t eanc 0 VOL. 32, NO. 20
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Friday, May 13, 1988
FALL RIVER DIOCESAN NEWSPAPER FOR SOUTHEAST MASSACHUSETTS CAPE COD & THE ISLANDS Southeastern Massachusetts' Largest Weekly
FALL RIVER, MASS.
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SIO Per Year
Pope in Bolivia
Latest Catholic Charities total at $1,421,217 Latest reports of Special Gift donations and parish contributions have brought the 1988 Catholic Charities Appeal total to $1,421,217.61. Contributions from parishes, priests and Special Gift donors should be made in person to Appeal headquarters from Wednesday, May 18 through Friday, May 20. The Appeal books will close Friday, May 20, at I p.m. This com'ing weekend, said Msgr. Anthony M. Gomes, PA, CCA director, every parish and Special Gift solicitor should make a last effort to canvass every potential. donor. These reports should be made to Special Gift and parish headquarters on Monday. 26 parishes have surpassed their 1987 final totals since last week's I edition ofThe Anchor. These honor roll parishes are St. Stephen, Attleboro; Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, Seekonk; Our Lady of the Cape, Brewster; St. Margaret, Buzzards Bay; Sacred Heart, Oak Bluffs; St. Joan of Arc, Orleans; Our Lady of Lourdes, Wellfleet. Also St. Mary's Cathedral, Espirito Santo, Notre Dame, Our Lady of the Angels, Our Lady of I Health, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Elizabeth, St. Louis and St. William, all Fall River; St. John of God and St. Thomas More, Somerset; St. John the Baptist, Westport. Our Lady of the Assumption, St. Anne, St. Kilian, St. Theresa, New Bedford; St. Francis Xavier, I Acushnet; Immaculate Conception and St. Paul, Taunton. . A detailed report of Special Gifts, parish totals, leading parishes and I parish donations begins on page 2 i of this issue of The Anchor. ' i
Criticizes "sirvinacuy"
THE MOTHER CHURCH is 150 years young. See pages 8 and 9 for some highlights of Cathedral history. (Gaudette photo)
DDCW workshops set Five workshops will feature the afternoon session of the annual convention of the Diocesan Council of Catholic Women, to be held Saturday, May 21, at St. Mary's parish center, South Dartmouth. Mrs. Alice Loew, Church Communities commission chairman, representing the Attleboro DCCW district" will present Sister Suzanne Beaudoin, SSCh, a campus minister at Bristol Community College, Fall River. With the topic of Church as Community, Sister Beaudoin will
consider various models of "church," exploring in particular how the community model corresponds to tradition, theology, Scripture and contemporary experience. Mrs. Ellen Calnan of the New Bedford district. Family Affairs commission chairman, will introduce Joanne Esancy, director of I ' social services at Sacred Heart Home, New Bedford from 1979 to 1987,and Linda Mclnnes,anoccu- , I Turn to Page Five
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LA PAZ, Bolivia (NC) -In his first full day in Bolivia, Pope John Paul II mixed praise and criticism for the customs of the Aymara Indians who dominate the population of the La Paz area. The pope praised the Aymara moral code: "Do not be a thief. Do not be lazy. Do not be a liar." But he criticized their practices of concubinage and trial marriage. The pope offered the dual approach during a May 10 outdoor Mass at the EI Alto Airport outside La Paz, where he received gifts from Indian men dressed in ponchos and women sporting their typical black bowler hats. Earlier in the morning he stepped out ofthe official program to greet 300 orphans who serenaded him with Indian folkloric music outside the apostolic nunciature, his residence in La Paz. The pope appeared on the balcony facing the youths and greeted them, then left the nunciature to hug and shake hands with many of them. At the Mass, the-pope criticized "unions contrary to the wishes of God and natural law, such as concu binage." The pope also criticized "sirvinacuy," a formal trial marriage system involving parental approval and a prior commitment by the couple to protect and aid each other during the trial period. "Help your friends, relatives and acquaintances who may find themselves in these situations. or in what you call 'sirvinacuy: so that they understand the true significance of Christian marriage," the pope said. The Mass theme was the need to
strengthen family life, and the pope used it to reiterate church opposition to divorce, abortion and artificial birth control. "The anti-conception mentality is a falsification of conjugal love:' he said. The pope also said outside activities should not be allowed to destroy family unity. "Do not flee from family obligations, putting your heart into other objectives, such as labor problems, the problems of society and politics," he said. Women should not seek refuge "in a female liberation which does not promote, but only subjugates women even more," he added. Before celebrating Mass. the pope met the diplomatic corps and asked world leaders to lift the "onerous weight of the foreign debt" on poor countries. "The unevenness between the amount ofthis debt and the capacity to pay it, the difference between the sums lent to borrowers and the amount of repayment required by creditors are causing grave damage to many poor countries," the pope said. "The extreme poverty which many countries still are affected by is an affront to all humanity," he said. Bolivia, with an annual per capita income of $400, is South America's poorest country. . "The abysmal differences between rich and poor countries are incompatible with the divine plan for an equitable and just participation in all the goods of creation," the pope said. These situations "can put in Turn to Page Six
Physician-assisted suicide violates "most hallowed" medical canon WASHINGTON (NC) -Dr. Edmund Pellegrino and three other prominent physicians said a gynecology resident who described injecting a terminal cancer patient with a lethal dose of morphine "violated one of the first and most hallowed canons of the medical ethic: doctors must not kill. "Neither legal tolerance nor the best bedside manner can ever make medical killing medically ethical:' they said. Pellegrino, director of Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and Drs. Willard Gaylin of The Hastings Center, Leo Kass of the Committee on Social Thought and Mark Siegler of the Universitv of Chicago's Center for Clinic~l Medical Ethics commented
jointly in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Their comments and 18 readers' letters were published in April in the Journal in response to its controversial January article titled. "It's Over, Debbie." "The conduct of the physician is inexcusable. But the conduct of the editor of JAMA {the Journa"l] is incomprehensible," said the physicians, who questioned how such an article served the "professional mission" of the medical association. The Journal received more than 150 letters for and against the physician-assisted suicide of a 20-year-old terminal cancer patient described in a first-person guest column. Journal editor Dr. George
Lundberg said at the time he decided to use it without knowing if it was truth or fiction because it was within the "critical objectives of the association to foster responsible debate on controversial issues that affect medicine." The Journal withheld the author's name upon request, which spurred a grand jury subpoena for all records on the article and its author. The medical association, in a successful effort to quash the subpoena, invoked First Amendment guarantees of freedom of the press. In the article, the writer, describedas a gynecology resident in a large private hospital, recounted being on call late one night and exhausted when a
nurse requested help with a patient, Debbie, reportedly dying of ovarian cancer. The author said the woman was in extreme pain. suffering "unrelenting vomiting" and could not sleep. When she saw the doctor she said, "Let's get this over with" - a statement the physician apparently interpreted as a wish to end her life and responded to by administering a fatal overdose of morphine. Pellegrino and his colleagues said the doctor's action was premeditated murder that should be punished and that the physician "behaved altogether in a scandalously unprofessional and unethical manner." They urged the Journal to
turn over to legal authorities all information regarding the case and to report the doctor-writer to his or her hospital's directors and local medical societies. The four physicians also said that the issue of physician-assisted suicide "touches medicine at its very moral center. "I fthis moral center collapses. if physicians become killers or are even merely licensed to kill:' they said. "the profession [and] each physician will never again be worthy of trust and respect as healer and comforter and protector oflife in all its frailty." If medicine is used "equally to heal or to kill, the doctor is no more a moral professional but rather a morally neutered technician," they said.