Euthanised in Belgium at 43: the Fifth Commandment forbids killing oneself too

A 43-year-old French actor and stage director, disabled since the fitting of a mesh implant meant to treat an inguinal hernia, was euthanised in Belgium on Tuesday 22 September 2026 to put an end to his suffering. The decision, his lawyer reports, was taken in consultation with three doctors in Namur.

The man had been operated on 17 July 2023; a polypropylene mesh was then implanted in him, the beginning of what he described as a "descent into hell." He had founded a collective gathering, on social media, hundreds of testimonies from carriers of these implants. In January 2026 he had filed a complaint against persons unknown for involuntary injury; dismissed at the end of August "for an insufficiently characterised offence," it was revived on 18 September by a complaint with an application to join as a civil party, demanding that a judicial investigation be opened. "They are trampling on the little of me that remains," he said then. His lawyer sums it up: "His body no longer carried him. He had lost control of it." The family did not wish to speak.

What the Fifth Commandment teaches

The Fifth Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," "forbids murder to all the world. It excepts no one." And it does not concern only the life of others. The tradition is explicit: "Nay more, prohibition to kill oneself. None has power enough over his own life to give himself death when it pleases him." Man is not the master of his days; he receives them from God, who alone disposes of them.

The same doctrine closes the door on every cooperation. It is not only forbidden to take life with one's own hands, but also "to contribute thereto by one's counsels, by one's means, by one's help or in any manner whatsoever."

The measurement

Held against this rule, the end of life chosen here is a killing of oneself that the precept forbids without exception. Suffering, however atrocious it may be — and the suffering described was real — confers on no one a power over his own life that God never gave him. The three doctors who concurred in this death did not treat a sick man: they, in the very sense of the doctrine, "contributed" to a killing. What our age names an easing, the law of God names murder.

We judge the act, not the soul. It does not belong to men to sound the inmost conscience of an exhausted dying man, nor to prejudge the mercy of God, who weighs the full liberty and full consent of the one who acts. What we can say, and must say, is that the act itself is forbidden, and that no distress renders it permissible.

What the faithful must hold to

There remains the question this death poses more than it resolves: a society that dismisses the complaint of a broken man, then leaves him no other horizon than to have death administered to him, has not answered his suffering; it has sent it away. The Christian answer to pain has never been to suppress the one who suffers, but to accompany him, to relieve him, not to abandon him. Faced with disability, illness, the temptation of despair, the faithful hold to this: his life does not belong to him, it belongs to God; and the cross carried in faith is never in vain.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the Fifth Commandment ("Thou shalt not kill"): on the absolute prohibition of murder that "excepts no one," on the prohibition of killing oneself — "None has power enough over his own life" — and on the prohibition of contributing to it "by one's counsels, by one's means, by one's help." Exodus 20:13.