In some
quarters of the Church, one will find Latter-day Saints who downplay the
severity of suicide. While personal experience is subjective, I will readily
admit, I recently had one local Church leader who said that those who commit
suicide are never guilty of sin, let
alone grievous sin. The following, from Catholic priest Romano Amerio about the
downplaying of the grievous nature of suicide in Catholicism, especially
post-Vatican II, is something that, sadly, mirrors the attitude towards suicide
in many LDS quarters too (we have many of the same problems Rome has, including
many holding an unscriptural view of “ecumenism” and other topics):
The change that occurred regarding suicide
appears more in practice than in theory. The principal fact involved is the
abrogation by the new Code of Canon Law of the ban on giving ecclesiastical
burial to those who have committed suicide (Canon 1184). The common teaching of
the Church was that suicide involved a threefold evil: a lack of moral
fortitude, inasmuch as the person gave in to misfortunate; an injustice,
inasmuch as he pronounced a death sentence against himself as if he were his
own judge, when he had no right to do so; and an offense against God, inasmuch
as life consists in the service of God, a service from which no one can
spontaneously exempt himself, as Plato puts it in the Phaedo. This view has been replaced by another: namely that there
are supreme earthly goods for which it is legitimate and noble to sacrifice one’s
life directly. So political suicides like those of Jan Palak, who burnt himself
to death in a square in Prague, and Bobby Sands in Ireland, are no longer
considered blameworthy and become instead an expression of the highest sort of
spiritual freedom, and a sign of heroism. Following Palak’s funeral, Cardinal
Beran, the Archbishop of Prague said: “I admire these men’s heroism, even if I
cannot approve of heir gesture.” It seemed to escape the Cardinal’s notice that
heroism and despair, which is a lack of fortitude, cannot coexist. Under the
influence of psychology and psychiatry, it has become the received view that
the mind of anyone committing suicide is convulsed y some irresistible
disturbance and that his freedom is therefore seriously restricted or indeed
totally annihilated. In the past the Church attributed broad bounds to a person’s
moral responsibility, but since the council it has increasingly accepted the
idea that suicides are not responsible for their actions. As to the converse
way of viewing it I mentioned above, the Church has always rejected the Stoic
ethos that regarded suicide as a supreme expression of man’s moral freedom and
the height of virtue. (Romano Amerio, Iota
Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth Century [trans.
John P. Parsons; Kansas City, Miss.: Sarto House, 1996], 425-26)
