Monday’s statement by the Vatican academy said Paglia “reiterates his ‘no’ towards euthanasia and assisted suicide, in full adherence to the magisterium.”
The academy added that the president’s comments were about a ruling in the Italian Constitutional Court and “the specific Italian situation.”
The archbishop gave his opinion, the statement said, that a “legal mediation” but “certainly not a moral one” is possible in order to keep assisted suicide a crime in some cases, while decriminalizing it under certain conditions.
Both assisted suicide and euthanasia are currently illegal in Italy, where the criminal law says that “anyone who causes the death of a man, with his consent, is punished with imprisonment from six to 15 years.” Assisted suicide is the providing of lethal drugs so patients can take their own lives, while euthanasia is the direct killing of patients by doctors.
A bill to decriminalize assisted suicide, known in Italian legislation as “homicide of the consenting,” passed the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Italy’s Parliament, last year. It has not yet been passed by Italy’s Senate.
The proposed law, which follows a 2019 ruling from Italy’s Constitutional Court, stipulates that medically assisted suicide would be decriminalized only in cases that meet the following conditions: “the person must be ‘kept alive by life-support treatment and suffering from an irreversible pathology, a source of physical or psychological suffering that he or she considers intolerable, but fully capable of making free and conscious decisions.’”
