c. 2005 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ A participant in a Vatican conference on the ethical values of sickness and health warned Thursday (Feb. 17) against an emerging new “religion of health” that turns the sick into second-class citizens and supports euthanasia.

“I believe that there really exists such a vision of man that is progressively becoming dominant throughout the world today, such a vision that could be called the `religion of health,”’ Manfred Lutz told a Vatican news conference called to discuss the forthcoming meeting of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

Lutz said that the ailing 84-year-old Pope John Paul II exemplifies a Christian view that is the opposite of the “religion of health” and values life from its start to its natural end even in sickness and pain, which mirror Christ’s suffering on the cross.

In 1984, at age 64, John Paul wrote the apostolic letter “Salvifici Doloris, On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering,” Lutz recalled. “What he wrote then the Holy Father is living today, embodying this message with great intensity.”

A German Catholic psychiatrist and neurologist, Lutz is a member of the academy and will participate in a debate on the “Quality of Life and Ethic of Health” at its general assembly next Monday through Wednesday.

Bishop Elio Sgreccia, president of the academy, attacked over-emphasis on physical well-being as key to “the quality of life.” While health is important, he said, “it certainly cannot be considered an absolute good.”

Lutz said that health is seen as a product that can be manufactured like any other. “You need to do something for health _ nothing comes from nothing _ he who dies, dies from his own fault,” he said.

“Not God but health, individual health, rises to undisputed `maximum good.’ Salvation and redemption are no longer expected in any hereafter but here and now,” Lutz said. “One awaits eternal life quantitatively from medicine and eternal happiness qualitatively from psychotherapy.”

The ethical consequences of this attitude are “very serious,” he said. “If health represents the maximum value, then the healthy man is also the true man. And he who is not healthy, and above all who cannot return to health, then becomes tacitly a second- or third-class man.”

The growth of public interest in methods of curing illness, chronic diseases and handicaps subtly fosters the belief that those who cannot be cured don’t want to live that way and should be given “the right of a good death, euthanasia,” he said.

Lutz said this thinking also leads to the acceptance of such “ethical abuses” as research on stem cells taken from human embryos in an effort to find cures for illnesses including Parkinson’s disease, a neurological condition from which John Paul suffers.

This, he said, is “the ethic of cure” and “the fundamentalism of the religion of health.”

MO/PH END RNS