The latest Western nation poised to deepen its embrace of the culture of death is the United Kingdom, where legislation facilitating assisted suicide is being moved forward in Parliament.

As in other places where this has happened, the local Catholic Church is confronted with a pressing question: How should the faithful respond to forestall this dreadful action?

The most immediate need is to communicate what’s really happening with assisted suicide and why it’s so wrong.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster, the president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, has eloquently done this, via a pastoral letter he released ahead of the proposed legislation’s formal introduction.

The cardinal’s letter delivers three vital warnings. The first is to “be careful what you wish for,” referencing the slippery slope that inevitably arises when assisted suicide becomes legal. While the initial U.K. legislation might seem relatively moderate, and “assurances will be given that the proposed safeguards are firm and reliable,” Cardinal Nichols notes that what is proposed now “will not be the end of the story” — especially for those with disabilities and other especially vulnerable people.

The second warning is that “a right to die can become a duty to die,” referencing the pressures that inevitably are brought to bear on some of those who are nearing death to opt for assisted suicide. A related evil, the cardinal notes, is the warping of medical ethics caused by assisted suicide, “bringing about for all medical professionals a slow change from a duty to care to a duty to kill.”

This brings us to the cardinal’s third and final pastoral warning: “Being forgetful of God belittles our humanity.” In this context, it should be remembered that it is in the secularized societies of the West, where the understanding that life is a gift from God has been undermined, where assisted-suicide laws have made headway recently. In other parts of the world where faith remains stronger, it has gained little traction.

“The questions raised by this bill go to the very heart of how we understand ourselves, our lives, our humanity,” Cardinal Nichols comments about the proposed U.K. legislation, noting that it “seeks to give a person of sound will and mind the right to act in a way that is clearly contrary to a fundamental truth: our life is not our own possession, to dispose of as we feel fit.”

For the United States, the validity of the cardinal’s cautions is confirmed by the ominous developments currently taking place to the north. Just six years after its introduction, deaths resulting from Canada’s euphemistically named Medical Assistance in Dying (MAid) law had climbed exponentially from 1,016 in 2016 to 13,241 in 2022, making it the nation’s fifth-leading cause of death that year. The situation has subsequently grown even worse, because Canada’s assisted-suicide law was greatly expanded in 2021 to include people who don’t have diagnoses of terminal illnesses.

Documented abuses include the pressuring of patients in Canadian hospitals to opt for MAiD, in direct contravention of the law’s stipulation that it should be a patient-led process, and of cases of assisted suicides carried out on patients who did not meet the law’s specific criteria. Other reports include cases of patients being approved for assisted suicide primarily because of economic poverty, not because of physical illness.

But while these escalating abuses should motivate Catholics in the U.K. and elsewhere to press their legislators to avoid following Canada’s deadly example, they should motivate the faithful even more to intensify our efforts to reach out to people who might be at risk of opting for assisted suicide. Palliative-care experts and others knowledgeable about this issue stress that those who seek to end their lives this way generally do so because they feel abandoned by other human beings, not because of their illnesses.

Afflicted by the hurt of their loneliness on top of their other sufferings, these vulnerable persons have lost sight of the truth that their lives remain as valuable and dignified as ever.

As followers of Christ, we should view it as our joyful duty to recommunicate this truth to them, through personal accompaniment. Wherever we might live, there are hospitals and hospices nearby that we can visit regularly. We can also encourage our parishes to establish permanent programs to carry out such activities on an ongoing basis, if they haven’t already done so.

“Part of this debate, then, must be the need and duty to enhance palliative care and hospice provision, so that there can genuinely be, for all of us, the prospect of living our last days in the company of loved ones and caring medical professionals,” Cardinal Nichols reminds us pointedly. “This is truly dying with dignity.”