Amplifying advocacy and pastoral care efforts, bolstering educational resources and championing life-affirming legislation are among the recommendations emerging from an international interfaith symposium on palliative care staged in Toronto.
The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) and the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAV) bestowed health care, medicine, ethics, legal and pastoral care experts with a forum to propose and discuss strategies for alleviating suffering and providing hopeful accompaniment for patients and their loved ones. The central goal was — and will be going forward — determining how to direct the world toward adopting a “narrative of hope.”
Speaking to the symposium, Pope Francis said that “authentic palliative care is radically different from euthanasia, which is never a source of hope or genuine concern for the sick and dying.”
“All who experience the uncertainties so often brought about by sickness and death need the witness of hope provided by those who care for them and who remain at their side,” the Pope said in his message to the symposium.
“In this regard, palliative care, while seeking to alleviate the burden of pain as much as possible, is above all a concrete sign of closeness and solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are suffering. At the same time, this kind of care can help patients and their loved ones to accept the vulnerability, frailty, and finitude that mark human life in this world.”
The Pope’s message was read on the opening night of the symposium by Archbishop Ivan Jurkovic, apostolic nuncio to Canada.
Quoting his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis called euthanasia “a failure of love, a reflection of a ‘throwaway culture’ in which ‘persons are no longer seen as a paramount value to be cared for and respected.’”
He also repeated a conviction he has shared before that assisted suicide and euthanasia constitute a “false compassion.”
“‘[C]ompassion,’ a word that means ‘suffering with,’ does not involve the intentional ending of a life but rather the willingness to share the burdens of those facing the end stages of our earthly pilgrimage,” he explained.
“Palliative care, then, is a genuine form of compassion, for it responds to suffering, whether physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual, by affirming the fundamental and inviolable dignity of every person, especially the dying, and helping them to accept the inevitable moment of passage from this life to eternal life,” he said.
“[O]ur religious convictions offer a more profound understanding of illness, suffering, and death, seeing these as part of the mystery of divine providence and, for the Christian tradition, a means toward sanctification,” the Pope continued in his remarks to the symposium.
“At the same time, the compassionate actions and respect shown by dedicated medical personnel and caregivers have often created the possibility for those at the end of their lives to find spiritual comfort, hope and reconciliation with God, family members and friends.”
CCCB president Bishop William McGrattan touted the importance of this symposium’s interreligious dimension during the closing news conference. Followers of Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, and Indigenous spirituality played an instrumental role in advancing the resolutions.
“All of these (traditions) contributed to the richness, to the narrative that we experienced, which was a narrative of hope,” said Bishop McGrattan, Bishop of Calgary. “Palliative care is a sign of hope especially for those who are experiencing grave illness near the end of life.”
PAV president Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia said the conference also promoted that “even when healing is no longer possible, it is always possible to care for others.”
The Italian prelate characterized palliative care as “a deeply human vision of medicine,” and he declared that “in the final stages of earthly existence, we must counter indifference and the culture of waste.”
The aforementioned realities articulated by Paglia and other hurdles or ethical considerations confronting palliative care were addressed in presentations by Dr. Mark Stoltenberg of Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Leonie Herx of Alberta Health Services and Chris Gastmans, a medical ethics professor at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. These May 22 morning lectures were followed by a roundtable discussion focused on devising practical and tangible solutions to address challenges and enhance the quality of care.
An interfaith panel assembled that afternoon to discuss how faith and culture play paramount roles in the palliative care journey. The panellists were Bishop Noel Simard of Valleyfield, Que; Rabbi Barak Hetsroni, chaplain and spiritual advisor of the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal; Julia Beazley, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s public policy director; and Dr. Ahmed Al-Awamer, a palliative care physician and educator for Toronto’s Princess Margaret Cancer Centre.
Dr. Nunziata Comoretto of the PAV and Louise Kashuba, the director of Covenant Health’s Palliative Institute in Edmonton, began the May 23 morning agenda with talks about promoting a culture of social responsibility in palliative care. Following these final two presentations, participants were assigned to one of the following five discussion groups: palliative care advocacy, community engagement and support, education, culturally responsive palliative care, and palliative care policy and legislation.
A post-symposium working group will transform the participants’ recommendations into resources that will help people from around the world build a narrative of hope and promote a culture of social responsibility in palliative care.
Bishop McGrattan said a suggestion pitched by the advocacy group meriting strong consideration is an ecumenical denunciation of medical assistance in dying (MAiD).
“As an interfaith intercoalition, (we) should actually approach the government again and point out all of what we are recognizing in and through this symposium,” said Bishop McGrattan. “There is a social responsibility, not only to address physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, but more importantly, as Dr. Leonie mentioned, this is a right, and this is something that the World Health Organization has stated is ethically required of every country around the world: access to palliative care.”
A key pillar of the community engagement and support roundtable discussion was how to expand the visibility and impact of Horizons of Hope: A Toolkit for Catholic Parishes on Palliative Care. This program, developed by a CCCB joint ad hoc committee, addresses questions parishioners might have about palliative care and examines how it should be understood through the lens of Catholic moral and pastoral theology.
Bishop McGrattan would like to see more Canadian and international Catholic parishes utilizing the toolkit and for it to be an advantageous resource for other denominations.
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