Assisted dying: France's law measured against « Thou shalt not kill »

In mid-July 2026 the French Parliament gave final passage to a law establishing a « right to assisted dying ». The text authorises the administration of a lethal substance to a person who requests it, at the end of a regulated procedure. It applies also within establishments that care for the elderly and the sick: an outside party will be able to come and administer death even in a resident's own room, without those who accompany him day after day being necessarily consulted.

Several Catholic nursing institutions have made known their refusal to apply this measure. Religious sisters who devote their lives to the aged have declared that they will not close their doors and will remain at the bedside of those they care for; a hospitaller order has denounced a law « of unheard-of violence ». The question put to these houses is simple and grave: can a place remain a house of life when the law introduces administered death into it?

What tradition teaches

The fifth commandment of the Decalogue admits no exception of compassion. « Thou shalt not kill » (Ex 20, 13). The Catechism of the Council of Trent draws from it the consequence the age would rather forget: the prohibition binds first of all against oneself. « Nay more, prohibition to kill oneself. None has power enough over his own life to give himself death when it pleases him. » And the same Catechism specifies that it is permitted to no one to take the life of his fellow « with his own hands, or with the iron, the stone, the staff, the noose or poison » — which reaches both the one who asks for death and the one who gives it.

Life is not a possession man may dispose of; it is a trust received from God, who alone is its master. To consent to one's own death, or to procure it for another even out of pity, does not free one from the prohibition: it transgresses it.

The measure

Measured against this rule, the law does not merely cross a technical boundary: it overturns the very meaning of the commandment. Where « Thou shalt not kill » absolutely protects the life of the weak, the new right makes of its suppression a regulated act, deemed good the moment it is requested. Homicide is dressed in the vocabulary of freedom and of care; the thing remains what tradition calls, without evasion, a murder — here, that of the most vulnerable, in the very place that was meant to guard him.

The refusal opposed by Catholic houses is therefore no confessional whim: it is fidelity to a precept that no legislator has received the power to abrogate. No majority makes lawful what God forbids.

What the faithful must hold

That the civil law permits a thing never makes it permitted before God. The Catholic has no business « applying » a right to kill; he has the duty to watch, to console, to relieve pain without causing death. To the dying we owe presence, the sacraments, prayer — not the syringe. That is the whole difference between accompanying and cutting short.

We call to no revolt, to no despair. We call to hold fast: to honour life to its natural term, as the Church has always taught, and to make of our houses refuges where one dies loved, never given over to death.

Sources. Holy Scripture, Exodus 20, 13: « Thou shalt not kill » (Douay-Rheims, from the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate). Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment, § of the killings that are forbidden.