Terri Schiavo’s Family Visits Catholic Church Leaders at Vatican 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
May 17, 2005
The Vatican (LifeNews.com) — The family of Terri Schiavo, the disabled woman starved to death late March over a 13 day period, visited with leaders of the Catholic Church in Rome. Bob and Mary Schindler said they drew strength from church supporters during their internationally watched legal battle.
The Schindler family met with Vatican Cardinal Renato Martino Tuesday and thanked him and other Catholic officials for speaking out on Terri’s behalf in the weeks leading up to her death.
Martino decried the “woman’s death as one of the most inhuman and cruel form of killing since it was by hunger and thirst."
Martino heads the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and, in February, urged U.S. courts to not allow Terri’s estranged husband to remove her feeding tube.
The cardinal told them that Terri’s death was death was “an insult to human dignity," according to a CBS News report.
The family will have an audience with newly elected Pope Benedict XVI, who has been outspoken in his opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Martino reminded Catholics worldwide of Pope Benedict’s words in a recent speech. The pontiff said “that the freedom to kill is not true freedom, but a tyranny that reduces man into slavery."
"The circumstances of the death of Mrs. Terri Schiavo have rightly shocked consciences. A life has been interrupted," chief Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said in a statement just after Terri’s starvation death in late March.
"A death was arbitrarily brought forward … There is no doubt there can be no exceptions to the principle of the sacred nature of life from the moment of conception until its natural end," his statement said.
The Catholic Church has been consistent in its opposition to Terri’s starvation death.
"Who can judge the dignity and sacredness of the life of a human being, made in the image and likeness of God? Who can decide to pull the plug as if we were talking about a broken or out of order household appliance," the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said.
Related web sites:
Terri Schiavo’s parents – https://www.terrisfight.org
