Vatican denounces 'health-fiend madness'
Rejecting society's costly quest for cures, Rome says Pope's suffering is to be admired
The Vatican accused affluent societies yesterday of gobbling up too much of the world's health-care resources with their fetish for stay-young-forever medical cures, urging them to look to Pope John Paul II as a model for the inevitability of old age and illness whose stoic suffering should be imitated.
Vatican psychiatrist Manfred Lutz hailed the 85-year-old Pope as "the living alternative to the prevailing health-fiend madness."
Referring to the Pope's advanced Parkinson's disease and other illnesses, Dr. Lutz said: "Precisely in the handicap, in the disease, in the pain, in old age, in dying and death, one can . . . perceive the truth of life in a clearer way."
It was rather an abrupt turnabout for the Vatican, which has vigorously obscured -- even lied about -- the Pope's state of health in the past.
But in advance of a conference on quality of life and the ethics of health, sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Life, officials adjusted the papal image to fit their argument: that while the world's poor do without basic public-health measures, rich countries luxuriate in utopian expectations of medical cures for all needs and desires.
"The medicine of desires, egged on by the health-care market, increases the request for pharmaceutical and medical-surgical services [and] soaks up public resources beyond all reasonableness," academy theologian Rev. Maurizio Faggioni said.
"Medicine has become impossible to manage, because it can't fulfill the desires" of consumers for perfect health, added Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, a bioethicist who heads the academy, a Vatican advisory body.
