“Personally,” the archbishop told his audience, “I would not assist with a suicide, but I understand that legal mediation may be the greatest common good concretely possible under the conditions in which we find ourselves.”

There is a reason the Catholic Church often speaks of abortion and euthanasia together as life issues.

For a young woman with acute environmental hypersensitivity, applying to government authorities for assistance with dying has proved far easier than dealing with the housing bureaucracy.

Spanish bishops published their own letter on the issue last December, “Sowers of Hope,” in which they reminded Catholics that “there is no one that can’t be cared for even if they are incurable.”

“The church is convinced of the necessity to reaffirm as definitive teaching that euthanasia is a crime against human life because, in this act, one chooses directly to cause the death of another innocent human being."

Euthanasia legislation is headed for the Spanish Senate and, if passed, it would be a defeat for human dignity and would affirm a self-centered view of life that proposes death as a solution to one's problems, the Spanish bishops' conference said.