patients a year. (They also run schools. All told, they serve some 30,000 people through care or education.) Since the legalization of euthanasia in 2002, institutions run by the Brothers of Charity have worked against the grain of secular culture. They took on an oppositional role by insuring safety from mercy killing to all they tended. How, then, to grasp the group’s decision to submit its historic mission to the dark embrace of therapeutic freedom and the ideology of patient autonomy? Some context is needed.

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Euthanasia is on the rise. “It’s like a rolling ball that goes on and on,” said Kenneth Chambaere, a University of Brussels researcher in end-of-life protocols. Greater willingness to eliminate pain—including psychic pain—by eliminating the patient has seeped into popular culture in the name of that vague determinant: quality of life. Ghent University ethics professor Freddy Mortier explained: “Euthanasia has been increasingly accepted by the patients as a valid option at the end of their life. They are increasingly asking for it. Physicians themselves are more inclined to comply with the wishes of the patients.”

Inclination slides easily into subjective judgment about which lives are deemed livable. Relieved of liability, Belgian doctors can rationalize their way to providing death as a form of treatment. Eight years after legalization, research conducted by the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) in 2010 found that 32 percent of euthanasia deaths in the Flanders region of Belgium occurred without an explicit request.

Numbers between studies vary but the direction is consistently upward. Last September, Reuters reported that “in the decade after Belgium legalized doctor-assisted death, the number of patients using it to end their lives rose nearly eight-fold, according to records of the national euthanasia control committee.”

According to a 2015 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, one in 20 Belgian deaths in 2013 were by euthanasia, more than double the number six years previously. A significant majority—at least 75 percent—of Belgians euthanized in 2013 were Dutch speakers. That makes Flanders the epicenter of a coup de culture that employs the phrases of Judeo-Christian concern for human life to facilitate the planned ending of it.

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