Assisted suicide is a ‘race to the bottom’– Maria Steen

Modern culture is being increasingly consumed by what St John Paul II called a “culture of death”, according to Maria Steen, barrister and columnist with The Irish Catholic.
Speaking in Dublin on Saturday about Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical on the Gospel of Life, at an event hosted by the Knights of St Columbanus – Ms Steen criticised the spread of euthanasia and assisted suicide in Western societies.
Citing the encyclical’s theological and philosophical foundation, Ms Steen said the Church remains a defender of life from conception to natural death and “speaks truth to power” and that the former pope highlighted “how the threats to the elderly and the sick are aggravated by a cultural climate which fails to see any value or meaning in suffering”.
Ms Steen said that Pope John Paul II anticipated many of the societal shifts now facing Ireland and beyond. “He identified how practices like euthanasia would cease to be seen as evils to be tolerated and instead would be demanded as rights and even celebrated,” she said, adding that this is rooted in moral relativism and an abandonment of the transcendent view of human dignity.
“This is exactly what we have seen happening in our own country over the past 10 years. And once it starts, the pace gets even faster. It becomes a race to the bottom, a race to depravity… When a sense of God is lost so also a sense of man is lost. Without the Creator, the creature becomes unintelligible. Man simply becomes just another organism on the face of the Earth. He loses his transcendent character. No longer sees his life as something sacred that has been entrusted to his responsibility.
“Life just becomes a thing which man claims as his own property to do with as he will. When reference to God is removed, everything he has created becomes profoundly distorted without him. This eclipse of God and man leads to practical materialism, individualism, utilitarianism, and hedonism. And in this atmosphere, it becomes simply impossible to make any sense of suffering, despite the fact that none of us escapes it,” she said.