The Times on JP II

In today's lead editorial in the New York Times, we read:

The pope would certainly never have wanted his own end to be a lesson in the transcendent importance of allowing humans to choose their own manner of death. But to some of us, that was the exact message of his dignified departure.

As is so often the case (at least, in my experience) in conversations about morality and the end of life, the editorial writer seems to confuse the Pope's acceptance of suffering and death with joy and dignity with "choos[ing] [one's] own manner of death."  The way the Times puts it -- "the transcendent importance of choosing" -- suggests that Justice Kennedy is moonlighting as an editorial writer.  I imagine the Pope heard a call -- the invitation to a "good and faithful servant" -- and had no promethean illusions about control, autonomy, and "choice."

The editorial also illustrates, again, the common failure to distinguish between choosing and causing death, on the one hand, and refusing treatment, on the other.  The concerns at issue in the Schiavo case had to do not with the fact that she died -- or even, frankly, with her right to refuse necessary treatment -- but with the possibility that, as some saw it, she was killed.

To be fair, the editorial ends on what I'm sure was intended to be a positive note:  "His embrace of each person's innate dignity was his touchstone, allowing him to shape our times even as he railed against them."  Even here, though, the writer just does not get it.  The Pope's relation with "our times" and the culture was not so adversarial; he did not merely "rail" against the times.  He embraced the world, and loved the young, and proclaimed constantly a message of optimism and hope.  His criticisms were not, as the Times seems to believe, the scolds of a curmudgeonly reactionary; they were the exhortations of a loving parent or faithful friend, who suspects that his loved ones are capable of doing better.

Rick