He spent his final hours in his Vatican apartment, surrounded by nine members of his mainly Polish inner circle. Three doctors were present, but no elaborate hospital technology to help prolong his life.
Just before the end, the pope's longtime secretary celebrated Mass and began to anoint the pope's hands with oil, according to one account. John Paul gripped his secretary's hand, an apparent farewell gesture to a faithful aide who helped the pontiff fulfill his wish to die unencumbered by tubes and machines.
Fine. I lied again. I do have a comment: How is it that this decision of how to end one's own life is not a problem in the most religious country in the world yet creates a torrent of controversy in a country supposedly with a separation of church and state?
1 comment:
I think that there was a lot of foolish allegiance to one's political cohort that made the Schiavo controversy much more pronounced. I suspect that a lot of conservatives fell into groupthink once a few conservatives started siding with the Schindlers, and the snowball kept on rolling downhill, picking up speed and mass. Did you see that on the Left?
These life-and-death issues really shouldn't be liberal or conservative, but they seemed to end up that way in this case. Maybe these days everything has to be Red State vs. Blue State.
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