Anglican Euthanasia Liturgies and the Abdication of Accompaniment

The Anglican Church of Canada published Pastoral Liturgies at the Time of Death in Contexts of Medical Assistance in Dying in July 2026, providing clergy with formal liturgical texts for use when parishioners choose medically assisted death.[^1] The document states that its purpose is not to settle the ethical controversy surrounding assisted dying or to argue either for or against the practice. It frames the Church's role as ensuring that no person faces death without spiritual presence.

That framing sounds Christian. It also conceals a prior question the document never asks: what did the minister do in the weeks and months before the appointment was made?

What the document does not address

Canada legalized medical assistance in dying in 2016. The number of Canadians choosing the procedure has grown every year since, making the country one of the most permissive jurisdictions in the world.[^1] As requests increased, religious communities faced pressure to define their pastoral role. The Anglican document responds by generating liturgical forms: prayers, blessings, rituals of presence for the moment of death itself.

What it does not generate is a prior program. There is no structured accompaniment for the terminally ill and suicidal before any application is filed, before a date is set, before the decision hardens into an appointment. The document arrives at the end of a process it played no recorded role in shaping.

A minister engaged throughout, accompanying the person through their fear of abandonment, their pain, their despair about being a burden, might have changed the outcome. A minister who appears only at the final hour, liturgy in hand, has accompanied a decision. The person who made it needed something earlier.

Liturgy is not neutral

The document's authors argue that pastoral presence does not equal moral endorsement. The distinction is formally correct and operationally misleading. Liturgy is the language a community uses to say: this belongs within our sacred story. When a church's most formal ritual vocabulary attaches itself to a moment, it does not stand apart from that moment as commentary. It consecrates it.

Federal monitoring data and state-level research on patients requesting assisted death bear directly on this. Oregon's Death with Dignity Act data shows that loss of autonomy (92%), declining ability to engage in enjoyable activities (88%), and loss of dignity (64%) are the leading reasons patients cite, with inadequate pain control and fear of being a burden on family cited by a meaningful minority. Canada's picture differs: Health Canada's 2021 report found a different pattern: inadequate pain control was cited by 57.6 percent of MAID recipients — a majority concern, not a secondary one — while the most frequently cited factors overall were loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities (86.3%) and loss of ability to perform daily activities (83.4%), with loss of dignity at 54.3%.[^3]

Those findings matter for pastoral practice across both contexts. Whether the primary driver is loss of functional capacity or undertreated pain, the question of whether that preference reflects an adequately explored alternative — palliative care, mental health support, sustained relational presence — remains open in every case. People who believe they have become a burden, or who fear the progressive loss of self, or who are living with pain that has not been adequately managed, are precisely the people a minister engaged months earlier might have reached differently.

Offering a liturgy at the final appointment addresses none of those antecedent needs. It soothes the conscience of the minister while the structural failure that preceded the appointment goes unexamined.

The Catholic alternative

The Catholic Church does not offer a liturgy for medically assisted death. It offers something more demanding: a rite of anointing of the sick, structured accompaniment of the dying through palliative care, and a theological account of suffering that refuses to treat death as the most efficient solution to pain.

The Rite of Anointing of the Sick, governed by the Ordo unctionis infirmorum, is administered by a priest to those who are seriously ill, and its purpose is healing: physical where God wills it, always spiritual and relational.[^2] Canon 1003 of the Code of Canon Law assigns this ministry to priests with care of souls as both a duty and a right, because the Church regards the sick person as still fully within the community's pastoral responsibility, not as someone whose fate is now their own concern. The sacrament does not accompany a decision to die. It accompanies a person who is suffering, with the explicit theological conviction that the person's life, and the meaning available within it, has not been exhausted.

That conviction changes what a minister does when a parishioner says they are considering assisted death. The first move is not to prepare a liturgy. It is to ask what is making death seem like the answer, and then to address that.

The social transmission problem

There is a further concern the Anglican document does not engage. Research on suicidal behavior has established that perceived social acceptability is a factor in individual decisions to pursue self-ending. When institutions, particularly religious ones, attach their most sacred forms to a manner of death, they participate in normalizing that death as an option, whatever their stated intentions about remaining neutral.

The Anglican Church of Canada is not a marginal community. Its pastoral decisions reach parishes across the country, shape what clergy say to parishioners in crisis, and signal to people weighing their options what their church thinks of those options. A church that arrives with a liturgy signals something, and that signal is not neutrality.

The harder path — developing a genuine program of accompaniment for the terminally ill and suicidal, training clergy to recognize undertreated depression and inadequately managed pain, building relationships with palliative care teams, and being present months before any application is filed — is exactly the path the document does not take. It is also the path most likely to change outcomes.

Compassion and its preconditions

The instinct that no person should face death alone is correct. The question is what genuine presence requires. A therapist who ratifies a client's stated wish to die without examining whether that wish emerges from integrated self-understanding or from a crisis state has not provided care. They have provided agreement. The therapeutic relationship is precisely where that examination happens, and it depends on the therapist's willingness to hold a larger vision of the client's flourishing than the client can hold for themselves in a moment of acute suffering.

The same principle applies in pastoral care, with the addition of theological conviction: the person is more than their present experience of themselves, and their story is not finished. A minister who holds that conviction does not wait for the appointment to be scheduled. They engage before the decision is made, because they believe the decision is not yet settled, because they believe in a future for the person that the person, in despair, cannot currently see.

The Anglican document, despite its pastoral motivations, concedes that future before the conversation begins. It prepares for the death rather than for the person. That is a failure of anthropology, and the liturgical forms that follow from it, however carefully written, cannot compensate for what was not done earlier.

References

[^1]: ZENIT Staff, 'Anglicans in Canada Normalize Murder Through Official Ritual Liturgies for Euthanasia,' ZENIT News, July 3, 2026, https://zenit.org/2026/07/03/anglicans-in-canada-normalize-murder-through-official-ritual-liturgies-for-euthanasia/.

[^2]: Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Prayers for Healing (Vatican City, 2000); cf. Ordo unctionis infirmorum eorumque pastoralis curae (Vatican City: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1975), no. 16.

[^3]: Health Canada, Third Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada 2021 (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2022), reporting that inadequate pain control was cited by 57.6% of MAID recipients, loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities by 86.3%, loss of ability to perform daily activities by 83.4%, and loss of dignity by 54.3%; Oregon Health Authority, Oregon Death with Dignity Act: 2023 Data Summary (Salem: Oregon Health Authority, 2024), reporting that loss of autonomy (92%), decreasing ability to engage in enjoyable activities (88%), and loss of dignity (64%) are the leading reasons cited.