Catholic bishops hold the key to defeating assisted suicide
By John Smeaton | 13 May 2026
The most dangerous threat to the right to life in Britain — legalisation of assisted suicide — ran out of parliamentary time last month. However, it is set to return to the centre of political debate within a matter of days.
Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was passed by MPs with a slim majority of 33 votes (324 to 291). Mercifully it was stopped in its tracks by the House of Lords, whose members tabled 1,200 amendments in an intrepid exercise of their constitutional role of scrutinising bills passed by the House of Commons.
Now campaigners are boasting that up to 200 MPs may flood the private members’ ballot this month in the new session of Parliament. They aim to produce an almost identical Bill in the House of Commons and use a rare procedure to bypass the Lords completely, thus assuring that it would become law.
The situation is urgent and we must get our battle plans right. I believe that the Catholic bishops of Britain have a key role — possibly the key role — in defeating assisted suicide in Britain. Here’s why.
In England and Wales, over half a million Catholics attend Sunday Mass. Whilst they are far from being uniformly opposed to assisted suicide, not least because of lack of catechesis at church and in Catholic schools, there remains a profound instinctive loyalty on the part of the faithful to their priests and bishops. However frail we may be in in our understanding and observance of Catholic teaching, the faithful, when strongly challenged to do so, are prepared to follow the leadership of our spiritual fathers.
This truth particularly struck me some years ago (in 2013) when the archdiocese of Westminster ran a fundraising campaign in its 212 parishes, entitled Growing in Faith, in support of the long-term future of the Church in north London and adjacent counties. Every week for several weeks, the project dominated the sermon and announcements during Sunday Masses. Fundraising packs were delivered to our homes and parishioners received personal phone calls, from volunteers recruited for the purpose, to discuss what we might be prepared to donate. As St Augustine’s Catholic Church in Hoddesdon put it in their weekly newsletter:
“OUR GROWING IN FAITH CAMPAIGN has now been widened to embrace the whole parish, and most households in the parish should have received a postal pack to give more information on our parish’s contribution to the diocesan scheme to support our parishes, our priests, and our diocesan Caritas.”
With the help of a professional, US-based fund–raising company, 600 volunteers were enlisted throughout the archdiocese and £37 million pounds was raised. Reportedly, there were 160,000 Mass-going Catholics in Westminster in 2013, meaning that an incredible average of £231.25 pence was raised per person!
Why did ordinary people, like you and me, give so much to this fundraising appeal? They did so because, in their heart of hearts, they want to support the one true holy Catholic Church, the ark of salvation, which enables their families and themselves to get to heaven.
Bearing in mind those herculean efforts made by the archdiocese of Westminster to raise money in their campaign Growing in Faith, today we have to recognise a painful contrast. Faced with the recent ferocious campaign to legalise assisted suicide, there were two pastoral letters issued. In October 2024 and in April 2025, these were read out in churches, or pinned to the noticeboard at the back of the church, urging the faithful to write to their MPs to oppose Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill.
Looking around our packed church in north London as the pastoral letter was read out, from my five decades of leadership in the pro-life battle, I knew that scarcely anyone in my parish would actually lobby their local MP as requested. The overwhelming majority of parishioners would never have written before to their political representative and would feel uncomfortable doing so.
But just imagine if a comparable scheme to the Growing in Faith fundraising campaign in the archdiocese of Westminster had been deployed. Imagine if the Catholic Church in its 3,000 Catholic parishes in England and Wales urged the 575,000 Mass-going Catholics to write to or to ring their Member of Parliament to oppose assisted suicide. Just imagine if, over several weeks, powerful prepared talks had been given to priests and personally addressed information packs were sent to individual parishioners, followed up with a telephone call by volunteers recruited by the parish priest.
Or just imagine if priests were urged to invite the experienced volunteers from the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, who have been organising nationwide pro-life letter-writing campaigns since 1967, to be at tables outside the churches where they could help the Catholic faithful to write letters to their MPs there and then.
If you really want something done — as the archdiocese of Westminster really wanted something done in its £37 million Growing in Faith campaign — then you enlist hundreds of volunteers, and especially those with appropriate experience. And you devote several Sundays to the issue and provide the priests with a powerful presentation on the fundamental moral issue at stake. For example, the kind of rhetoric used by the great German Cardinal Archbishop Clemens von Galen springs to mind as the right way to get the message across.
Cardinal von Galen won the approval of the world with his denunciations of the euthanasia programme in Nazi Germany, such as the sermon he preached as a bishop in St Lambert’s Church, Munster, on 3 August 1941 in which he said:
“Woe to humanity, woe to our German people, if the holy commandment of God, ‘Thou shalt not kill’, which the Lord gave on Sinai amid thunder and lightning, which God the Creator wrote into the conscience of man from the beginning, is not only broken, but if this breach is tolerated and taken up as a regular practice without punishment.”
For those who say that the bishops should keep out of the front line against evils such as abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide, Catholic bishops have a unique apostolic moral power to preach the Gospel of life bestowed upon them by Christ before his Ascension. When they speak the Gospel truth in love, their words reverberate with authority, both in the hearts of the faithful and in the hearts of people who do not believe in Christ — just as Christ’s words did.
I have no doubt that a well-organised concerted campaign on the part of the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, sending out a major clarion call on the greatest new threat to civilised values and the right to life in Britain today, would provide an essential boost to pro-life campaigning groups and anti-assisted suicide champions in Parliament and could change the political debate on assisted suicide in our nation completely. It could overturn the small majority in the House of Commons, currently in favour of assisted suicide, and see its defeat in Parliament for a generation.
And the same applies to countless legislative battles elsewhere in this world. It’s time for pro-life campaigners and pro-life groups to have the humility to recognise that we do not have the material and spiritual resources necessary to stop the killing on our own of innocent human beings by abortion, euthanasia, IVF procedures, abortifacient birth control procedures. Indeed, these killings are currently rising exponentially in the US, in Ireland, in the UK and in so many other countries around the globe.
We are in the midst of the worst, most murderous tyranny in world history, firmly in place in virtually every country in the world. Our pro-life organisations need urgently to be reinforced by the prophetic and unequivocal voices of bishops throughout the world faithfully preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ — for two reasons: because without Christ we cannot do anything; and because the full Gospel message about sanctity of human life, which is also part of the natural law written on all human hearts, is nowhere more fully spelled out than in the teaching of the Church.
So wherever we are in the world, let us meet our local priests, let us write to our local bishops, and let us ask them to study what the Catholic archdiocese of Westminster did in 2013 when it wanted to raise tens of millions of pounds to preserve and develop church infrastructure — and ask them to apply that level of organisation and total commitment to stop the murder of the innocents. Leaders of national pro-life groups should consider doing the same.
And you may like to join Voice of the Family’s Daily Rosary for the Family, which takes place every day of the year at 7:45 pm UK time, to offer reparation for sins against the Blessed Sacrament, and to obtain for bishops the graces necessary to lead Catholic resistance to abortion, euthanasia, contraception, IVF, corrupting sex education, gender ideology and other sins against purity. In addition to this, there is a specific intention for each month. Check here to find the local time for the Daily Rosary for the Family in your part of the world and consider joining us.