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In this episode, Trent responds to a Belgian bishop whose views on morality contradict the infallible teachings of the Catholic church.
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Transcript:
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
I don’t like talking about the mistakes or the bad calls that the Catholic bishops make sometimes. I just want to defend the faith. But every now and then a bishop says something that directly contradicts the faith, and so something needs to be said. Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. And today I want to talk about a specific comment from a bishop in Belgium that’s similar to comments I’ve seen from other bishops, but it was really flagrant just in how erroneous it was in contradicting the doctrine of the faith. So before I do that though, if you could please like this video and subscribe to our channel, I would greatly appreciate it. Because this episode is prerecorded, I don’t know if we’re at a hundred thousand subscribers yet, but if we’re not, then we’re really, really close. So please help put us over the top and also consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com where you get access to my private study series and also monthly private patron-only live streams.
All right, so what motivated today’s episode was an interview Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp, Belgium gave. It’s recorded in an article from the Catholic News Agency and the Bishop appears to reject the Church’s teaching on the intrinsically evil nature of euthanasia. He said such a teaching provides too simple an answer that leaves no room for discernment. And then he said this. “Philosophy has taught me to never be satisfied with generic black and white answers. All questions deserve answers adapted to a situation. A moral judgment must always be pronounced according to the concrete situation, the culture, the circumstances, the context. We will always oppose the wish of some to end a life too prematurely. But we must recognize that a request for euthanasia from a young man of 40 is not equivalent to that of a person of 90 who faces an incurable illness.”
All right, there’s so much that is wrong here that needs to be unpacked. First, if by euthanasia Bishop Bonny means the direct killing of an innocent human being because he or she is suffering, then the Bishop is gravely in error. The Catechism calls euthanasia murder in paragraph 2324, and the CDF called euthanasia an intrinsically evil act in its 2020 document Samaritanus bonus. In February 2022, Pope Francis gave a homily on St. Joseph, the Patron of a Good Death, and he said, “We must accompany people towards death but not provoke death or facilitate any form of suicide.” Keep in mind, by the way, that the Church’s infallibility is restricted to the bishops as a whole when they choose to infallibly define a matter, or the Pope as an individual when he makes a definition ex cathedra on faith or morals. In other cases, you could have bishops erring, and so the faithful and their brother bishops, we need to correct them. A Catholic also could never follow any of their instructions to do something evil.
So how can a bishop get away with saying something like this? In a lot of cases, you have theologians, and in rare cases, bishops who say a certain teaching needs to be developed. Now, before you say no development is authentic, please remember, Church teachings have developed over time even on this issue related to the ending of someone’s life. For example, the Roman Ritual, a document from 1614, denied funerals to victims of suicide unless the person who committed suicide was insane. The 1917 Code of Canon Law also denied funerals for suicide victims who killed themselves deliberato consilio. It allowed for a few more exceptions, but it wasn’t until 1980 that the Church lifted the general rule that prohibited funerals for suicide victims, because we now had a better knowledge of mental illness.
The Church has always taught that suicide is gravely evil, but it developed its understanding of who exactly is culpable of this sin. But while pastoral care for suicide victims, that has changed over time, the teaching on the wrongness of suicide, assisted suicide, and euthanasia can’t change. It has not changed and it cannot change. For example, in 1998, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith said the wrongness of euthanasia must be held definitively because it is taught in an infallible way by the Church’s ordinary and universal magisterium. It also says that the Church, through its universal teaching, has infallibly taught that prostitution and fornication are sinful as well. Here’s the full paragraph.
“The doctrine on the illicitness of euthanasia taught in the encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae can also be recalled. Confirming that euthanasia is a grave violation of the law of God, the Pope declares that this doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written Word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium. Other examples of moral doctrines which are taught as definitive by the universal and ordinary magisterium of the Church are the teaching on the illicitness of prostitution and of fornication.”
The infallible teaching in the Church’s ordinary and universal magisterium, or what it is taught everywhere and always, can be seen in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, where Pope St. John Paul II said the Church simply has no ability to ordain women to the priesthood. The doctrine of the intrinsically evil nature of euthanasia is something the Church has definitively taught. In other words, any debate about the issue has been brought to an end, Latin, [foreign language 00:05:55]. As for Bishop Bonny’s disdain towards black and white answers and philosophy, I wonder if you would say that declaring racism or wage theft intrinsically evil also constituted faulty black and white thinking. Those who condemn absolute answers are always confident that their frameworks, at least, should be absolutely accepted.
Now, keep in mind that it’s not wrong to discontinue burdensome medical care in some cases. Murder is always wrong, but it’s not murder to allow the natural course of someone’s life to come to an end and not intervene with costly or painful treatments to keep someone alive. When Bishop Bonny brought up age being a factor regarding euthanasia, he was wrong because age never justifies murder. But age can justify refusing certain treatments. For example, it may be an irrational suicide for a healthy 40-year-old man to reject what for him is a mildly burdensome treatment. He needs to have a normal lifespan. But a 90-year-old man dying from multiple organ failure might reject the same treatment if it was much more painful and burdensome for him and only provided a very small fraction of life to live. However, to be clear, it is always wrong to justify the intentional killing of a person just on their age or disability.
If we withdrew medical care from a sick 90-year-old and he continued living, we would not be justified in smothering him with a pillow. There is a difference between discontinuing disproportionate care and a person just happens to live still, even if we don’t foresee it, and intentionally killing someone because we foresaw and desired their death. That is always wrong, but it’s not always wrong to discontinue lifesaving care, and it isn’t wrong to discontinue care that is disproportionate and now no longer provides a benefit for the patient. But what’s most shocking about the Bishop saying this about euthanasia is that this is a teaching all Catholics must accept because it’s to be held definitively. And if the Bishop can’t accept that, he has no business being a bishop entrusted with the souls in his diocese, especially those who at most risk of being murdered by euthanasia. This is especially the case in Belgium where Pope Francis has already had to admonish Catholic organizations that have supported euthanasia in this country.
Speaker 3:
Pope Francis is cracking down on a Belgian Catholic charity performing euthanasia. The Brothers of Charity is the group running the psychiatric centers and is mainly made up of laypeople. Each of the religious Brothers serving on the board has been ordered to sign a joint letter with the General Superior declaring adherence to Church teaching. The Brothers of Charity group is expected to face legal action and have its Catholic status revoked if it does not rescind its euthanasia policy.
Trent Horn:
I pray that Bishop Bonny will do what other bishops have done, which is, even if it isn’t ideal, he backtracks this erroneous statement. Ideally, a bishop who makes an error would repent and do penance for the evil of what he said, but we don’t get that a lot lately, so at least backtracking and dropping the error is something to hope for. One recent example of this would be Cardinal Hollerich, who said in 2022 that the Church’s teaching on homosexuality was no longer correct, but this flies in the face of the Catechism, which says the teaching on homosexuality is rooted in sacred scripture.
Cardinal Hollerich then backtracked in a press conference a few months later where he said the following. “I fully believe in the tradition of the Church, and what is important in this process is not a change of doctrine, but what is important is to listen to everybody, to listen also to the suffering of people. I think of parents, for instance, of people concerned, and to have a change not of doctrine, but a change of attitude, that we are a Church where everybody can feel at home. So I’m not in favor of changing any doctrine.”
And hopefully he means what he says. But as I said earlier, I don’t want to fall down the rabbit hole of critiquing and analyzing every single instance when a bishop makes a bad call or a mistake. I’m glad there are people who offer this kind of commentary, and I’m glad there are people who are in positions of leadership to give the bishops and cardinals feedback when they say something bad, dumb, imprudent, or bordering on heresy even. They can at least backtrack if they aren’t willing to do the right thing and apologize for their error.
However, as we saw with Bishop Bonny, there are cases where a bishop doesn’t just give a confusing message or a prudential judgment that causes scandal. There are cases, rare as they are, where a bishop might reject a teaching of the Church, including ones that must be held definitively. Whenever that happens, I consider it my duty to charitably call out their error. This often happens on the left, but it can also happen in conservative traditional aspects of the Church, like Archbishop Viganò, who seems to have endorsed the grave error of sedevacantism. I’m not going to go through all of that because the arguments he uses are similar to those that I addressed in my video on why Father Altman is wrong about sedevacantism in light of Pope Francis’s pontificate. If you want to see more of my thoughts on that, check out the link in the description below.
Finally, I hope that you’ll continue to pray for the Church because throughout its history, we have had bishops who have failed to uphold the faith. At one point, the Eastern Church was so overrun with the heresy of Arianism that Bishop Athanasius was said to be Athanasius contra munda, Athanasius against the world. But the Church survived that crisis, as it survived many other crises in its history, through the prayer and faithfulness of its members who have kept the faith in prayer, word, and deed, and listened to the calling of the Holy Spirit to help them renew the Church and constantly give it renewal. Well, I hope that this was helpful for you all and yeah, I just hope that you have a very blessed day.
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