More Dissent concerning directives of Holy Father on food/water

Four weeks after Pope John Paul II said health-care providers are morally obligated to continue artificial feedings for people in vegetative states, debate is growing over what the pontiff's speech will mean to patients in America.

...the pope last month called such assistance a "natural means of preserving life, not a medical act" and therefore "obligatory."

The pontiff said withdrawing a feeding tube based on a lack of hope for the patient's recovery from a vegetative state after a year or more could be called "euthanasia by omission."

"Previously, among Catholic theologians there hasn't been unanimity with regard to the use of feeding tubes in people in a vegetative state," said McCurdy, an ordained minister with the United Church of Christ. "Many lay Catholics are not going to agree with this apparently new teaching of the church."

The trouble is that is not a new teaching - it is consistent with the teaching of the Church throughout the ages.

Answers to questions raised by the pontiff's speech may be elusive until the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops gives its interpretation in coming months. The pope's remarks came during a special Vatican conference on the ethical dilemma raised in the care of patients in vegetative states.

Great, if history is any indicator, this will take years to resolve. Example: Ex Corde Ecclesiae.

Catholic health-care institutions have a duty to counsel families as relatives consider all their options - including transferring their loved one to a non-Catholic site if Catholic facilities decline to remove feeding tubes, Piccione said.

Despite the Catholic Health Association's analysis, Piccione said families who transfer vegetative patients out of Catholic institutions to remove feeding tubes wouldn't necessarily be seen by the church as sinning.

"I don't see Catholic ethics as being 'sin-based,' but rather oriented to identification and accomplishment of the good," Piccione said. "The good can't always be pursued or achieved, and persons in these cases are not seen as morally deficient or in sin."

The "good" in this case, is moving the patient to place where he can be starved to death...All without any culpability. What a novel approach!

Article here.