It is not, it’s fair to say, a universal view among Catholic priests that MPs who vote the wrong way on assisted dying and the decriminalisation of abortion up to birth should be punished by excluding them from communion. But so it has turned out with Chris Coghlan, the Lib Dem MP for Dorking and Horley. He voted for assisted suicide and didn’t vote at all on the Antoniazzi amendment allowing women to abort up to birth. Now he’s complaining that his parish priest is intent on denying him communion at mass.
Or as he put it on X:
My Catholic Priest publicly announced at every mass he was denying me Holy Communion following the assisted dying vote. Children who are friends of my children were there. This followed a direct threat in writing to do this four days before the vote.
In a piece in the Observer, he explained:
I was deeply disturbed to receive an email from my local priest four days before the vote on Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill saying if I voted in favour I would be “an obstinate public sinner”. Worse, I would be complicit in a “murderous act, which must always be forbidden and excluded”. Such a vote would, he wrote, be “a clear contravention of the Church’s teaching, which would leave me in the position of not being able to give you holy communion, as to do so would cause scandal in the Church.
The priest is in fact entitled to deny communion to those ’obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin’ under canon 915 of the Code of Canon law. And plainly, in terms of the teaching of the Church, anyone voting to pass a law for assisted suicide – giving someone poison for the specific purpose of doing away with themselves, as opposed to, say, refusing life support – runs counter to the teaching of the Church in the most public possible way. The priest was arguably correct to describe him as complicit in a murderous act, though Chris Coghlan himself maintains that assisted suicide (whereby a practitioner presents the patient with a lethal dose of barbiturates or some other cocktail of toxins) is different from direct euthanasia, whereby someone, for instance, injects the patient with toxins directly. I’m not sure that’s quite the distinction he thinks it is; a murderous act pretty well covers giving someone a lethal dose of poison, even if it’s actually delivered by the would-be suicide (let’s see how long that provision lasts). And voting to legalise this process is as morally culpable as taking part in it.
The question is, whether a public denunciation is the best way to go about changing hearts and minds, even those of self-regarding LibDems. My nice liberal priest friend thinks Coghlan’s priest ‘is a prat and he should be ashamed of himself. It goes against everything we stand for; we’re not in the business of publicly punishing people. The man presumably was following the dictates of conscience, which is the first law. I don’t think it helps the church and I don’t think it helps this particular chap to change his mind.’
And naturally, my liberal clerical friend quotes the late Pope Francis on the matter, to the effect that ‘communion is not a reward for the perfect but medicine for the soul’. That’s one way of looking at it; the other, more conventional view, is that you shouldn’t take the eucharist if you’re in a state of grave sin. (Me, I’d like to see that definition more widely applied.)
But all this fuss tends to distract, I think, from the actual issue as to whether the Church’s approach to assisted suicide is right. And there’s absolutely nothing in the bishops’ statements on the issue that is specifically religious. That is to say, the Catholic and, I’d say, the Christian view, is nothing else than the moral view that people who aren’t remotely religious can share. You may not, like the bishops, regard life as a gift from God, but there’s nothing specifically Catholic about their concerns:
Can MPs guarantee that the scope of the Bill will not be extended? In almost every country where assisted suicide has been introduced the current scope is wider than was originally intended. What role, if any, will the judiciary have in the process? We were told that judicial oversight was a necessary and vital part of the process; now we are told it isn’t needed at all. What will protect the vulnerable from coercion, or from feeling a burden on family? Can the National Health Service cope with assisted suicide or will it, as the Health Secretary has warned, cause cuts elsewhere in the NHS? Can MPs guarantee that no medical practitioner or care worker would be compelled to take part in assisted suicide? Would this mean the establishment of a ‘national death service’?
In contrast to the provisions of this Bill, what is needed is first-class, compassionate palliative care at the end of our lives. This is already provided to many in our society but, tragically, is in short supply and underfunded. No-one should be dispatched as a burden to others. Instead, a good society would prioritise care for the elderly, the vulnerable, and the weak.
As Cardinal Nichols put it:
Once assisted suicide is approved by the law, a key protection of human life falls away. Pressure mounts on those who are nearing death, from others or even from themselves, to end their life in order to take away a perceived burden of care from their family, for the avoidance of pain, or for the sake of an inheritance.
The radical change in the law now being proposed risks bringing about for all medical professionals a slow change from a duty to care to a duty to kill.
Even Chris Coghlan might concede that much.
This is why it’s so insanely annoying that he’s trotting out the usual canards about Catholicism in public life. ‘I am not the Catholic MP for Dorking and Horley. I am the Liberal Democrat MP for Dorking and Horley,’ he writes, a la John F. Kennedy.
But there is nothing specifically religious about the Church’s position – if you exclude that bit about life being God’s gift. It is one which any conscientious individual might take on prudent and rational grounds, without any spiritual motivation whatever, unless we are to assume that concern for vulnerable people is a Christian prerogative. Coghlan doesn’t need to swank about not being bossed about by priests – a position highly gratifying to any English parliamentarian, invoking all sorts of latent prejudice – but instead he should ask himself whether the Church itself has a point. Its argument isn’t arcanely religious unless it’s arcanely religious to say that human life is sacred. By turning this into a Martin Luther moment – Coghlan stands up to bossy cleric – he is distracting attention from the fact that he voted for a measure which will diminish the value of human life at its most vulnerable.
I don’t in fact think the priest is being helpful here, though he was perfectly within his rights to warn Chris Coghlan that his vote was at odds with his faith. Publicly condemning him risks turning this rather tiresome Lib Dem into some sort of poster boy for the rights of conscience. But conscience can be a tricky organ; influenced by fashion and opinion as well as by an innate moral sense. Right now, the real problem isn’t whether Coghlan will be turned away from the altar rail; it’s whether institutions such as Catholic hospices will be required to participate in assisted suicide or whether they will in fact receive specific protection by law to prevent that happening. If they are required to participate in helping people kill themselves, they’ll have to close. Over to you, Chris ‘Compassion’ Coghlan.
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