A “profoundly Christian and moral thing”, according to Lord Carey.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, has appeared in a video made by the English assisted suicide lobby group Dignity in Dying. In it, he argues that it is possible to draft a law which will protect the vulnerable elderly from cruel and greedy relatives and that some patients will inevitably experience “excruciating pain”.

And he tells his fellow Christians that assisted suicide is a “profoundly Christian and moral thing” – even though he realises that some will be shocked by his break with the official Church of England policy.

From a theological point of view, Lord Carey seems to have crafted his own interpretation of the proper meaning of suffering for a Christian. “Some people have said on the issue of compassion that actually pain is a noble thing, to bear pain and to say that we are suffering with you is, in my view, a very poor argument indeed,” he says in the video. “There is nothing noble about excruciating pain and I think we need as a nation to give people the right to decide their own fate.

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Michael Cook

Michael Cook edits BioEdge, a bioethics newsletter, and MercatorNet, an on-line magazine whose focus is human dignity. He writes from Sydney, Australia.

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