By Dave Andrusko
During a Saturday press conference aboard the papal plane flying from Marseille to Rome, Pope Francis condemned euthanasia and abortion as actions that “play with life.”
According to the Catholic News Agency (CNA) the Pope said
“You don’t play with life, neither at the beginning nor at the end. It is not played with!” he told journalists Sept. 23, as he returned from a two-day trip to Marseille, in southern France, to speak at a meeting of young people and bishops called Mediterranean Encounter.
“Whether it is the law not to let the child grow in the mother’s womb or the law of euthanasia in disease and old age,” he said, “I am not saying it is a faith thing, but it is a human thing: There is bad compassion.”
Pope Francis told reporters said it is not just an opinion that life should be safeguarded. He “warned that it is easy to fall into an idea that pain should always be prevented, even through what some might consider a ‘humanistic euthanasia,’” CNA reported.
Instead, science has made great strides in helping people to control pain with medication, he noted, repeating that “you don’t play with life.”
The Pope met with France’s President Emmanuel Macron earlier in the day. He was asked by a French journalist whether he had spoken about euthanasia with the French president.
While Pope Francis said he hadn’t, he added that he had expressed himself “clearly” on the issue when the French president visited him at the Vatican last year.
“Macron, who made changing the end-of-life framework one of his campaign promises, declared his “penchant” for the Belgian model in April 2022,” CNA reported.