Richard Neuhaus Quotes (11 Quotes)

It's very devious and insidious to see how -- once one permits a departure from the notion of the inherent good of life and the responsibilities that are owed to life -- that then it becomes very difficult to answer the question, 'Why not kill a person' ... People don't like to have the comparison made because it rightly makes all of us very uneasy, but there are some very striking analogies to what is happening now among us here in the United States and the Third Reich, Nazi Germany.

The idea of physician-assisted suicide is a direct and potentially lethal blow to the whole self-understanding of the medical profession. It all of a sudden finds itself in the position not of healing, but of killing. I think a lot of doctors who have reflected upon this philosophically recognize that it is a truly radical assault upon the very self-understanding of Western medicine.

The bishop has to show in each and every case that he is in a very serious posture of pastoral care and concern for that politician -- and that has to be seen by the Catholic people. When something is a public scandal, it has to be remedied publicly, but there are many different ways in which bishops might exercise that pastoral care and concern,

this time we mean it.

human nature being what it is, those who want to evade the clear statement of the instruction will have ample opportunities to seek loopholes, evasions and rationalizations.

Allowing people to choose that they don't wish to live creates a circumstance in which death itself comes to be viewed as a 'good,' so you have a 'right to die,' ... And then we move quite logically to asking about the person who is not in a position to request this 'good' called death.

I became a Catholic in order to be more fully the Christian I was as a Lutheran, and that is what has happened.

In legal parlance, that is called 'the rational person test,' ... That's where somebody else says, 'Even though we have no idea what this person would want in this circumstance in which they cannot themselves tell us what they want, a 'rational' person -- meaning, myself -- in that circumstance would want to die.' So you move very quickly from so-called voluntary euthanasia to involuntary euthanasia. These legal and medical developments are not simply hypothetical They're in the courts right now.

On such questions, the church has clearly defined positions,

One example is Roe v. Wade. The lethal logic of Roe v. Wade is that nobody has rights that we are bound to respect if they cannot effectively assert those rights. They are at the mercy and the discretion of those who can effectively assert their rights. We're not talking simply about the unborn, we're talking about the aged, the radically handicapped, the deformed.

There can be little doubt that over the centuries that there have been great priests, bishops - and maybe even popes - who by today's criterion would be deemed homosexual in orientation, ... It's not the nature of one's temptations - be they sexual or som