Vatican nutrition text not a ruling on specific cases, says official

Published: 2007-09-14

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The Vatican's document saying it is a moral obligation to provide hydration and nutrition for individuals in a vegetative state is not meant to adjudicate specific cases but to provide moral guidelines, said an official with the U.S. bishops' pro-life secretariat. The brief Vatican document approved by Pope Benedict XVI "doesn't directly answer" some specific questions that might arise in specific cases, said Richard M. Doerflinger, deputy director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities. The debate surrounding end-of-life issues "is a debate that goes far more broadly than any one case," he told Catholic News Service Sept. 14. Giving the example of documents that were released in 1992, 1998 and 2004, Doerflinger said the debate "has been going on for years." The outcomes of individual circumstances, such as that of Terri Schindler Schiavo, "depend on disputes of facts" involved in the cases, he said. For example, he said, there were debates on whether or not Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman who died in March 2005 after a court ordered her feeding tube be removed, was in a persistent vegetative state. The U.S. bishops refer people to the local Catholic Church when such issues arise, he said.

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