Thoughts of suicide 'not from God' say Catholic bishops

This video shows 'Anne', a lay apostle from the Kilmore diocese in Ireland. Anne receives messages direct from Jesus, St Margaret Mary Alacoque and the Virgin Mary on a regular basis. She is a controversial figure, as this blog testifies. I mention this because the Press Association is running a story today saying: 'The Catholic Church in England and Wales said today that suicide should be greeted with “compassion” rather than blame as it launched a campaign aimed at softening its image over the sensitive issue.' The relevant link on the Catholic bishops' website takes you to the Day for Life website...

And if you look under 'blogs' on the Day for Life site, you will find this:

Heaven Speaks booklet on Suicide

'Posted: Friday, 26 June 2009

In the booklet (cover shot left), Saint Margaret Mary of Alacoque speaks to those who are considering suicide:

“Often, the most difficult part of suffering anguish is the perception that nobody understands the depth of your pain. One can feel very alone in such pain and when one seeks out consolation from others, one is often terribly disappointed. Please listen to me. I am your sister in Christ. I experienced great anguishes while I was on earth so I am rejoicing that God allows me to help you. When you go to another seeking comfort and you find yourself in worse shape, feeling more misunderstood and alone, you must come to me. Say, “Margaret, I need help. I need help now.”

Direction for Our Times is a non-profit organisation which is dedicated to promoting the heavenly messages received by “Anne”, a lay Catholic apostle. None of her work is published without the permission of her local ordinary, the Bishop of Kilmore in Ireland, The Right Reverend Leo O’Reilly. All of her writings have been submitted to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Click to view the Direction for Our Times downloadable booklets.'

The booklet includes this passage, dictated to 'Anne' by St Margaret Mary Alacoque on 30 November 2006:

I want to say something else. It is common for a person on earth to have thoughts that are not from God. Everyone on earth struggles with this at some time. We could say, actually, that everyone on earth struggles with this each day in terms of temptations. The battle is not finished until you die in your body and come to God’s Kingdom. Given this, the constant need for struggle, you must view your thoughts of suicide as temptations. Do not be alarmed by these thoughts in that simply having these thoughts does not mean there is any reason to act on these thoughts. Do you understand? Do not be afraid. We, the saints in heaven, all had bad thoughts and temptations during our time on earth and we all at times failed to fight off temptations. The temptation to commit suicide is one where you must fight hard, with everything you have because of the nature of the consequence. If you take your life, you will not be able to go back and say, Jesus, I want to do better and serve you now. You take away any second chances for yourself to convert to Jesus and try again. Dear friends, this is wrong for you. It is not the answer you are seeking. Jesus needs you to stay in the world until it is the right time for you to come home. This is God’s plan and it is always best to follow God’s plan. The last day of your life is determined by God. You must not think that the answer to great pain is suicide. This act of self-harm is always a mistake. Always.

Not quite what the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales have in mind, or perhaps it is? All Anne's comments are published with the permission of the Bishop of Kilmore, who has given her a personal chaplain.

This is the full text of what auxiliary bishop in Westminster, Bernard Longley, said today at the launch of Day for Life 2009:

Bishop Longley said: 'As a priest and a bishop, I have often listened to the stories of the friends and families of people who have lost a close friend or relative through suicide.  No words can express or take away their pain; it is so acutely felt.  They need our constant love, support and consolation.  As a community of believers, our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of the victims of suicide and we entrust the souls of their loved ones to the mercy of God; praying for their eternal joy and peace.

'Assisted suicide is illegal, and a change to the law would place pressure on vulnerable people – including those who are elderly, disabled, depressed, terminally or chronically ill – to request assisted death.   We pray for all those who may feel that their life is no longer worth living and for all those who accompany and give hope to those who are feeling suicidal.  We also pray for the Lawmakers in this land that they make decisions which promote and protect life.

'The Bishops of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales have chosen the theme of suicide for this year’s Day for Life – the Day in the Church’s year dedicated to celebrating the sacredness of life from conception to natural death – because so many lives have been affected by the death of a close friend or relative through suicide. There are around 6,000 deaths by suicide in the UK and Ireland each year.  This year’s Day for Life aims to highlight why life is worth living even when a person has lost all hope and is suicidal; it also aims to clarify the Church’s teaching on suicide and to help reduce the number of myths associated with mental illness, depression and

'What is the Catholic Church’s position on suicide?  According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

'Everyone is responsible for his life before God who has given it to him. It is God who remains the sovereign Master of life.  We are obliged to accept life gratefully and preserve it for his honour and the salvation of our souls.  We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of.

'If suicide is committed with the intention of setting an example, especially to the young, it also takes on the gravity of scandal. Voluntary co-operation in suicide is contrary to the moral law.

'We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways know to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for people who have taken their own lives. 

'Our own teaching document ‘Cherishing Life’ says:

“Suicide should never be romanticised, promoted or encouraged.  On the other hand, attempting suicide is typically the act of a desperate person and it should be greeted with compassion rather than with blame” (Cherishing Life*,181).

“The Church is increasingly aware of the pressures that bring people to attempt suicide and which reduce the moral culpability of their actions” (Cherishing Life, 182).

'The Church’s teaching on suicide has not changed. What has changed is that our understanding of human psychology has altered what the Church understands as ‘full knowledge and full consent’ – the conditions for mortal sin.  It is doubtful whether someone who is driven to try to take their own life is capable of either, as self-preservation is one of the deepest instincts of human nature. 

'The Catholic Church allows Christian burial to the victims of suicide. Only God can stand in judgement of a person’s soul or know their final thoughts, regrets, desires or prayers. Funeral Masses are offered for the victims of suicide and ongoing Masses are said for the eternal rest of their soul.

'God is merciful; He is always ready to forgive. Suicide is a grave sin, but an individual must be mentally healthy to be fully aware that what they are doing is a sin. When a person commits suicide, they are generally so clouded by confusion and despair as to be no longer in full control of their mental faculties.  God does not condemn anyone not fully aware of what they are doing; His mercy is without end.

“Father, forgive them.  They know not what they do.” Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord and let perpetual light shine upon them, may they rest in peace.'

Bishop Longley ended with a prayer:

God, lover of souls,
you hold dear what you have made
and spare all things, for they are yours.
Look gently on your servant,
and by the blood of the cross
forgive their sins and failings.

Remember the faith of those who mourn
and satisfy their longing for that day
when all will be made new again
in Christ, our risen Lord,
who lives and reigns with you for ever and ever.

Amen.

Comments

[Roger]

Victims Ask San Jose, Calif. Police to Reopen Troubling Death of Jesuit Priest Case

Suspicious Death of Abused Jesuit Priest Ruled Suicide

New Evidence May Have Been Unearthed, Family, Supporters Say

Jesuits Settled Wrongful Death Case With Family for $1.6 Million in 2007

In a June 1, 2009 letter addressed to a Bay Area law enforcement agency, victims of childhood sex abuse are asking that:

-- a five-year-old suspicious death case be reopened by law enforcement,

The letter was written by victims of child sex abuse and their supporters who are members of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAPNetwork.org) and the family of Father James Chevedden, a Jesuit priest who died in 2004 after reporting that another Jesuit, Brother Charles Leonard Connor, sexually abused him in 1998.

According the coroner's report, Chevedden committed suicide when he fell from the courthouse parking garage in San Jose on his 56th birthday, minutes after he completed jury duty service. There was no suicide note and the police did not check his computer. <http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2005_07_12/2005_08_06_Bunting_BehindA.htm>

Chevedden's brother and SNAP are writing the San Jose police because of the agency's renewed promise to reopen cold or suspicious cases. <http://www.sjpd.org/BOI/Homicide/>

"We believe that new evidence may have been unearthed since the coroner quickly closed Fr. Chevedden's case less than 24 hours after his death," the letter to the San Jose Police says. "A wrongful death lawsuit against the Jesuits for Chevedden's death settled in 2007, and there may be a great deal of new and important information that was unearthed as a part of the discovery process."

In addition, the Jesuits implicitly admitted that they "lost" or "disposed of" important evidence in Chevedden's death, including his Bible, Rosary, note pad, glasses and some correspondence.

The letter also asks the cold case team to re-examine evidence at the scene and/or still in police or Jesuit possession.

If there is any reason to believe that Chevedden was intentionally hurt for being a whistle blower, the group believes, then it is a public safety issue that the death investigation be reopened.

Chevedden was sexually abused at Sacred Heart, a Jesuit-run facility in Los Gatos by Jesuit Brother Charles Leonard Connor in 1998, while Chevedden was healing from two broken feet. Connor also molested two mentally retarded men at the facility over a 30-year period and was convicted in 2001, although he is still allowed to live at the facility. <http://www.bishop-accountability.org/ma-bos/settlements/SettlementLosGatos.html>

[alan]

No Robert.
Your glib comment shows a lack of compassion.
Or is is cognitive incapacity?

[Robert Ian Williams]

So on Jusdgement Day we will all be claiming mental incapacity!

[j]

I am close to four people with serious terminal denegerative disease. One now breathes with a ventilator, is artifically fed, communicates by mechanical means, can't move much at all. We friends rally round, the family is there as well, we arrange travel, nursing, respite, fun. This person currently feels there is enough to live for.

If tomorrow I got a postcard from Zurich it would not be because they had been neglected and abandoned: it would be because they had decided that enough is enough. I would respect that decision and remember our good years with love.

[iain rae]

Anyone hearing voices in the head,including Bishops, from the Almighty needs to be handled with great care.

[alan]

David and PererB - you both have a point. Help may help, but not always.

What if she did have help, and what if she was still unable or unwilling to face a life that had become meaningless and unbearable?

Incidentally, this not only applies to desperately unhappy people, but also to terminally ill people who have nothing else to look forward to (!) except a lingering, painful process of dying.

I'm not recommending suicide. But it should sometimes be understood and accepted. I speak from personal experience.

[David Smith]

Alan:
'How much better would it have been if she had had the means - legally - of ending her own life in a dignified manner.'

How much better, surely, if she had had someone to show her all that there was for her still to live for!

[PererB]

D.Smith
"The message this lady says she has received is sound enough, but since Mary and Margaret Mary are both dead women, it must come from somewhere else in the spiritual realm"

If you are a Christian, they are not dead.

You are a Christian?

[PererB]

Alan
"How much better would it have been if she had had the means - legally - of ending her own life in a dignified manner"

Quite a heartless conclusion. It would have been better if she had had some help in her desperation.

However, I suppose it would go some way towards alleviating your population problem.

[alan]

What catholic bishops say aboout suicide is of no interest to me.

Suicide is often an act of desperation, seldom the express wish not to live any longer in such a cruel and unjust world.

Recently someone I know took her life by leaping from a skyscraper. She had been unable to come to terms with the loss of her child.

How much better would it have been if she had had the means - legally - of ending her own life in a dignified manner.

But I suppose catholic bishops would be against this. So what?

[Paul Burnell]

I don't think the two sets of comments contradict each other. There is no doubt people contemplating suicide need a lot of support. However there is also no doubt that when someone sees in the full light of God's truth that life is a gift. They might well rue what they did. A fair number of mystics say that people who commit suicide should not be blamed and that God looks far more probingly at those who might have driven them to this desperation or neglected to help or pray for them.

[David Smith]

The message this lady says she has received is sound enough, but since Mary and Margaret Mary are both dead women, it must come from somewhere else in the spiritual realm.

She sounds confused about the sources of her 'messages'.

It's good to see a balance between discouraging suicide, and compassion for those who life and the voice of the one who seeks to steal even life itself from us has overwhelmed.

[Chris Gillibrand]

PS
The 1917 Code of Canon Law contained no concession, treating suicide as a mortal sin with inevitable consequences. Suicide is an act of despair, which it could be said excludes almost by its very nature final repentance, so vital for salvation

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Holy Hope and I would urge anyone who is any way depressed to turn to her and to watch the film Its a wonderful life, where a guardian angel shows the manager of a bank who is about to jump off a bridge how much worse the world will be without him.

[Chris Gillibrand]

Indeed at Mayerling, there is a deeply wonderful and conservative Carmelite convent, whose chapel is located exactly on the place of Crown Prince Rudolph's suicide and whose inhabitants one must assume occupy some part of their time praying for the repose of his soul. The occasion, if not the cause for the suicide, was his father, the Emperor snubbing him, when the Pope refused to consider any divorce from the Belgian Princess Stephanie.

[Ruth Gledhill]

RG comments: in addition the Catholic Media Office has sent this explanatory note from Zenit, laying to rest the myth that suicides cannot be buried in consecrated ground.

In earlier times a person who committed suicide would often be denied funeral rites and even burial in a Church cemetery. However, some consideration has always been taken into account of the person's mental state at the time.

In one famous case, when Rudolph, the heir to the throne of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, committed suicide in 1889, the medical bulletin declared evidence of "mental aberrations" so that Pope Leo XIII would grant a religious funeral and burial in the imperial crypt. Other similar concessions were probably quietly made in less sonorous cases.

Canon law no longer specifically mentions suicide as an impediment to funeral rites or religious sepulture.

Canon 1184 mentions only three cases: a notorious apostate, heretic or schismatic; those who requested cremation for motives contrary to the Christian faith; and manifest sinners to whom a Church funeral cannot be granted without causing public scandal to the faithful. These restrictions apply only if there has been no sign of repentance before death.

The local bishop weighs any doubtful cases and in practice a prudent priest should always consult with the bishop before denying a funeral Mass.

A particular case of suicide might enter into the third case -- that of a manifest and unrepentant sinner -- especially if the suicide follows another grave crime such as murder.

In most cases, however, the progress made in the study of the underlying causes of self-destruction shows that the vast majority are consequences of an accumulation of psychological factors that impede making a free and deliberative act of the will.

Thus the general tendency is to see this extreme gesture as almost always resulting from the effects of an imbalanced mental state and, as a consequence, it is no longer forbidden to hold a funeral rite for a person who has committed this gesture although each case must still be studied on its merits.

Finally, it makes little difference, from the viewpoint of liturgical law, whether the body is present or not. If someone is denied a Church funeral, this applies to all public ceremonies although it does not impede the celebration of private Masses for the soul of the deceased.

The same principle applies to funeral Masses of those whose body is unavailable for burial due to loss or destruction. Certainly the rites are different when the body is present or absent, but the Church's public intercession for the deceased is equally manifest in both cases.