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Published: April 4, 2007

Cardinal Mahony Publicly Decries Suicide Bill --- and Fabian Nuñez

“We should be troubled that Fabian Nuñez --- who has worshipped here in this cathedral, is a Catholic --- somehow has not understood and grasped the culture of life but has allowed himself to get swept into this other direction, the culture of death.”

"As we look around us, we still see many elements of a culture of death," said Cardinal Roger Mahony. "We have a new danger, an assault on life. It has come again in the form of a bill in the state Assembly."

Monday was the second anniversary of the death of Pope John Paul II, and Cardinal Mahony, during Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles, urged Catholics to oppose a state bill, AB 374, which would allow doctors to prescribe lethal doses of medication to terminally ill patients with only six months to live. Safeguards include a provision that two doctors have to concur on the diagnosis and verify the patient’s ability to make the death choice.

Though euphemistically called, “Compassionate Choices,” the bill “is nothing more than an assisted suicide bill,” said Mahony. The bill has received support from Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, whom the cardinal singled out in his talk. “We should be troubled that Fabian Nuñez --- who has worshipped here in this cathedral, is a Catholic --- somehow has not understood and grasped the culture of life but has allowed himself to get swept into this other direction, the culture of death,” said Mahony.

Though a Catholic, Nuñez seems untroubled by his Church’s criticisms of his support for suicide. In February, he said, though Mahony had asked him to oppose the suicide bill, he was “ready to buck my church.” He said he would call Mahony, but that his “toughest conversation” was the one he was “going to have with my Catholic mother, who wanted me to be a priest.”

Of those who would “benefit” from “Compassionate Choices,” Nuñez said, “the question is how much pain and suffering is involved and how much of that person's dignity is taken away from him or her.”

Nuñez is not the only Catholic to support the suicide bill. Its co-author, Assemblywoman Patty Berg (D-Eureka), said in 2005, "I am a Roman Catholic, a practicing Roman Catholic.” The bill, she said, “is all about the freedom of the individual to make choices, and it respects the freedom for your choices to be different from my choices, and the people of California get that.”

But the Church doesn’t “get that”; was that important to Berg? "Church doctrine is against family planning, Church doctrine is against condoms for AIDS [sic], Church doctrine is against divorce; what can I say?" she said.

The suicide bill, to Berg, is “just like Roe v. Wade, it's just like abortion. If you support choice at the beginning of life, you can't reconcile not supporting choice at the end."

Last month, in a letter, San Francisco's Archbishop George Niederauer asked Assemblywoman Fiona Ma to withdraw her support from the suicide bill. "Legalization of assisted suicide ... victimizes our poorest, weakest and most vulnerable members of society," he said.

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