Solidarity with Vincent Lambert
Michel Houellebecq and Pope Francis are two names seldom found in the same sentence. Yet they are united in decrying the death of Vincent Lambert, the disabled French nurse who died this week after having his food and water removed.
Being the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis’s views are, and are supposed to be, predictable. But Houellebecq, France’s most acclaimed and controversial novelist, is hardly a spokesman for traditional values. His novels are grotesque, nihilistic, pornographic, vulgar, cynical, and misogynistic. But, with the unsparing honesty of a true artist, he sees exactly what was going on:
“Vincent Lambert was in no way prey to unbearable suffering, he was not suffering any pain at all (…) He was not even at the end of life. He lived in a particular mental state, the most honest of which would be to say that we know almost nothing …
As he points out, it is ironic that France’s minister for health is called the “Minister of Health and Solidarity”. Solidarity with whom?
Michael Cook
The man at the centre of an international bioethics controversy has died
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