Rosary Crusade to defeat British euthanasia legislation and embolden Catholic bishops to reverse their policy on the reception of Holy Communion
By John Smeaton | 30 October 2024
Voice of the Family invites you to join Catholics in Britain and throughout the world in three novenas of Rosaries, beginning on All Souls’ Day, Saturday 2 November 2024. The intention of this Rosary Crusade is twofold: to defeat the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which has its second reading on Friday 29 November, and to embolden Catholic bishops to witness uncompromisingly against this hellish legislation, the evil of which was excellently set out by His Excellency Philip Egan, Bishop of Portsmouth, in his pastoral letter, Thou Shalt Not Kill, on Sunday 27 October 2024.
Catholic bishops in England and Wales have issued eloquent pastoral letters calling on Catholics to urge their Members of Parliament to oppose a law which, according to Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, “risks bringing about for all medical professionals a slow change from a duty to care to a duty to kill”. Cardinal Nichols also points out that parliamentarians will be voting for it “to become lawful to assist, directly and deliberately, in the ending of a person’s life”.
In other words, MPs will be voting for, or against, an intrinsic evil. Consequently, it is morally and spiritually incumbent on bishops, as shepherd of souls, to warn Catholic parliamentarians that, if they do so, they should not come forward at Mass to receive Holy Communion.
Bishop Egan, with true episcopal clarity and courage, wrote in his pastoral letter:
“When suicide is done with full knowledge and deliberate consent, as in an assisted suicide, it is clearly a mortal sin. Likewise assisting someone [to] kill themselves is also a mortal sin. How would it be possible to offer them the Last Sacraments? What justification could a person make when, crossing into eternity after death, they meet the living God to give an account of their life — and their death?”
Tragically, in 2014, after speaking out against the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, a message was sent to Catholic legislators from the Catholic bishops which stated, “There are no plans by any Bishops in England and Wales to deny communion to Catholic MPs or peers who voted in favour of same-sex marriage legislation last year.” According to the Scottish Catholic Observer, the message to Catholic parliamentarians was authorised by the Bishops’ Conference, whose president is Cardinal Nichols.
This must never happen again. Indeed, exactly the contrary urgently needs to be done. How can we, as ordinary Catholics, help to bring this about?
As a good Catholic woman put it to me last week, “To win the most difficult battles, the most powerful weapon is prayer. A Crusade of Rosaries to be said by 29 November would be an excellent initiative, also to make the faithful more aware of the gravity of the situation.”
In the present crisis, characterised by deeply compromised witness on the part of so many bishops in the Catholic Church, we should be mindful of the words of Pius V in the bull Consueverunt Romani Pontifices of 17 September 1569, which Professor Roberto de Mattei calls “the Magna Carta of the Rosary”:
“Following the example of our predecessors, seeing that the Church militant, which God has placed in our hands, is agitated at present by so many heresies and gravely disturbed and afflicted by so many wars and the moral depravation of men, we lift our eyes full of tears, but also of hope, towards that same mountain (Mary), from whom descends all help (cf. Ps 121: 1–2), and we invite all the faithful, admonishing them benevolently in the Lord, to do likewise.”
For those who cannot undertake a full Rosary, I finish with the wise and encouraging words of Bishop Egan on Sunday 27 October:
“In today’s Gospel the blind beggar cried ‘Son of David, Jesus, have pity on me.’ That is our prayer too. To permit killing is wrong. It is to cross the line. It would be a shift of historic significance. It would be to capitulate to the very ideology Britain fought against in the Second World War. So we need to mobilise. We need to campaign, and I’ve provided you with materials to help. And we need to pray. Please attend Mass; please undertake fasting; please offer every day a Decade of the Rosary for God’s grace and mercy and for the demise of this bill.”
Readers in the UK are strongly urged to write to their Members of Parliament. For guidance on how and what to write, go to https://www.spuc.org.uk/assistedsuicideuk