Rome (NEV), December 28, 2017 – “For a Christian person to seriously deal with life means also to deal with death. Death for a Christian is not a normal fact that belongs to the cycle of life, but it is the last enemy that will be defeated when God will finally be all in all (1 Corinthians 15, 26). So it is the Christian person’s duty to fight death by dealing with it, deciding in advance how to limit the power of death that disfigures life and transforms the body into a prison.
The New Testament reverses the common sense of living and dying: “In fact – writes the apostle Paul – for me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1, 21), “because you died and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3, 3).
For a Christian person, life is a reality wider than the one we experience. What matters most is that life widened by God, which the New Testament calls eternal life. Therefore, the power of death is not to end the experience of life, but its ability to divide the person from God and other people, isolating it in a dimension that we no longer recognize.
The fight against death means to oppose this separating force that shatters every communion. To see recognized by law one’s own provisions on how to face dying and death, it means to see that the typical Christian art of dying, is recognized.
This new law encourages an alliance between doctor and patient regarding dying. Death is too often a fact delegated only to the decision of the doctor who has no information on how the patient would have wanted to die; or a fact only regarding the patient who is waiting, without proper procedures, to die.
Knowing one’s health conditions and deciding in advance how to die means putting the experience of death back in a community context, encouraging the involvement of other Christian fellows in accompanying the dying person and his/her family.
For these three reasons: face death as the last fight, cultivate the art of dying and not be left alone when we die, welcome Law!”
, December 28, 2017 – “For a Christian person to seriously deal with life means also to deal with death. Death for a Christian){kind=link}