Pope Leo XIV on Sunday condemned assisted dying as immoral and calling it “false compassion.”
He told sick and disabled pilgrims at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes that causing death must never be treated as normal and that what a legislature permits is not therefore moral.
“No human law should ever make you lose the certainty of your dignity,” the pope said. “On the contrary, it is precisely in the name of this inalienable dignity of the human person that we must reject the temptation to cause death under the guise of false compassion. It is impossible to regard causing death as something normal. What is legal is not necessarily moral.”
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The warning came on the third day of Leo’s visit to France, after French lawmakers this year approved a right to assisted dying for some adults. French Catholic bishops had opposed the measure as a serious “rupture.”
Similar euthanasia and assisted suicide laws already exist in countries including the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada.
Leo, a native of Illinois, has also criticized a new law legalizing assisted suicide that took effect Sept. 12 in his home state, the 13th U.S. state with such a law.
At Lourdes, a shrine linked to the care of the sick, he called the sanctuary “a place for professing the beauty and sanctity of life.” About 150,000 pilgrims attended Mass on the prairie beside the basilica. People in wheelchairs filled the front rows.
The ill, he said, are not a “burden” but the “beating heart of our humanity and a precious treasure for the Church.”
“It is a joy for me to be with you here in Lourdes, where, for more than a hundred and fifty years, pilgrims from every corner of the world have come to entrust their physical, psychological and spiritual sufferings to Jesus… Indeed, fragility is not hidden here; instead it becomes the place of a sacred encounter.”
“The human person is ‘worthy’ simply by virtue of existing and of being destined for eternity. Our dignity cannot be measured or debated,” he said.
He told those living with “terrible pain” that a dark horizon does not cancel that worth.
Catholic teaching holds that every human life must be protected from conception until natural death. That teaching is the Church’s ground for opposing abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide. Leo pressed the same point throughout the France trip, telling officials that protecting the right to life is the “essential foundation of every other human right.”
At a care center for sick pilgrims, he appealed to doctors and nurses not to confuse killing with mercy.
“Here in Lourdes, the city of the sick and of hope, I appeal to the entire healthcare community to remember the profound meaning of your vocation, which is to care for a suffering person, not to eliminate that person. Yes, dear friends, be passionate servants of life. No one ever has the right on the basis of laboratory algorithms, to decide the life of a given embryo or elderly person! Medicine must never become the servant of programmed death!”
Meeting France’s bishops Sunday morning, he said the Church must speak in public “even if it is not always understood.”
“Even when her teaching is not followed, particularly on essential questions touching the foundations of civilisation, it remains necessary.”
His charge to Lourdes was the Church’s oldest claim about the weak: they are not problems to be solved by death. They are lives to be accompanied until God, not the state, ends them.
