{"id":25501,"date":"2019-12-18T13:44:10","date_gmt":"2019-12-18T12:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vincenzopaglia.it\/?p=25501"},"modified":"2019-12-18T13:47:59","modified_gmt":"2019-12-18T12:47:59","slug":"25501","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vincenzopaglia.it\/index.php\/25501.html","title":{"rendered":"Vatican Archbishop: those who say Judas is in hell are \u2018heretics\u2019 and priests may \u2018accompany\u2019 assisted suicides"},"content":{"rendered":"

ROME, December 11, 2019 (LifeSiteNews<\/a>) \u2014 In a statement\u00a0difficult to reconcile with\u00a0Scripture and Tradition, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, has claimed on behalf of the Catholic Church that anyone who says Judas Iscariot is in hell is a heretic.<\/p>\n

In an even more disturbing statement, the Italian archbishop has also asserted that a priest may legitimately remain at the bedside of someone undergoing assisted suicide in order to \u201chold their hand\u201d and \u201caccompany\u201d them.<\/p>\n

Archbishop Paglia\u2019s\u00a0comments<\/a>\u00a0came on December 10, at the presentation of a multi-faith International Symposium on\u00a0Religion and Medical Ethics: Palliative Care and Elderly Mental Health<\/em>, being held in Rome December 11-12. The symposium, co-sponsored by the\u00a0Pontifical Academy for Life\u00a0and the\u00a0World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH), an initiative of Qatar Foundation, is chiefly focused on Christian and Muslim perspectives on end of life issues.<\/p>\n

Following the formal presentation at the Holy See press office on Tuesday, a journalist asked Archbishop Paglia for his views on a December 5\u00a0statement issued<\/a>\u00a0on by the Bishops of Switzerland,\u00a0requiring priests and Catholic pastoral caregivers to leave the room before a lethal injection or other means of suicide is administered.<\/p>\n

The 30-page\u00a0document<\/a>\u00a0of the Swiss Bishops, titled\u00a0\u201cPastoral behavior with regard to the practice of assisted suicide,\u201d comes in response to increasing rates of assisted suicide in Switzerland. It states that assisted suicide \u201cis radically against the Gospel message\u201d and its practice \u201cis a serious attack on the preservation of the life of the human person that must be protected from conception until natural death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Archbishop Paglia, who serves as chancellor of the new John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences in Rome (and presided over the former institute\u2019s demolition),\u00a0said he has not read the statement issued by the Swiss bishops \u201cin detail\u201d but doesn\u2019t believe that \u201canyone should ever be abandoned.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are against assisted suicide because we do not want to do the dirty work of death and because we are all well aware that, for believers, life goes on,\u201d he continued. \u201cTo accompany and hold the hand of those who are dying\u201d is therefore the \u201cgreat task\u201c of every believer, he said, along with fighting\u00a0the culture of assisted suicide, which represents \u201ca great defeat for society.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cannot turn [assisted suicide] into a wise choice,\u201d he\u00a0said.<\/p>\n

Archbishop Paglia then\u00a0clarified: \u201cI always celebrate funerals for those who commit suicide, because suicide is always a question of unfulfilled love. We must also remember that, for the Catholic Church, if someone says that Judas is in hell, he is a heretic.\u201d<\/p>\n

The assertion that saying Judas is in hell is tantamount to heresy is surprising given the clear teaching of Sacred Scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church and the liturgy. As Cardinal Avery Dulles once explained in\u00a0an article<\/a>\u00a0titled \u2018The Population of Hell\u2019:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe New Testament does not tell us in so many words that any particular person is in hell. But several statements about Judas can hardly be interpreted otherwise. Jesus says that he has kept all those whom the Father has given him except the son of perdition (John 17:12). At another point Jesus calls Judas a devil (John 6:70), and yet again says of him: \u201cIt would be better for that man if he had never been born\u201d (Matthew 26:24; Mark 14:21). If Judas were among the saved, these statements could hardly be true. Many saints and doctors of the Church, including St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, have taken it as a revealed truth that Judas was reprobated. Some of the Fathers place the name of Nero in the same select company, but they do not give long lists of names, as Dante would do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, Sacred Scripture, Pope St. Leo the Great,\u00a0St. Augustine<\/a>, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Catherine of Siena, the\u00a0Catechism of the Council of Tren<\/a>t and the Church\u2019s\u00a0liturgy<\/a>\u00a0are all of\u00a0one accord<\/a>\u00a0regarding the fate of\u00a0Judas Iscariot.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, as\u00a0canons 750 and 751<\/a>\u00a0confirm (as well as\u00a0Pope John Paul II\u2019s 1998 motu proprio\u00a0Ad tuendam fidem<\/a>),\u00a0<\/em>for any assertion to be qualified as a heresy it must contradict Divine Revelation; according to what the Church has proposed as divinely revealed, nowhere in Sacred Scripture or Tradition is it said that Judas is not in hell.<\/p>\n

Asked if a priest can therefore \u201caccompany a person who undergoes assisted suicide,\u201d Archbishop Paglia said the issue \u201cgoes beyond laws\u201d and that he \u201cdidn\u2019t want to give a rule to contradict and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI would like to remove ideology from these situations forever and for everyone,\u201d the archbishop said. \u201cFor me, those who take their own lives manifest the failure of the whole of society, but not of God. And God never abandons anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s\u00a0avoid getting stuck in ideological debates,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat is most important is accompaniment. We think of laws when the most serious thing is the abandonment of thousands and thousands of sick people, even when there is a law. Perhaps because they don\u2019t get votes.\u201d<\/p>\n

In comments to LifeSite, a priest close to the Vatican, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: \u201cFrankly, the first abandonment a Catholic and a priest should worry about is the possible or likely abandonment of a soul of such a person into hell, i.e. supernaturally provoked abandonment and suicide of one\u2019s soul for having voluntarily forsaken God\u2019s law, His plan and His love … then we can talk about other matters….\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTrue accompaniment in this case means seeking to be close, yes,\u00a0but that does not mean scandalously holding their hand while they commit mortal sin, as if condoning or remaining\u00a0indifferent to it and being perceived as such. A priest must seek\u00a0first and\u00a0foremost to save a soul, by telling that person what is at stake, and not abandoning him to his bad judgment. Indeed,\u00a0that\u00a0<\/em>would be true abandonment, although perhaps it would be less troublesome for a priest and allow him to continue to be praised by the world,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u201cBut ours is not the spirit or criterion of the world. We are creatures of the kingdom of heaven who wish to reach our true home.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ROME, December 11, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) \u2014 In a statement\u00a0difficult to reconcile with\u00a0Scripture and Tradition, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, has claimed on behalf of the Catholic Church that anyone who says Judas Iscariot is in hell is a heretic. In an even more disturbing statement, the Italian archbishop has also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25502,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english","category-rassegna"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.vincenzopaglia.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/Archbishop_Paglia_by_Ed_Pentin_810_500_75_s_c1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vincenzopaglia.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vincenzopaglia.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vincenzopaglia.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincenzopaglia.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincenzopaglia.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25501"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincenzopaglia.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25504,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincenzopaglia.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25501\/revisions\/25504"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincenzopaglia.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vincenzopaglia.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincenzopaglia.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincenzopaglia.it\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}