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Skriven 2005-02-17 10:28:20 av Marc Lewis (1:396/45)
Ärende: Vatican Information Service (Press Release)
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              The following press release is Copyrighted by the
                        Vatican Information Service.
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                               VIS-Press releases

MEETING TO OPEN ON QUALITY OF LIFE, ETHICS OF HEALTH

VATICAN CITY, FEB 17, 2005 (VIS) - Bishop Elio Sgreccia, president of the
Pontifical Academy for Life, opened the press conference this morning in the
Holy See Press Office for the presentation of the General Assembly of the
Pontifical Academy for Life which will meet in the Vatican from February 21 to
23 on the theme "The Quality of Life and the Ethics of Health."

The bishop said the assembly will focus on "two current and weighty concepts:
'the quality of life' and that of 'health'." He said that "developed societies
push for attaining a better level of the quality of life and international
organizations intend to assure a better level of health," noting that "what
exactly is meant by 'quality of life', is not yet clear to the public and
perhaps not even to politicians themselves."

The academy president, in defining "quality of life" remarked that there are
many parameters: medical-health, socio-economic, with a greater consumption of
material goods today than in the past, and even ecological. But at the same
time, he said, "a very different meaning has progressively emerged," a
"reductive" meaning where "it is affirmed that where an acceptable level of
quality of life does not exist, life loses its value and does not merit being
lived." Here, he said, we see that "the quality of life becomes absolute and
the sacredness of life becomes relative."

There are also problems in defining the word "health," Bishop Sgreccia said.
"Even if health does not represent the ultimate good of the person, it is
however a very important one which demands the moral duty to preserve, support
and recover it." He noted the problems that have arisen since the World Health
Organization defined health "as 'complete physical, mental and social well-
being': this value has become utopian and mythical" and sometimes has "lethal
meanings," such as "the fact that, motivated by women's health, abortion was
legalized. ... Up to what point does 'the right to health' go? Is there a right
to health 'at all costs'? Or rather, is there a right to care?"

Jean Marie Le Mene, a magistrate and academy member, in his presentation
focused on health and health care in both rich countries, where "it has evolved
into a demand for well-being," and where medical expenses are ever higher and
poorly regulated, and in poor countries where, he said, "the administration of
health care is penalized by unsuitable situations."

He said that in wealthy countries "new needs are created", where often the sole
criteria is "desire" - the desire to have - or not have - a child, to be
beautiful, attractive, forever young. Such desires, he said, have led to
medically assisted procreation techniques for those who desire and cannot have
children, abortions for the undesired child, techniques to suppress unborn
children who are abnormal or handicapped, therapeutic cloning for those seeking
youth.

The health systems of developing countries, he added, are "victims of
ideologies" and of "piracies," the latter, he said, incorporating "biological
piracy, the privatization of the biological patrimony of the South" and
"juridical piracy, the attempts at the United Nations to authorize cloning, ...
even though the majority of the countries present are for this interdiction."

Fr. Maurizio Faggioni O.F.M., theologian and moralist, pointed out that "health
is not simply an absence of disease, but the harmony and integration of all
individual, physical, mental and spiritual energies towards a life project that
is particular to each individual."

With reference to the right to health, he affirmed that "it is not limited to
people who enjoy specific standards of living, but derives from the right to
life, a right that is rooted in each human being. ... Persistently-emerging
schools of thought estimate the value of each person's life and his right to
health care in a way proportional to the current or potential quality of his
life, in contrast Catholic morality prophetically announces the value of each
human life and the duty to care for others; a duty that is all the more
significant the greater its response to the appeal of simpler, poorer and more
defenseless lives."

Dr. Manfred Lutz, a neurologist, psychiatrist and member of the academy, said
that "today we live in the age of the real existence of the religion of health.
... Health, goodness, like almost everything in our society, is seen as a
product that can be manufactured."

"If health represents the highest value," he went on, "then the healthy man is
also the true man. And whoever is not healthy, and above all whoever can never
be healthy again, tacitly becomes a second or third class man."

Dr. Lutz underlined the fact that "salvation, according to Christian
conviction, is not to be found primarily in so-called good health, but rather
in the extreme situations of human life, situations that are disdained by the
religion of health as realities to avoid or deficits to eliminate. Yet it is
precisely in disability, illness, pain, old-age dying and death that one may
perceive the truth of life more vastly and clearly than in the passing of time
without significant problems."
OP/QUALITY LIFE/SGRECCIA VIS 050217 (890)

SUMMARY

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