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Bishop says elderly suffer in ‘culture of death’


Bishop Mark Davies

Bishop Mark Davies

The neglect of the elderly on National Health Service hospital wards may be a symptom of the 'culture of death' that has grown out the loss of respect for human life generally, following decades of abortion and destructive experimentation on human embryos, the Rt Rev Mark Davies, the Catholic Bishop of Shrewsbury, has said.

In an address to the annual meeting of the St Vincent de Paul Society in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, Bishop Davies said that the “alarming” findings of last week’s national report by the Care Quality Commission on dignity and nutrition for older people contradicted the “vision which first inspired the work of the hospital and the vocation of the medical and caring professions”.

Bishop Davies asked if medical ethics had been perhaps corrupted by practises which demean the value of human life.

Bishop Davies said: “Management and nursing practice have been questioned but surely we have need today to ask more searching questions of ourselves in a country where millions of lives have been destroyed in abortion, where human life is routinely experimented upon and discarded and when today pressure grows for what is called ‘mercy killing’ to end the lives of the terminally ill and the aged. So as a society we have need to ask: are we losing that respect and reverence for what Blessed John Paul II called, ‘the sacred value of human life … the incomparable value of every human person’. (Evangelium Vitae no.2) on which the very ideal of the hospital and the caring professions are founded?”

He added: “Could it be that we have begun to dismiss the cries of the weakest in the place where they expected to receive the greatest care because their impaired lives no longer seem to have any great value?”

The Bishop of Shrewsbury praised the “tireless work and witness” of the Society of St Vincent de Paul and the Church’s voluntary organisations in their “service of the poorest” and said that it was the precious value of every human life that inspired both the work of St Vincent and Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. At the event on Saturday 15th October, Bishop Davies also reminded his audience that “this witness to the value of every human life, especially the most impaired, is more vital than ever before”.

The report by the Care Quality Commission can be downloaded here:

www.cqc.org.uk/reviewsandstudies/inspectionprogramme-dignityandnutritionforolderpeople.cfm

Website for the Society of St Vincent de Paul: www.svp.org.uk/


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