An Open Letter to Michael Schiavo
Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life,
and an eyewitness to Terri Schiavo’s final hours, released the following open
letter to Michael Schiavo tonight. Fr. Pavone will read it to a worldwide
audience on an internationally broadcast religious service on Sunday morning,
March 26.
A year ago this week, I stood by the bedside of the woman
you married and promised to love in good times and bad, in sickness and health.
She was enduring a very bad time, because she hadn’t been given food or drink in
nearly two weeks. And you were the one insisting that she continue to be
deprived of food and water, right up to her death. I watched her face for hours
on end, right up to moments before her last breath. Her death was not peaceful,
nor was it beautiful. If you saw her too, and noticed what her eyes were doing,
you know that to describe her last agony as peaceful is a lie.
This week, tens of millions of Americans will remember
those agonizing days last year, and will scratch their heads trying to figure
out why you didn’t simply let Terri’s mom, dad, and siblings take care of her,
as they were willing to do. They offered you, again and again, the option to
simply let them care for Terri, without asking anything of you. But you refused
and continued to insist that Terri’s feeding be stopped. She had no terminal
illness. She was simply a disabled woman who needed extra care that you weren’t
willing to give.
I speak to you today on behalf of the tens of millions of
Americans who still wonder why. I speak to you today to express their anger,
their dismay, their outraged astonishment at your behavior in the midst of this
tragedy. Most people will wonder about these questions in silence, but as one of
only a few people who were eyewitnesses to Terri’s dehydration, I have to speak.
I have spoken to you before, not in person, but through
mass media. Before Terri’s feeding tube was removed for the last time, I
appealed to you with respect, asking you not to continue on the road you were
pursuing, urging you to reconsider your decisions, in the light of the damage
you were doing. I invited you to talk. But you did not respond.
Then, after Terri died, I called her death a killing, and I
called you a murderer because you knew – as we all did – that ceasing to feed
Terri would kill her. We watched, but you had the power to save her. Her life
was in your hands, but you threw it away, with the willing cooperation of
attorneys and judges who were as heartless as you were. Some have demanded that
I apologize to you for calling you a murderer. Not only will I not apologize, I
will repeat it again. Your decision to have Terri dehydrated to death was a
decision to kill her. It doesn’t matter if Judge Greer said it was legal. No
judge, no court, no power on earth can legitimize what you did. It makes no
difference if what you did was legal in the eyes of men; it was murder in the
eyes of God and of millions of your fellow Americans and countless more around
the world. You are the one who owes all of us an apology.
Your actions offend us. Not only have you killed Terri and
deeply wounded her family, but you have disgraced our nation, betrayed the
Gospel of Jesus Christ, and undermined the principles that hold us together as a
civilized society. You have offended those who struggle on a daily basis to care
for loved ones who are dying, and who sometimes have to make the very legitimate
decision to discontinue futile treatment. You have offended them by trying to
confuse Terri’s circumstances with theirs. Terri’s case was not one of judging
treatment to be worthless – which is sometimes the case; rather, it was about
judging a life to be worthless, which is never the case.
You have made your mark on history, but sadly, it is an
ugly stain. In the name of millions around the world, I call on you today to
embrace a life of repentance, and to ask forgiveness from the Lord, who holds
the lives of each of us in His hands.
-- Fr. Frank Pavone
Please visit our page on Terri Schiavo for more
information: www.PriestsForLife.org/terri