Vatican Conference to Focus on End-of-Life Treatment

Catholic World News reported yesterday and Catholic News Agency reported today that the Vatican Pontifical Academy for Life is organizing a conference on the treatment of people who are incurably ill and close to death: Close by the Incurably Sick and the Dying: Scientific and Ethical Aspects. A 2-minute audio clip from the press conference (in English) is available on Vatican Radio.

Bishop Elio Sgreccia, the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life explained that the conference will be held at the Vatican on February 25 and 26. The focus of the conference, Bishop Sgreccia said, would be on approach of death, when "human fragility is felt most deeply, a moment often intensified by solitude and suffering." Both doctors and pastors, he said, should support patients as they "draw near the entrace to full life: eternal life."

The Vatican conference will seek to clarify "the limits of the therapy and assistance given to the terminally ill and dying," the bishop continued. The questions to be addressed will include palliative care, the issue of when medical treatment produces real benefit, and the ethical restraints on needlessly prolonging life.

Msgr. Calipari told reporters that ethicists should unite two different approaches to questions about end-of-life treatment. The traditional approach questions whether treatment is "extraordinary," while a newer medical approach asks whether the treatment is proportional. Each approach has its strengths, he said, and together they might produce a more satisfactory ethical guide. Zbigniew Zylicz remarked that hospice staff members regularly cope with ethical questions involving treatment for the terminally ill, while concentrating on palliative care. Their work is complicated, he observed, by "the increasing societal demands of euthanasia."