Catholic News Agency reports (Dec. 10, 2025) that disability advocacy groups have filed a federal lawsuit challenging Delaware’s physician-assisted suicide law, alleging it discriminates against people with disabilities. The law, set to take effect Jan. 1, 2026, permits terminally ill adults with six-month prognoses to obtain lethal drugs. Plaintiffs argue the statute violates the Americans with Disabilities Act by creating a dual standard where disabled individuals expressing suicidal ideation receive “suicide help” rather than prevention. The complaint highlights the law’s lack of mandatory mental health evaluations and warns of insurance companies incentivizing cheaper suicide drugs over costly life-sustaining treatments. This legal challenge exposes the neo-pagan worldview masquerading as “compassion” while ignoring the Church’s immutable condemnation of self-murder in any circumstance.
The Naturalistic Reduction of Human Life
The lawsuit correctly identifies disability discrimination but remains trapped within the same naturalistic framework that birthed the assisted suicide law itself. Both sides operate within a paradigm that reduces man to his temporal existence, ignoring the supernatural finality of human life (Pius XII, Address to Midwives, Oct. 29, 1951). While plaintiffs decry unequal treatment of disabled persons, they accept the underlying premise that suicide could be legitimate for non-disabled individuals – a position condemned by the Church since the Apostolic era.
The article quotes plaintiff Daniese McMullin-Powell’s warning that “this law will put us at risk of deadly discrimination from doctors and insurance companies,” revealing the modern world’s abandonment of caritas in favor of utilitarian calculations. This confirms Pius XI’s warning in Quas Primas that society becomes “shaken and heading towards destruction” when it removes Christ from legislation. The lawsuit’s purely earthly concerns about “discrimination” and “healthcare spending” exemplify the very secularism the encyclical identifies as the root cause of societal collapse.
Omission of Catholic Doctrine on the Sanctity of Life
Nowhere does the article reference the Church’s perennial teaching that suicide violates the Fifth Commandment. The Catechism of the Council of Trent explicitly states: “He who kills himself sins against God… To destroy oneself is as criminal as to destroy another.” Pius XII’s 1957 condemnation of euthanasia as “contrary to natural law and the divine will” applies equally to assisted suicide. The plaintiffs’ narrow focus on disability discrimination implicitly accepts the conciliar sect’s silence on these doctrinal truths.
The Syllabus of Errors condemns the underlying philosophy enabling such laws: “Moral laws do not stand in need of the divine sanction” (Error #56) and “Right consists in the material fact” (Error #59). Delaware’s law operationalizes these condemned propositions by making temporal suffering the measure of life’s value rather than its divine origin and supernatural destiny. As Leo XIII taught in Libertas, human laws permitting intrinsic evils like suicide lack all legitimacy, becoming “violence rather than laws.”
Theological Implications of State-Sanctioned Suicide
The law’s requirement that patients be “terminal” with “six months or less to live” constitutes blasphemous presumption. Christ alone holds dominion over life and death: “It is appointed unto men once to die” (Heb 9:27). Physicians making mortality predictions usurp divine prerogatives, recalling the Syllabus‘ condemnation of those who place “human reason… as the sole arbiter of truth” (Error #3). The article’s reference to “self-administer[ing] lethal medication” whitewashes what is in fact state-sponsored murder, violating the Church’s consistent teaching that cooperation in suicide constitutes formal cooperation in evil (St. Alphonsus Liguori, Theologia Moralis).
The Silent Apostasy of “Catholic” Media
Catholic News Agency’s framing reveals the conciliar sect’s doctrinal bankruptcy. While reporting the lawsuit, the article never references:
1. The intrinsic evil of suicide as defined by the Fifth Commandment
2. The sacramental aids available through Last Rites
3. The redemptive value of suffering united to Christ’s Passion
4. The eternal consequences of dying in mortal sin
This silence confirms St. Pius X’s warning in Lamentabili sane exitu that Modernists reduce religion to “man’s self-awareness of his relationship to God” (Condemned Proposition #20). By treating assisted suicide as merely a policy debate about “discrimination” rather than a grave sin crying to heaven for vengeance, the outlet participates in the conciliar sect’s apostasy from Catholic truth.
Conclusion: Only Christ the King Offers True Protection
The lawsuit’s purely secular arguments – however valid politically – cannot address the theological root of this evil: society’s rejection of Christ’s social kingship. As Pius XI declared in Quas Primas: “Nations will be reminded by the annual celebration of this feast that not only private individuals but also rulers and princes are bound to give public honor and obedience to Christ.” Delaware’s law exemplifies the “pest of indifferentism” condemned in the Syllabus (Error #77), where civil authority presumes to judge matters belonging solely to divine law. Until societies acknowledge that “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12), such attacks on human dignity will escalate. The only remedy is the restoration of Catholic civilization under the reign of Christ the King.
Source:
Disability advocates sue Delaware over allegedly ‘discriminatory’ assisted suicide law (catholicnewsagency.com)
Date: 10.12.2025