(LifeSiteNews) — A leading pro-life group has condemned Britain’s assisted suicide bill as a moral disaster enabled by decades of failed catechesis, the National Catholic Register has reported.
The John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family, founded by former members of the Vatican’s bioethics body, released a searing response to the House of Commons vote approving the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill by 319 to 291.
The bill, now headed to the House of Lords, would permit physician-assisted suicide in England and Wales. It passed days after Parliament voted to decriminalize DIY chemical abortion up to birth.
READ: UK votes to decriminalize abortion
In its statement, the academy warned that while the vote margin appeared narrow, it masked the deeper loss: most MPs who opposed the bill did so on procedural grounds – not moral ones. “Virtually no one spoke from the standpoint of natural law or intrinsic moral evil,” the statement said.
Instead, Parliament’s debate was dominated by language of “choice” and “autonomy,” with moral reasoning reduced to emotion and utility. The academy blamed this “moral collapse” on six decades of inadequate catechesis, which has left public and Catholic discourse alike unmoored from foundational truths.
This was illustrated by Liberal Democrat MP Chris Coghlan, who expressed surprise after being denied Holy Communion after voting for the bill, despite being warned beforehand.
Supporters of the bill appealed to compassion – but the academy noted that the medical profession’s true ethic of compassion is rooted in the Hippocratic Oath: “Do no harm.” Prescribing death, the group argued, is the very opposite.
The statement pointed to natural law as the compass for just legislation – warning that modern leaders, lacking this grounding, are now prepared to “sacrifice the weakest and most vulnerable to the culture of death.”
The statement ended with a call for urgent reform – not just of law, but of Catholic teaching.
“Only through an authentic catechesis that teaches the supremacy of God’s law,” it said, “can we convince wider society that all innocent human life deserves equal protection under the law.”
England’s bishops issued their own response, with Westminster’s Cardinal Vincent Nichols calling the vote a “watershed moment” and urging Catholics to try to “limit the damage” done by the coming assisted suicide law.
