From the Schiavo Revisited thread:
"Many traditional and "conservative" Catholics were misled by unprincipled politicians and pseudo-conservative talk-show hosts into thinking of it as a pro-life or anti-euthanasia case.
It was no such thing...
That (the above) was a judgement about the entire case, not merely about the question of "extraordinary means." People who were convinced that Mrs. Schiavo could swallow without assistance, for example, would therefore have been outraged by that judgement, because it rashly (and in their judgement, inaccurately) narrowed the case down to a question of the continuance of extraordinary intervention.
I have also learned from the text of Fr. Joseph McFadden, and it is really very instructive to have witnessed the enormous scandal taken from this case by various parties and then to see what this moralist wrote about that point so many years ago.
In actual medical practice, however, I would be very much opposed to any cessation of intravenous feeding in the above case. The fact that this form of nourishment has already been in use in this case necessitates a different outlook on the problem. First, the danger of scandal would be very real: members of a family who know that their loved one is expected to live several weeks and who then witness the withdrawal of nourishment, followed by death within a day, would almost surely believe that the patient had been deliberately killed in order to avert further suffering.
In your 7:53 post, you gave us one Cekada quote using McFadden, and you put a second McFadden quote beneath it, implying the second quote refuted what Fr. Cekada had said.
I responded by saying that the
second quote from McFadden did not refute the
general principle that Cekada took from the
first quote of McFadden.
The reason: McFadden was talking about a
specific case, and not saying the action was EVIL IN ITSELF, but that he would be against it in practice because of OTHER evils that could occur incidentally.
So in your 9:10 post, you delete the first quote and replace it with something Fr. said about unprincipled politicians, and people being "scandalized." And you call it Fr's general
JUDGMENT" on the case.
But a "general
JUDGMENT" is not the same thing as "
general moral PRINCIPLE," which is in fact what Fr was talking about.
What is more, Fr.'s statement still gets you nowhere anyway, because under McFadden's principle, what you describe are only INCIDENTAL evils. These do not make the action Fr. was defending EVIL IN ITSELF.
It's all just more evidence to pop the bubble on the phony "accessory to murder" charge you and the Cabal have been spreading around.
Topic: Fr. Cekada - Two Emails on Schiavo (Read 4158 times)