An interview here, a platform there, a press conference another day. On the site of the end of life, a highly sensitive subject for believers, the representatives of the cult speak out regularly.
Invited to the Elysée by Emmanuel Macron in March during a dinner of exchange and reflection, they were also able to discuss it directly with the Head of State. In a fairly identical tone, they expressed their reservations about the legalization of euthanasia and “the need to listen to caregivers reluctant to practice the gesture”.
On the subject, the opinions of the representatives of French monotheistic cults converge: all insist in particular on the need, they say, for better application of the Claeys-Leonetti law of 2016, and want the development of palliative care in France, considered insufficiently deployed on the territory. However, no collective expression. But speeches and positions in a dispersed order.
Thus, on April 4, it was the Protestants who expressed, alone, a clear-cut opinion on the question. The “ethics and society” commission of the Protestant Federation of France submitted a report to the minister delegate responsible for territorial organization and the health professions, Agnès Firmin Le Bodo, in which she wrote that it is not “appropriate to open the law to assisted suicide or, by principle of equity, to euthanasia”. Explaining that “many Protestants, of all persuasions, are not in favor of the inclusion in the law of any possibility of ending the life of another”. “We consider that a law is inappropriate. If we have a law, we create a protocol. And killing would then become a sort of possible option every time.specifies Christian Krieger, president of the federation.
Contribution to collective reflection
A few days earlier, at the end of March, the Conference of Bishops of France (CEF) also published a press release, in which it hoped that “the ongoing debate on the end of life is a positive opportunity for significant progress in support and care, in particular for dependency due to old age in our country”. The CEF also stated that it intended “several observers of our society, with various philosophical opinions and religious affiliations, warn against the injunction to give up life that the legal and economic ease of active assistance in dying would impose on fragile people”.
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