Dr. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury (Anglican), Vincent Nichols, the archbishop of Westminster (Catholic), and Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, have written a joint letter published in [Monday's] Telegraph, opposing parliamentary moves to undermine the law against assisted suicide. Among other things, the letter states that Lord Falconer's amendment to government's Coroners and Justice bill, due to debated by the House of Lords

"would surely put vulnerable people at serious risk, especially sick people who are anxious about the burden their illness may be placing on others. Moreover, our hospice movement, an almost unique gift of this country to wider humankind, is the profound and tangible sign of another and better way to cope with the challenges faced by those who are terminally ill."

The fact that the leaders of three of Britain's main religions, representing millions of followers, have come together to sign this letter demonstrates the profound concern that exists in British society about threats to the sanctity of human life. There is widespread disquiet about a growing culture of death in Britain, with euthanasia already allowed in law in some circumstances through the Mental Capacity Act passed in 2005. The amendments proposed by Lord Falconer, Lord Joffe, Lord Alderdice and other peers will serve to threaten the vulnerable with lethal abandonment. …

As an independent human rights organisation, SPUC supports the right of religious leaders to speak out on ethical principles. If an action, especially a public one, is incompatible with religious belief, then religious leaders must be free to point this out. Those who call this interference fail to recognise that the moral law cannot be confined only to certain spheres of activity. Morality has a universal jurisdiction.

As George Pitcher, an Anglican clergyman with a column in The Telegraph, welcoming the religious leaders' letter, points out, contrary to

"the euthanasia lobby [who] would like nothing better than to characterise the issue as a simple choice between religion and secularism"

that

"[m]any a secular humanist will argue that human life is uniquely to be revered and that the best answer to the terminally ill clogging up our health service isn't necessarily to help them to kill themselves."
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Mr. Smeaton is surely correct in lavishly praising the letter from Archbishop Rowan Williams, newly-installed [Catholic] Archbishop Vincent Nichols, and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. As George Pitcher writes in The Telegraph, "That is significant not just because the two archbishops have chosen this issue to be the first on which they make common cause…[but it's also] of tremendous significance simply because they have intervened in the assisted suicide debate at all." People of faith and religious leaders enter the public arena at their own peril in our own country. But in England they are particularly savaged by the British press which loves to pummel them unmercifully.

The subject of the letter to the Telegraph is opposition to yet another attempt in England to loosen the nation's laws against assisting in suicides. As per usual, it is clothed in euphemisms and protests that it is a minor clarification.

"[Lord] Charlie Falconer has indeed enjoyed some success in persuading peers that his amendment merely serves to rectify the anomaly that British people are already assisting people to fly to Switzerland to commit suicide and are not being prosecuted," writes Pitcher. "So, he claims, it's just a technical question of law."

However, it is nothing of the sort, according to Pitcher. "If his amendment succeeds, it will effectively overturn the Suicide Act 1961, which makes 'a person who aids, abets, counsels or procures the suicide of another' liable to imprisonment for up to 14 years. So long as this is on the Statute Book, the vulnerable are protected from unscrupulous familial pressures to take their own lives to relieve the burden of care or, yet worse, to release inheritance cash."

It is, Pitcher warns, "the latest bid to achieve that in the Lords is nothing but a bid to introduce euthanasia to Britain by the back door."

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