Demonstrators pray for Terri Schiavo outside a courthouse in March 2005. AP
ROME – Hard cases, as the famous legal maxim holds, make bad law. The Vatican served up a reminder of the point this week with a new “little end-of-life lexicon,” which not-so-subtly amends an earlier Vatican ruling on the issue of withdrawing artificial nutrition and hydration from chronically ill patients 17 years ago.
The new lexicon was issued by the Pontifical Academy for Life, and while it doesn’t have the force of law or express any new teaching, it nevertheless clearly marks a departure from the position taken by the Vatican in 2007, which was framed in the wake of the anguished Terry Schiavo case in the United States.
