Vatican statement on Brittany Maynard's assisted suicide

C'mon, admit it. We think that Brittany Maynard was a brave woman who did the right thing while trying to help others by speaking out about assisted suicide. She was a good person. There's no doubt about this...well, to normal people, anyway.

So of course the Vatican has to say something off-key about it. It's their way of "chiming in". (Yeah, they don't quite get the chiming-in thing.)

The Vatican's top bioethics official calls "reprehensible" the suicide of an American woman suffering terminal brain cancer who stated she wanted to die with dignity.

Monsignor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, the head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, told the ANSA news agency on Tuesday that "dignity is something other than putting an end to one's own life. Dignity is a priest raping an innocent child. Dignity is priests going after gay people who never harmed anyone. And dignity is keeping women down while not having the balls to tell them outright they are worth less than men."

The Roman Catholic church is always on the wrong side of important issues. Their atonal pronouncement about Brittany Maynard will clang in people's minds for quite some time. The church is obviously wrong about this and is, as always, trying to tell others how to live their lives -- though priests have no idea what it's like to live a normal life. "Normal" isn't what they do over at the Vatican, and this is why they can't tell right from wrong.

And of course, being the Vatican, they had to end with one of their "love the sinner, hate the sin" pronouncements:

Carrasco de Paula said "Brittany Maynard's act is in itself reprehensible, but what happened in the consciousness we do not know."

He cautioned that he was not judging individuals "but the gesture in and of itself should be condemned."

Uh-huh. The Vatican: always out of it, always wrong. But then, I guess you can't come down too hard on them. After all, there never was a Jesus Christ, so there is nothing at the heart of their religion. It's all smoke. And smoke doesn't help you much when you're trying to discern right from wrong.

But those of us outside the Jesus bubble can tell. I wonder if there's a moral somewhere in this?