Today the Gospel tells of a miracle and a vocation. When Our Lord called Simon Peter to be His follower, He won His admiration by working a miracle. Simon was a fisherman. On the particular occasion we hear of today, he had had an unsuccessful night’s fishing. Our Lord told him to put his faith in Him and throw out the nets once more, on the other side of the boat. Having done as He suggested, Simon was astonished to find that he had caught a huge number of fish. Our Lord told Simon that he would “become a fisher of men”.

    Assisted suicide has been intensively debated in the media since the Law Lords decided unanimously in favour of Ms Debbie Purdy in July last year. Ms Purdy suffers from primary progressive MS and foresees that her life will become not worth living. When it does, she wants her husband to assist her to commit suicide. But assisting suicide is a criminal offence, and Ms Purdy refuses to risk her husband's prosecution. By a complex legal argument, she persuaded the Law Lords that she has a right to know whether prosecution would follow. In fact Ms Purdy had every reason to think that it wouldn't. Her appeal, supported by the pressure group Dignity in Dying, was about obtaining from the Crown Prosecution Service a new policy on assisted suicide, guaranteeing immunity from prosecution in cases like hers. Although it would be at odds with the law, Ms Purdy knew that the Director of Public Prosecutions (Keir Starmer QC) was keen to operate such a policy. When the Law Lords granted  her appeal, they conspired with Ms Purdy and Dignity in Dying to override the law, giving a green light to what they euphemistically called 'compassionate assistance'. The draft guidelines on prosecution subsequently issued by Mr Starmer have exactly this effect.

Just over a month later, Lord Phillips, one of the Law Lords who had heard Ms Purdy's appeal, went on the record  to say that he has 'enormous sympathy' with anyone who prefers to 'end their life more swiftly and avoid [a prolonged] death as well as avoiding the pain and distress that might cause their relatives'. Reading their judgements in Ms Purdy's case, it's clear that Lord Phillips' four colleagues felt the same way. The Law Lords' evident approval of 'compassionate assistance' has led to their decision in Ms Purdy's case being challenged in the Supreme Court.

We await the outcome of this challenge; but given the ideological commitment to assisted suicide among the judicial elite, no one should hold his breath.

At the heart of the issue of assisted suicide is the idea of a life 'not worth living'. Of course  people can come to feel their existence is worthless. But are they right? As Christians, we know that such thinking embodies a tragic mistake. Since 1961, suicide has been decriminalised in the UK, and that is perhaps as it should be. But decriminalisation does not equal endorsement. When someone assists another to commit suicide, even out of 'compassion', he or she unavoidably endorses the suicidal person's conviction of worthlessness. This is what the law, as well as our Faith, forbids us to do.  Transgressing this, society would legitimise the murderous doctrine that there really are 'lives not worth living'.

We should say, in fact, further legitimise – for already the UK is up to its neck in this way of thinking. Babies are aborted because their lives are judged not worth living; and every abortion, for whatever reason, says that a baby's life is not worth saving. Similarly, involuntary euthanasia frequently threatens the 'worthless' lives of the disabled and the elderly. Everywhere, we see the growing exercise of lethal power over the afflicted and dependent. Suicide, tragically, exercises that power over oneself: killing to erase one's own affliction, just as others are killed to erase theirs.

A rage against affliction and dependency is at the heart of the culture of death. Assisted suicide,  which Ms Purdy, Dignity in Dying, the Law Lords and many others wish to portray as a 'civilised' and 'compassionate' solution, merely deepens the catastrophe.