Sloth and Canada’s culture of death

In 2015, Canada’s Supreme Court ordered the government to legalize euthanasia, and Parliament dutifully passed a law doing so in 2016. The idea was that “Medical Assistance in Dying” would be only for a small number of people whose suffering could not be relieved and were near death. But the criteria have been expanded steadily and now people who are not in imminent danger of dying can request it. Now the government plans to make it available for those with mental illness.

How did a culture of death advance so far and so quickly in Canada?

John Paul II may not have coined the term “culture of death,” but he certainly installed it into the public consciousness with his powerful encyclical The Gospel of Life in 1995. In that encyclical, John Paul called for development of a “culture of life” and addressed issues such as abortion and euthanasia, which he saw as signs of a “culture of death.”

What is the essence of the culture of death? Using the institutionalized killing of human beings as a way of solving social problems is certainly evidence of the existence of a culture of death. But what lies behind the willingness of a culture to resort to such methods? I would like to suggest what might at first seem like an odd answer. I submit that the culture of death arises, at least in part, from refusing to repent of the sin of acedia.

What is acedia? It comes from the Greek word kedos, which according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary means care, concern, or grief. The “a” in Greek is the negation. So, acedia means a lack of care or concern. It is laziness but with the added element of culpability. One should care or grieve over something enough to be moved to action, but instead one is indifferent or unconcerned. Understood in this way, one can easily see how it could be included in moral theology as a sin under the name “sloth.”

In Scripture, sloth is regularly castigated as sinful. For example, in Proverbs we read “The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied” (Proverbs 13:4). Acedia or sloth is not just a matter of temperament or preference, but a vice. It is to choose to be unconcerned so many times that you become unconcerned about that which you ought to care deeply. Unchecked, it leads a person or a culture to death.

That seems to be what happened in Canada. In Quebec, which is the most secularized part of Canada, euthanasia is quickly becoming normalized. The CBC reports that “Quebec is on track to finish the year with seven per cent of all deaths recorded as doctor-assisted” and quotes the head of the independent body charged with monitoring the operation of the law, Dr. Michael Bureau, as saying, “That’s more than anywhere else in the world: 4.5 times more than Switzerland, three times more than Belgium, more than the Netherlands. It’s two times more than Ontario.” The article goes on to say, “As the frequency of medical aid in dying continues to rise in Quebec, he worries doctor-assisted deaths are no longer being seen as a last resort.”

What is it about Canada that is causing this to happen?

Elainia Plott Calabro, writing in The Atlantic, lucidly describes the acedia at the heart of the Canadian experiment.

Nine years after the legalization of assisted death, Canada’s leaders seem to regard MAID from a strange, almost anthropological remove: as if the future of euthanasia is no more within their control than the laws of physics; as if continued expansion is not a reality the government is choosing so much as conceding. This is the story of an ideology in motion, of what happens when a nation enshrines a right before reckoning with the totality of its logic. If autonomy in death is sacrosanct, is there anyone who shouldn’t be helped to die?

That is a good question. If access to medically assisted suicide is a human right, based in autonomy and freedom of choice, how can society legitimately limit it?

But what if modern political liberalism only worked when there was a social consensus that certain moral truths were absolute, such as “Do not murder”? What if striving for greater personal autonomy is only legitimate within the limits of natural law? And what if modern people, when they cease to believe in Christianity, become indifferent to the natural, moral law? What if acedia leads to the corruption of the conscience?

These questions are far from theoretical. They are painfully relevant to modern, secular, societies such as Canada. We are in the process of discovering that acedia leads to a culture of death and the only alternative is the gospel of life.