The indefatigable Pope Francis will be on the road again Sept. 26-28, less than two weeks after finishing a marathon voyage to Asia and Oceania. His destination this time is closer to home: the northern European countries of Luxembourg and Belgium.
Western Europe has hardly been the focus of attention for Pope Francis, the first pope from the Global South, who has preferred to reach out to developing countries and the non-Catholic world. Yet this trip will qualify, in another sense, as a visit to the “peripheries” that he has always identified as his mission field.
Once a bastion of Catholic culture, Belgium, where the Pope will spend most of his time, increasingly exemplifies the post-Christian, secular West. Fifty percent of Belgians identified as Catholic in 2022, a drop of 16% from a decade earlier, according to the country’s bishops’ conference. Only 8.9% of those attend Mass even once a month.
No aspect of Belgian society reflects this shift more starkly than its embrace of euthanasia. Belgium was the second country in the world to legalize the practice, after the neighboring Netherlands, in 2002. Twelve years later, it legalized euthanasia for minors, with no minimum age specified.
The practice has steeply grown in popularity there over two decades, to 3,423 cases in 2023 from 235 cases in 2003, according to official statistics. Last year’s number, a record high, represented a rise of 15% over the previous year. The most common reason given was cancer, but 89 people were euthanized in 2023 due to psychiatric disorders or cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s.
The Pope’s visit to Belgium thus offers him an occasion to address a practice he has denounced as reflective of a “throwaway culture,” and one increasingly common in various parts of the world.
Euthanasia — ending the life of a patient who is enduring a serious physical or mental illness — is legal in Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain and most of Australia. Assisted suicide — when patients take life-ending medication themselves, with medical guidance — is legal in Austria, Switzerland and several U.S. states including California, New Jersey, Washington and Colorado.
“Euthanasia is an act of homicide that no end can justify and that does not tolerate any form of complicity or active or passive collaboration,” the Vatican’s doctrinal office said in a letter published in 2020. “Helping the suicidal person to take his or her own life is an objective offense against the dignity of the person asking for it, even if one would be thereby fulfilling the person’s wish,” the same office said in a declaration earlier this year. Both documents were personally approved by Pope Francis.
When Belgium legalized euthanasia, the country’s bishops’ conference denounced the move as “an attack on the fundamental respect for human life.” But other Catholic institutions have been more accommodating.
A 2006 study by the Catholic University of Leuven found that more than half of Catholic hospitals in Belgium’s Flanders region allowed euthanasia, with more than a quarter permitting it for patients who were not terminally ill.
In 2017, a Belgian hospital chain affiliated with the Brothers of Charity, a Catholic religious congregation, decided to allow the euthanizing of psychiatric patients without terminal illnesses. The Vatican’s doctrinal office ruled that the chain could no longer identify itself as Catholic and the congregation cut its ties with the hospitals.
Earlier this year, the president of the Christian Mutual Society, one of Belgium’s major insurance companies and an institution with Catholic roots, argued for relaxing the current rules permitting euthanasia for people with an incurable disease or in unbearable pain, to include those who simply feel their life is over. He cited the costs of caring for Belgium’s rapidly aging population in support of such a change.
The Belgian bishops denounced that proposal, yet as euthanasia has grown in popularity in the country, they have had to address the challenge of ministering to Catholics who choose a practice contrary to the teachings of the Church. In a 2019 document, the bishops stressed that hospital chaplains should continue to accompany patients who choose euthanasia, praying for and with them, though “this accompaniment is in no way an approval” of their decision.
The Vatican’s doctrinal office stated in 2020 that a priest may not administer the sacraments to patients who insist on euthanasia, and that “those who spiritually assist these persons should avoid any gesture, such as remaining until the euthanasia is performed, that could be interpreted as approval of this action. Such a presence could imply complicity in this act.”
Yet some clergy in Belgium, as elsewhere, have shown more leniency.
Father Gabriel Ringlet, author of a widely read book on “spiritual support up to euthanasia,” has proposed that people devise personal rituals for the process.
Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp, a leading progressive, told an interviewer last year that he disagreed with the 2020 document of the Vatican’s doctrinal office “that euthanasia is always an intrinsic evil, no matter the circumstance. It’s too simplistic a response that leaves no room for distinguishing.”
“A request for euthanasia from a 40-year-old man is not equivalent to that of a 90-year-old person facing an incurable illness. We must learn to better define these concepts and distinguish between situations,” Bishop Bonny said.
Pope Francis, who is scheduled to give four speeches in Belgium in addition to a homily at Mass, could choose to address euthanasia more or less explicitly on one or more of those occasions. Whatever he might say, the sight of the 87-year-old Pope in a wheelchair, defying his ailments to carry out his ministry in a foreign land, will be unspoken testimony to his conviction that life amid suffering remains worth living.