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Rebel theologian Hans Kung, who at the age of 85 is suffering from Parkinson’s disease, has revealed he is considering seeking help to take his own life.
In the final volume of his three-part memoirs, he says he has macular degeneration as well as Parkinson’s disease. He will soon be blind, and can hardly manage to write by hand any longer.
“I don’t want to go on existing as a shadow of myself,” Kung writes.
“Human beings have a right to die when they see no hope of continuing to live according to their very own understanding of how to go on living in a humane way.”
Kung says cannot understand why his Church and German law deny people the right to assisted suicide. In his native Switzerland suicide organisations are allowed to offer incurably ill patients lethal medication which the patients themselves can then take.
Kung writes that people have a right to “surrender” their lives to God voluntarily if illness, pain or dementia make further living unbearable.
He asks readers: “If I have to decide myself, please abide by my wish.”
But if he does have to decide, he says, he does not want to go to a “sad and bleak” assisted suicide centre but rather be surrounded by his closest colleagues at his house in Tuebingen or in his Swiss home town of Sursee.
“No person is obligated to suffer the unbearable as something sent from God,” he writes. “People can decide this for themselves and no priest, doctor or judge can stop them.”
A spokesman for Rottenburg-Stuttgart diocese, where Tuebingen is located, said Kung’s views on assisted suicide were not Catholic teaching. “Mr Kung speaks for himself, not for the Church,” Uwe Renz said.
The Vatican withdrew Kung’s licence to teach Catholic theology in 1979 after he questioned the doctrine of papal infallibility and refused to recant.
Kung described Pope Francis as “a ray of hope” and disclosed that the new pontiff had sent him a hand-written note thanking him for books that Kung sent him after his election in March.
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Image: Clarin.com
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