At Lourdes, Leo XIV rejects euthanasia and 'false compassion'

On Sunday, 28 September 2026, at the Notre-Dame Welcome in Lourdes, Pope Leo XIV addressed some 5,000 sick people and those who accompany them, to refuse that the sick be put to death. His words were aimed at the recent legalisation of euthanasia and assisted suicide in France, the fifth country in Europe to take this step, after Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Spain.

"It is precisely in the name of this inalienable dignity of the human person that we must reject the temptation to give death under the cover of a false compassion," he declared. "It is impossible to consider it normal to give death. What is legal is not necessarily moral." That same morning he had praised the courage of the bishops of France for their opposition to the law, and he also condemned the abortion of disabled children.

Taking up his June address to the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation, he recalled that medicine must never become "the handmaid of programmed death." To caregivers he made this appeal: "remember the profound meaning of your vocation, which is to care for the person who suffers, and not to eliminate them." To the sick themselves: "you are not a burden. You are the beating heart of our humanity and a precious treasure for the Church." He pleaded for the development of palliative care and closed his visit with a torchlight rosary procession from the grotto of Massabielle.

The tradition: "Thou shalt not kill"

The fifth commandment admits no exception of compassion. "Non occides," reads the Decalogue (Exodus xx, 13) — "Thou shalt not kill." The Catechism of the Council of Trent, expounding this precept, teaches that God has reserved to Himself power over life and death, and that it is forbidden to take the life of the innocent; it expressly ranks among murderers the man who gives death to himself as well as the man who gives it to another. Pius XI, in the encyclical Casti connubii (1930), repeats that no human authority, no reason, no medical, eugenic or social "indication" can make lawful the direct killing of an innocent, for his life is equally withdrawn from the arbitrary power of men.

The measure

A law that permits the giving of death creates no right: it names lawful what the divine law calls murder. This is why the Sovereign Pontiff's phrase, "false compassion," names the thing exactly. To finish off a sick man is not to care for him; to suppress the disabled child before birth is not to heal him. True mercy toward the one who suffers is to remain at his bedside and to ease his pain, not to end his days: this is the meaning of palliative care, the development of the duty of care, and not its abandonment. On this precise point, the Pope's call to "care for the person who suffers, and not to eliminate them" repeats what the Church has always held, and what French law has just overturned.

What the faithful must hold

That the legal and the moral do not coincide, and that the Christian conscience is ruled by the second. No member of the faithful, no caregiver, may cooperate in giving death, however permissive the civil law may be. The sick, the infirm, the dying keep an entire dignity and a vocation: they are a burden to no one. Let us pray for them, let us remain beside them, let us support the works of care that carry suffering instead of suppressing it.

Sources. Holy Scripture, Exodus xx, 13 (Vulgate; Douay-Rheims); Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment; Pius XI, encyclical Casti connubii (1930).