Home / News & Publications / Michigan Catholic News / 2010 / Jesuit ethicist: Feeding tubes not always necessary
Jesuit ethicist: Feeding tubes not always necessary
by Robert Delaney of The Michigan Catholic
Published March 12, 2010
DETROIT — Catholics who think Church teaching requires every dying 90-year-old to be hooked up to a feeding tube are misunderstanding and distorting what the Church teaches, a Jesuit priest who is also a medical doctor told Catholic healthcare workers last Sunday.
The result is unnecessary anxiety for many older Catholics, improper demands on Catholic physicians and other healthcare professionals, and unwarranted attacks on the orthodoxy of many Catholic bishops, medical ethicists and others, Jesuit Fr. Myles N. Sheehan, M.D. told an audience of about 175 people at Sacred Heart Major Seminary.
Fr. Sheehan, provincial of the New England Province of the Society of Jesus, spoke after the 12th annual Rose Mass for Catholics in the healthcare field.
Auxiliary Bishop Francis Reiss was celebrant for the Mass, which takes it name from the rose-colored vestments worn on Laetare Sunday, though this year's Rose Mass was moved ahead a week.
Fr. Sheehan attracted the largest turnout in the history of the archdiocesan Rose Mass – an audience that included doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, and both medical and nursing students, among others.
Prior to his February 2009 appointment as head of his province, Fr. Sheehan was senior associate dean of the Loyola University Health System and on the faculty of its Stritch School of Medicine, Chicago. He was named among Chicago's top doctors and among America's top doctors by the Campbell Castle survey for multiple years before he left medicine to serve his order.
Misunderstandings arise from both a lack of understanding of medicine and of the fullness of Church teaching, in Fr. Sheehan's view, with passages from Church documents sometimes taken out of context or misapplied to a medical situation.
"In many of the arguments in the area of life issues, people feel very strongly, but think very weakly," he said.
A major mistake is confusing is what is required in the case of people in what has come to be called a persistent vegetative state with what should be done for those who are dying a natural death.
"No more than a Toyota is a Chrysler is Terri Schiavo a 90-year-old woman who has led an otherwise good life," Fr. Sheehan said, referring to the famous case of a Florida woman who died in 2005 when her feeding tube was removed after she had been in a persistent vegetative state for seven years.
Many people misunderstand that life is not an ultimate value, but is "relative to our eternal vocation in heaven," he said, noting that Pope John Paul II spoke out against "both the artificial extension of human life and the hastening of death" (in a June 21, 1998 address in Vienna).
"If God calls, and you're giving a busy signal, that's a really stupid thing to do," Fr. Sheehan commented.
The rareness of the pervasive vegetative state condition is seldom fully understood even by health professionals, and thus is not a good paradigm for policy on the treatment of dying persons in general, he maintained.
In fact, he said one of America's largest Catholic nursing home operators reported only a few such cases in its entire system.
Too often, the fact that an elderly person is not eating is seen as the cause they are dying, when the reality is that they lack the need to eat precisely because they are dying, Fr. Sheehan said.
Andy Berkowski, a fourth-year medical student at Wayne State University's School of Medicine, where he is active in the Medical Students for Life, said Fr. Sheehan's talk had clarified a perspective he already had on the issue.
"He shed light on the fact that it's not tube-feeding at all costs," said Berkowski, a member of St. Anselm Parish, Dearborn Heights.
For Luke McCoy, a member of St. Ronald Parish, Clinton Township, the talk "reinforced everything we have learned in our ethics class" at the University of Detroit Mercy, where he is a senior nursing student.
Peg Nelson, a registered nurse and nurse practitioner who is director of palliative care at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital Oakland, said she thought Fr. Sheehan's message was "realistic, thoughtful and helpful for those of us who work with people who suffer with serious illness."
Ann Suziedelis, Ph.D., ethicist at St. Joseph Mercy Oakland, called the talk "a marvelous breath of fresh air."
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