Pope Benedict met with members of an international gathering of doctors and medical personnel and used the occasion to reaffirm the Church’s teachings on euthanasia:

The Holy Father received participants in an international congress entitled: “Close by the Incurable Sick Person and the Dying: Scientific and Ethical Aspects”. The event was promoted by the Pontifical Academy for Life for the occasion of their general assembly which will be held in the Vatican over the coming days.

“Death”, said the Pope, “concludes the experience of earthly life, but through death there opens for each of us, beyond time, the full and definitive life. … For the community of believers, this encounter between the dying person and the Source of Life and Love represents a gift that has a universal value, that enriches the communion of the faithful”. In this context, he highlighted how all the community should participate alongside close relatives in the last moments of a person’s life. “No believer”, he said, “should die alone and abandoned”.

All society “is called to respect the life and dignity of the seriously ill and the dying”, said the Holy Father. “Though aware of the fact that ‘it is not science that redeems man’, all society, and in particular the sectors associated with medical science, are duty bound to express the solidarity of love, and to safeguard and respect human life in every moment of its earthly development, especially when it is ill or in its terminal stages.

“In more concrete terms”, he added, “this means ensuring that every person in need finds the necessary support through appropriate treatments and medical procedures – identified and administered using criteria of therapeutic proportionality – while bearing in mind the moral duty to administer (on the part of doctors) and to accept (on the part of patients) those means for preserving life which, in a particular situation, may be considered as ‘ordinary'”.

You can read more excerpts from his remarks at the Catholic Online link