At the Élysée, Leo XIV warns against "the offer of a programmed death"

On 25 September 2026, at the Élysée Palace, in his first address delivered in France before the head of state, the authorities, civil society, and the diplomatic corps, Leo XIV warned against societies that lose their way by turning science and technology into lucrative enterprises, favouring genetic manipulation, surrogacy, the purchase of organs, and "the offer of a programmed death." He reaffirmed "with force that the protection of the right to life constitutes the inescapable foundation of every other human right." These words came a few weeks after France approved, at the end of July 2026, a right to euthanasia and assisted suicide in certain cases, and two years after inscribing in its Constitution the "guaranteed freedom" to abort.

What the Church has always held

The fifth commandment of the Decalogue is without detour: "Thou shalt not kill" (Exodus xx, 13). The Catechism of the Council of Trent, in explaining this precept, teaches that God alone is master of life and of death, and that it is permitted to no private person to take the life of an innocent. "I will kill and I will make to live" (Deuteronomy xxxii, 39): the life of man is not a property of which he may dispose at will, nor which the public authority may deliver up. Pius XI recalled it without ambiguity: no one, neither the private person nor the civil power, has any direct right over the life of the innocent.

The measure

A law that grants a "right" to give death overturns this order. It makes the State, the physician, or the patient the arbiter of a life that belongs to God alone. To name this compassion does not change the nature of the act: the direct suppression of an innocent, be he consenting or suffering, remains what tradition calls a homicide. In placing "the protection of the right to life" at the foundation of every other right, Leo XIV said nothing else: where that foundation gives way, no other right holds.

The pope praised, by contrast, the Catholic institutions where caregivers "accompany our brothers and sisters made fragile by suffering," seeing in them "a true school of humanity on the greatness of care." This is the way tradition blesses: to relieve, to watch, to accompany to the natural term, never to hasten death. At a moment when Catholic hospitals and nursing homes are asking for a conscience clause that would exempt them from practising euthanasia, the line is clear between caring and killing.

What must be held

No positive law can render licit what the divine law forbids. Leo XIII taught it: a human law contrary to the eternal law is no longer a law, but the corruption of law. The faithful therefore owes no obedience to a prescription that would command giving death or cooperating in it; on the contrary, he must support those who care without killing. Not out of revolt, but out of fidelity to what the Church has always held.

Sources. Sacred Scripture, Exodus xx, 13 and Deuteronomy xxxii, 39 (Douay-Rheims, Vulgate). Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), explanation of the fifth commandment. Pius XI, encyclical Casti Connubii (1930). Leo XIII, encyclical Libertas Praestantissimum (1888).