The EWTN News article of March 13, 2026, reports on a database compiled by Aging with Dignity showing over 14,000 recorded assisted suicide deaths in the U.S. since 1997, with the real number likely higher due to missing state data. It highlights lax enforcement, complications from drugs, and the expansion to non-terminal conditions like lupus and diabetes. Jamie Towey of Aging with Dignity states safeguards like psychiatric screenings are ignored, citing Oregon and Washington providing them in less than 1% of cases. Matt Vallière of the Patients’ Rights Action Fund calls the policy “dangerous and discriminatory” and notes a nearly 1,000% increase in 10 years. The article frames the issue as a failure of “safeguards” and a lack of transparency, urging political action.
This analysis exposes not merely a policy failure but the logical, diabolical culmination of the apostasy that has infected the post-conciliar “Church.” The article’s very framework—debating “safeguards” for murder—reveals a mindset that has utterly abandoned the absolute, non-negotiable moral law of God. It operates within the naturalistic, humanistic paradigm of the “abomination of desolation” standing in the holy place, where the sanctity of life is subordinated to the idol of personal autonomy and the cult of suffering is replaced by the cult of death.
The Theological Bankruptcy of “Safeguards” in a Culture of Death
I. Factual Deconstruction: The Illusion of “Regulated” Murder
The database’s findings are presented as shocking violations of a system that could be “fixed” with better enforcement. This is a fatal concession. The core error is the premise that the state can legitimately “legalize” assisted suicide at all. The article quotes Towey saying, “Following Canada’s lead, suicide-affirming care is being normalized… There is a growing expectation that people seen as a ‘burden’ on society have the duty to die.” This admission exposes the true goal: not compassionate care, but a utilitarian elimination of the weak. The expansion to “non-terminal conditions like lupus, complications from a fall, anorexia, and diabetes” and the cryptic “other” category prove the slippery slope is not a hypothetical but the intended design. The 14% complication rate in Oregon, involving “seizures and vomiting while ingesting these experimental, unregulated poisons,” demonstrates the barbaric, anti-medical nature of the act. Yet the article’s solution is more “transparency” and “safeguards,” treating murder as a public health policy matter. This is the language of the “new morality” condemned by St. Pius X in *Pascendi Dominici gregis* and *Lamentabili sane exitu*, which reduces sin to social harm and elevates human opinion over divine law.
II. Linguistic Analysis: The Euphemistic Veil Over Apostasy
The article’s language is a masterclass in modernist obfuscation. Terms like “assisted suicide,” “suicide-affirming care,” “physician-assisted suicide,” and “death with dignity” are employed. These are not neutral descriptors but ideological weapons. They sanitize the direct, intentional killing of an innocent person—a crime crying out to heaven for vengeance—by framing it as a medical “option,” a form of “care.” The phrase “safeguards are ignored” implies that the underlying act is permissible if properly managed. This is the precise “hermeneutics of discontinuity” at work: the absolute Fifth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex. 20:13), which the Church has always understood to prohibit direct euthanasia, is silently relativized. The silence on the supernatural destiny of the human person, the state of grace, and the judgment of God is deafening. The article operates entirely on the naturalistic plane of “burden,” “dignity,” and “care,” which is the very “cult of man” denounced by Pope Pius IX in the *Syllabus of Errors* (Error #58: “All the rectitude and excellence of morality ought to be placed in the accumulation and increase of riches… and the gratification of pleasure”) and by St. Pius X as the synthesis of Modernism.
II. Theological Confrontation: Christ the King vs. the Culture of Death
The article never once invokes the Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ over individuals, families, and states. This omission is not accidental; it is doctrinally necessary for the apostate paradigm. Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical *Quas Primas* (1925), which the article’s authors would presumably disregard as pre-“reform,” teaches with absolute clarity: “The Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men… He is indeed the source of salvation for individuals and for the whole… Let rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ.” The Pope explicitly links the rejection of Christ’s reign to the societal ills of his time: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states… the entire human society had to be shaken, because it lacked a stable and strong foundation.” The assisted suicide epidemic is the precise, predicted fruit of this removal. The state, having denied Christ’s authority, now arrogates to itself the power to define who is a “burden” and whose life is “not worth living.” This is the logical endpoint of Error #77 of the *Syllabus*: “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship,” which leads to Error #55: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.” A state separated from Christ becomes a Leviathan that decides the value of human life based on utilitarian calculus, directly opposing the Catholic principle that life is sacred because it is created in the image of God and redeemed by Christ.
IV. Symptomatic Analysis: The Conciliar Revolution’s Foul Fruit
The assisted suicide movement does not exist in a vacuum. It is the offspring of the “new theology” and “new morality” that flooded the Church after Vatican II. The *Syllabus of Errors*, particularly Section VII on “Natural and Christian Ethics,” is a prophetic condemnation of the very principles underlying assisted suicide:
* Error #56: “Moral laws do not stand in need of the divine sanction…” – This is the foundation for “safeguards” based on human law, not divine law.
* Error #58: “…all the rectitude and excellence of morality ought to be placed in the accumulation and increase of riches… and the gratification of pleasure.” – The “dignity” argument in assisted suicide is a perverse gratification of the will-to-power over suffering.
* Error #64: “It is lawful to refuse obedience to legitimate princes, and even to rebel against them… when done through love of country.” – This perversion of the common good justifies state-sanctioned killing for “social benefit.”
St. Pius X’s *Lamentabili sane exitu* condemns propositions that directly enable the euthanasia ideology:
* Proposition #58: “Truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him.” – The absolute prohibition of killing the innocent is “developed” into a “right to die.”
* Proposition #59: “Christ did not proclaim any specific, all-encompassing doctrine suitable for all times and peoples…” – The Fifth Commandment’s application to euthanasia is dismissed as a “development” of consciousness.
* Proposition #63: “The Church is incapable of effectively defending evangelical ethics, because it steadfastly adheres to its views, which cannot be reconciled with modern progress.” – This is the explicit rationale of the “safeguards” lobby: the Church’s immutable teaching must yield to “progress.”
The article’s authors, likely within the conciliar sect’s “pro-life” movement, are trapped in this contradiction. They appeal to “safeguards” and “transparency” within a legal framework that is intrinsically evil. They fail to proclaim, as the pre-1958 Magisterium did, that any law permitting assisted suicide is a null, tyrannical law that must be resisted with all lawful means, and that the politicians who enact it incur automatic excommunication (*Trent, Sess. XXV, can. 19*). Their language of “policy” and “data” is a capitulation to the secular, Masonic principle of the state as the supreme arbiter of life and death, condemned by Pius IX in his allocution to the Prussian bishops: “no power in the world… can deprive of the pastoral office those whom the Holy Ghost has made Bishops…,” a principle applying to the state’s usurpation of God’s power over life.
V. The Omission That Is the Accusation: The Silence of the Supernatural
The gravest charge against the article is not what it says, but what it omits. There is no mention of:
* **Sin:** The mortal sin of murder (direct abortion/euthanasia).
* **Grace:** The necessity of the state of grace for a holy death.
* **Sacraments:** The role of the Last Rites, Viaticum, and the Sacrament of Extreme Unction in preparing for a Christian death.
* **Suffering:** Its redemptive value, united to the Cross of Christ, as taught by St. Pius X’s encyclical on the Sacred Heart and the tradition of the Church.
* **Eternal Judgment:** The reality that assisted suicide is a direct rebellion against God’s sovereign right to determine the hour of death.
* **The Social Reign of Christ the King:** The duty of the state to recognize and protect life as an inviolable right derived from God, not from human consent.
This silence is the hallmark of the post-conciliar “Church” and its allied movements. It is a “different gospel” (Gal. 1:8). The article treats death as a social policy problem, not a supernatural event. This is the “naturalism” Pius IX anathematized (Errors #1-7). The true Catholic response, from *Quas Primas*, is: “The Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men… He is the author of prosperity and true happiness for individual citizens as well as for the state.” Happiness (*beatitudo*) is not the absence of pain but the vision of God. To eliminate suffering by eliminating the sufferer is the ultimate act of despair, rejecting the Cross and the promise of eternal life.
VI. The Only Catholic Response: Integral Rejection and the Call to Arms
The data showing a 1,000% increase is not a call for “better safeguards.” It is a damning indictment of a society that has legally institutionalized murder, and of a “Church” that has lost the courage to call it by its name. The “usurper antipope” Leo XIV and his “conciliar sect” have normalized this apostasy through their ambiguous statements on “dignity” and their failure to excommunicate Catholic politicians who promote these laws. This is the fulfillment of the “diversion from apostasy” noted in the critique of Fatima: the real danger is not external communism but internal Modernism, which now wears the mask of “compassionate” killing.
The faithful are not called to “get involved in informing state lawmakers” within a system that has declared war on God. They are called to **non-collaboration**, **public confession of the unchanging faith**, and **prayer and penance** for the conversion of those in error. They must look to the true Church, which endures in the faithful who hold the integral Catholic faith, led by bishops with valid sacraments (prior to 1968) and priests ordained in the traditional rite. The “structures occupying the Vatican” have no authority to teach on morals, having embraced the errors of *Lamentabili* and the *Syllabus*.
The article’s data is a call to arms for the remnant: to restore the public reign of Christ the King, to demand that laws be based on the Ten Commandments, and to reject any compromise with the “culture of death.” As Pius XI declared in *Quas Primas*, “the annual celebration of this solemnity will also remind states that not only private individuals, but also rulers and governments have the duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him: for it will remind them of the final judgment, in which Christ… will very severely avenge these insults.” The assisted suicide industry will be avenged by the King of Kings. Our duty is to choose His side now, in full, integral Catholic faith, and to have no part in the abomination.
Source:
‘Safeguards are ignored’ around assisted suicide, per new database (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 13.03.2026