Faced with the escalating public debate on end-of-life care, the Catholic Church in Italy is undergoing one of the most dramatic theological and political reversals in its recent history. This is no longer a silent retreat or passive tolerance in the face of secularization, but a veritable genetic mutation. Led by the President of the CEI, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, and the last two presidents of the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAV), Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia and his successor, Monsignor Renzo Pegoraro, ecclesiastical leaders are, in effect, albeit informally, pushing Catholic politicians to co-author a law that would institutionalize, albeit with limitations, assisted suicide.

It is the triumph of a desperate Realpolitik, which, for fear of losing its last hold on legislative power, is willing to sacrifice the purity of evangelical testimony and overturn decades of papal teaching.

The Optical Illusion of the “Imperfect Law” and the Betrayal of Evangelium Vitae

The theoretical framework with which Monsignor Renzo Pegoraro justifies (read here) this push for compromise is based on a bold reading, to say the least, of paragraph 73 of St. John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae. The current president of the PAV argues that, to avoid libertarian tendencies (the so-called normative “Wild West”), it is moral for Catholics to give their assent to an “imperfect law” that incorporates the criteria established by the Constitutional Court’s ruling 242/2019.

However, a rigorous analysis of Pope Wojtyla’s text reveals the blatant contradiction of this strategy. The “imperfect law” exception applies in Catholic moral theology only when unjust legislation is already in force or about to be enacted through the initiative of others. In that case, and only in that case, the Catholic legislator can vote on amendments to limit the damage, taking containment action.

But in Italy, Article 580 of the Penal Code (which punishes assisted suicide) is still formally in force. Encouraging Catholics to promote and be the first signatories of a comprehensive law that, for the first time in the Italian legal system, authorizes and regulates state intervention to procure the death of a sick person, does not mean limiting harm. It means formally cooperating in evil. It means transforming the principle of “tolerance of a lesser evil” into the “creation of a conditional right.” Indeed, there is a world of difference between defending oneself from an unjust law and promoting an unjust law — a theological short circuit that makes Catholics no longer defenders of the sanctity of life but bureaucrats of its administration.

The “greatest common good”: Monsignor Paglia’s progressive shift

If Pegoraro’s statements highlight a casual use of doctrine, it was his predecessor, Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, who certified the cultural shift toward secular progressivism. In a 2023 statement (read here), which will go down in history as the smoking gun of this surrender, Paglia declared: “Personally, I would not resort to assisted suicide, but I understand that legal mediation can represent the greatest common good concretely possible in the conditions in which we find ourselves.”

These few words demonstrate the systematic demolition of the Catholic moral system. First, the use of the adverb “personally” reduces a universal commandment founded on Natural Law to a mere subjective option, slavishly copying the rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon “liberal” politicians, extreme advocates of individual rights, in the homeland of individualistic liberalism. If morality is personal, the Church ceases to be the teacher of truth and becomes one opinion among many.

But it is the use of the expression “common good” that represents the pinnacle of linguistic mystification. In the Social Doctrine of the Church, the common good is the precondition for the human and spiritual flourishing of society. Defining a law on state suicide as the “greatest concretely possible common good” means perverting Catholic vocabulary in order to justify a political calculation. The goodness of an action is no longer measured by objective Truth but by the ethics of the situation (“in the conditions in which we find ourselves”). It is an admission of the impotence of a hierarchy that, encountering no serious difficulty converting hearts in a secularized, perhaps even pagan, society, is content to govern the nation’s ethical decline.

Zuppi’s Paradox and the New Psychological Collateralism

The political architect of this stance is Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, current president of the Italian Episcopal Conference. His repeated exhortations (for example, here) to find a parliamentary “mediation channel” conceal highly pragmatic motivations. Church leaders are terrified by the regulatory vacuum, which leaves decision-making power to civil courts and local health authority ethics committees (which are gradually tightening the grip of the Constitutional Court’s ruling). They also fear the activism of the Luca Coscioni Association, which is attempting to force the issue with regional laws. Finally, they calculate that the current center-right government majority is the only one capable of passing a highly restrictive law, at least barricading the obligation of palliative care before future progressive majorities open the door to widespread euthanasia.

These fears have their own political logic, but they generate a striking historical paradox. In the 1970s, Catholic Action and the Italian Church repudiated party affiliation with the Christian Democrats through the famous “religious choice: the goal was not to dictate laws but to shape consciences, leaving secularists free to influence politics.

Today we are witnessing a dramatic reversal. Having suffered a resounding failure to form consciences in a secularized society, the Church of the CEI is once again taking refuge in the fetish of State Law. This is psychological and institutional collateralism: the hierarchy refuses to accept having become a cultural minority and prefers to pursue mediation in order to maintain a semblance of authority and influence over those in power, deluding itself that it can protect society through a civil code rather than the Gospel.

The French Lesson: Monsignor Ulrich’s Prophecy against Roman Notaries

To understand the gravity of Italy’s disorientation, one need only look across the Alps. On August 19, 2026, French President Emmanuel Macron enacted a law legalizing assisted suicide. The reaction of the Archbishop of Paris, Laurent Ulrich, was the exact opposite of the Zuppi-PAV stance.

Archbishop Ulrich did not seek compromise, nor did he speak of an “imperfect law” or the “common good.” He urged Catholics (read here) to courageous resistance: “Today, tomorrow, in the future, we will undoubtedly have to make courageous choices, perhaps against the grain, starting with those we make for ourselves. It is therefore up to us, first and foremost, to choose not to ask to avail ourselves of this new ‘right.'”

The French Church, the product of centuries of rigid secularism, knows it has no leverage to negotiate laws with the secular state and for this very reason is extraordinarily free. The Archbishop of Paris has outlined the path of the “creative minority”: recognizing that the state is taking a direction opposite to the Truth, stopping chasing it in the corridors of ministries, and returning to forming a community of believers capable of saying a radical “no,” practicing conscientious objection and true healing.

While in France the Church defends its spiritual identity by accepting political defeat, in Italy the hierarchy trades its identity in order to delude itself into believing it can still wield a fraction of political power. Monsignor Ulrich respects the mandate of Christian witness; Zuppi and Pegoraro act as notaries of a defeat.

An irreparable rift between the Magisterium and curial practice

Making this picture even more opaque is the now unbridgeable gap between the Petrine Magisterium and the practices of curial bureaucracies. Just last Wednesday, Pope Leo XIV (read here) dedicated a heartfelt catechesis to the dignity of the person, reiterating unsparingly the absolute non-possession of human life, from conception to natural death. A few days earlier, the Italian leaders of the PAV tacitly blessed the idea of ​​a state law on the administration of death.

How is this schizophrenia possible at the top of the universal Church? The answer lies in the rhythms and complex mechanisms of the Roman Curia. The appointment of Monsignor Pegoraro as President of the Pontifical Academy, which took place on May 27, 2025, just nineteen days after the election of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost (Leo XIV) to the Papal Throne, in no way represents the new Pope’s bioethical endorsement of this compliant line.

On the contrary, it was merely a bureaucratic formalization of a file already closed. Monsignor Paglia, having turned 80 in April 2025, had reached the age limit. Pegoraro, already Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy since 2011, was the natural candidate for continuity, prepared by the previous administration. The new Pope, installed less than three weeks earlier and overwhelmed by the plethora of physiological emergencies that come with the beginning of each pontificate, simply signed a routine nomination prepared by the Secretariat of State and desired by Pope Francis.

This temporal detail could explain the striking cognitive dissonance witnessed by the faithful: a Pope who preaches with theological clarity and a curial machine — the product of a turbulent ecclesial period now past — that operates with a totally different horizon.

Conclusion

The CEI and PAV’s strategy on end-of-life care in Italy is not a prudent act of legislative wisdom, but prophetic suicide. In a desperate attempt to govern secularization through parliamentary amendments, Zuppi, Paglia, and Pegoraro are teaching Catholics that even the most sacred principles can be partially derogated, as long as the compromise is stamped by the official state.

If the Church refuses to declare that evil is evil, just to be able to write a law that authorizes it “just a little,” it isn’t protecting life: it’s merely negotiating the price of its end. And in this negotiation, what dies first and foremost is the very credibility of the Christian message.

It might be appropriate to turn our gaze and meditate on the words of Joseph Ratzinger, when in 1969 he prophesied a Church that would experience a dramatic upheaval: “From today’s crisis, a Church will emerge that will have lost much. It will become small and will have to start again more or less from the beginning. It will no longer be able to inhabit many of the buildings it had built in prosperity.” But above all, he said that the Church would lose its political and social privileges in order to achieve its prophetic mission.