The Pope has been unwell for so long that his death was expected, and though many prayed for a prolongation of his life, this seems to have been largely a selfish sentiment. Partings, even those from significant figures we know only through the media, are traumatic or merely bothersome. They cause grief or disturb us in other ways. We would prefer to avoid them. Yet praying for God to grant an extension to the life of a seriously-ill man of 84 is unrealistic. Quite clearly, his time had come. The prayers the Vatican called for were not prayers that he be allowed to live longer, but prayers that would have him slip more comfortably and quickly into the next life.

The message was stark and it was not open to interpretation. We were told that the Pope had refused to be hospitalised, even though there was a slim chance that a man of his age and in his condition could survive septic shock with very aggressive treatment given in an intensive care unit. Members of the Roman Catholic Church are at liberty to refuse such aggressive treatment in all good conscience. Diabetics who would die if their legs are not cut off may refuse amputation. People suffering from fatal cancer may refuse the harsh treatment that might give them more time on earth or even cure them. The kind of treatment that members of the Roman Catholic Church may not refuse, if they wish to be in conformity with their religion, is run-of-the-mill. They may not refuse antibiotics and so let a severe infection kill them. If they are otherwise healthy and have suffered a gastrointestinal disease, they may not refuse a drip that will keep killer dehydration at bay. But if they are dying in any case, if the drip will only serve to eke out their life by a further few tortuous weeks in a hospital bed, hooked up to a tube, when they are elderly or fatally ill and their number is obviously up, then they may refuse that drip.

Those are just some examples, and I am talking about members of the Roman Catholic Church who wish to conform to the strictures of their religion. These rules have nothing to do with lapsed Catholics, non-Catholics, or anyone else. That much should be obvious. Because of the way we are brought up, we have difficulty in accepting that the religion we see as a way of life is not a way of life for others, not is it the law of the state. Many Catholics do not agree with these rules in the same way that they do not agree with the teachings on contraception, sex outside marriage, and so on. In that case, they cannot in all conscience call themselves Catholics, because it is not a pick-and-choose religion, and Catholicism is much more than tribal, personal or national identity. Also, there are many non-Catholics who agree with the rules. Going by the furore that surrounded the case of poor Mrs Schiavo, they are mainly far-right American Christians, the sort who believe that the creation of the world took place exactly as described in the Book of Genesis, and that dinosaurs never existed despite the evidence. On the whole, Catholics at least reach their conclusions by a process of rational argumentation and philosophical discussion, and not by the due process of mass hysteria.

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The reactions to the case of Mrs Schiavo, which I wrote about in detail in my column last Thursday, are rooted in fundamental misunderstandings about personal liberty and the separation of church and state. This is the crux of the matter: Mrs Schiavo did not want to be kept like a vegetable on a feeding-tube for 15 years. Keeping her that way for so long was a gross violation of her rights and an abusive denial of her wishes. The mistake people are making is to conclude that because her parents, Mr and Mrs Schindler, are dogmatic Roman Catholics, then Mrs Schiavo was a Roman Catholic, dogmatic or otherwise, too, and that she shared their beliefs. Worse still, they appear to suggest that her parents had the right, purely by virtue of being her parents, to impose their religious beliefs and wishes on their daughter, who was way past the age of 18. They had no more right to do so than you or I would have had, as complete strangers. This is as it should be, otherwise where would we end up? The parents would have had the obligation to make certain decisions as her next-of-kin, had she not been married, but even then, had their daughter left a ‘living will’ – in other words, written instructions – as to her fate, they would have had no moral right to go against them. Having parents as next-of-kin, who make decisions in these situations, is the default option. We are all free to specify that, if we find ourselves in such a situation and are not married, it is not our parents who should be regarded as the decision-making next of kin, but a sister, an aunt, a cousin or even a close friend. We choose the person whom we most trust to respect our wishes, and that is not necessarily the person who loves us most. People think clearly before they make such decisions; we all have strong feelings about whether we wish to be kept as vegetables or not, whether our organs should be donated or not, whether we wish to receive aggressive treatment or not.

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The Roman Catholic debate has raged around the point that, in church terms, it was wrong to remove the feeding-tube from a woman in a persistent vegetative state. And even here there are widely divergent views. Fr Peter Serracino Inglott and Fr Emmanuel Agius, who heads the department of moral theology at the university, made their opinion obvious, even though they both stopped short of spelling it out. The crucial point has been carefully avoided in the hope that nobody would notice, and this is it. In the eyes of the dogmatic Catholic hierarchy, was it wrong to remove the feeding-tube because Catholics are obliged, when in a persistent vegetative state, to keep themselves hooked up to feeding-tubes even for decades? Or was it wrong because it went against Mrs Schiavo’s wish – which is not what her husband says - that she be kept hooked up to such a tube for so long?

If the answer is yes to the first, then the retort is glaringly obvious: Mrs Schiavo was not necessarily a Catholic. The fact that we are baptised and raised as Catholics by Catholic parents does not mean that we reach middle-age adhering to every last bit of dogma. Many of my generation have ditched the whole thing (yes, even in Malta), maintaining only a nominal notion of Catholicism and then usually to keep the older generation happy or to conform to social strictures. Yet, even if she were a Catholic, this by no means gives Catholic authorities (or even Catholic parents) the right to impose on her conformity to dogma and principles that she has rejected. We should have left the mentality that gave rise to the Inquisition a long way behind. Since the late 18th century, religious belief has been very much a matter of personal choice. Individual liberty cannot be compromised by church leaders given the full backing of the state. Let’s put it this way. Even if I were a dogmatic Catholic who went to mass every day, received Holy Communion, went to confession, said the Rosary, and adhered to every last rule and regulation, if I suddenly found myself seriously ill and in need of a blood transfusion, and if I were to decide that I would rather die than have that blood transfusion, then there the matter would rest. Church leaders, my Catholic parents, or even the hospital doctors would have no right to intervene and impose their own wishes. Our hospital system applies this principle: if an adult refuses treatment, then his or her wishes are respected.

Even so, this is to assume, of course, that it is written in stone that strict Catholics may not refuse feeding-tubes when they are in a persistent vegetative state (of course, they would have to make this hypothetical refusal beforehand). There is tremendously conflicting opinion here, even among Catholic thinkers, priests and philosophers. The principle remains that no one should be allowed to interfere in decisions like these. If people wish to refuse treatment – even hypothetically in advance, by means of a living will or a credible message relayed to a close individual – then the rest of us should keep out of it.

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What has shocked me most about the raging debate is that nobody has bothered to address this question specifically: was the decision to remove the feeding-tube wrong because it went against Mrs Schiavo’s wishes? That is the only context in which I would call the decision grievous: if it blatantly went against her will. Conversely, if she was kept in that horrible state against her will, which was almost certainly the case, then that was a serious assault on her dignity and a violation of her will, and amounted to nothing less than violent aggression.

Mrs Schiavo left no living will, in other words, no written instructions. How many of us think to do this? Most of us don’t even bother with a will and testament until we reach a certain age. Yet it would be wise to make such a living will, and her case has alerted us to this wisdom. It is pointless specifying such wishes in your actual will, which can be opened only after you die. You have to leave separate instructions as to what should be done with you if you find yourself unable to communicate, and deposit at least three copies with trusted friends and relatives.

As for Mrs Schiavo, we have no reason to doubt her husband, the one person who really knew her, and knew her from childhood through to adulthood. Parents know their children, of course, and they know them well. But they do not know their most private thoughts, their secrets, or their innermost nature: those are only revealed to the other person with whom we choose to share our adult life. Adults who reveal their most personal thoughts to their parents are unusual and psychologically unhealthy; they haven’t matured properly, generally because their parents (usually the mother, particularly in the case of a favoured son) haven’t allowed them to do so.

From what I have heard said, it seems that everyone imagines that husbands are somehow always suspect. Why is this? For every wife-beating abuser or stingy bastard, there are a thousand good husbands who love and respect their wives as adult individuals. This is a very different love to that which parents feel, who love their sons and daughters as the adult version of the baby they brought into the world so many years ago, and not as individuals whom they ‘chose’ in adulthood. In a good marriage, the loyalty of husbands and wives to each other supersedes loyalty to their parents, and this is very much as it should be – though not in the Maltese way of seeing things, which is why so many marriages are damaged beyond repair.

Michael Schiavo’s commitment to carrying out his wife’s wishes indicates that he continued to feel loyalty and responsibility towards his wife even when she was in that ugly state for so long. I am astonished that he is talked of as a bastard. A bastard would have buzzed off years ago, divorced her, married another, gone to live in another state, and wiped her from his mind, which would have been a lot easier than the Calvary of the past 15 years. Even during the debate on Net TV last Thursday, a few of the prominent and highly intelligent persons round the table smiled cynically when it was suggested that he could have divorced her years ago. “As if he would relinquish his next-of-kin status!” they said. Why – what does he stand to gain from his next-of-kin status? Do these people know something that the rest of the world does not? The $1 million the couple got from winning a medical malpractice suit (which he filed in her name) years ago has long since been spent on medical care and legal battles to allow her to die. Only $50,000 remain. We forget that medical treatment in the US has to be paid for, so accustomed are we to treating St Luke’s like Fr Christmas’ sack. At the end, Mrs Schiavo was dependent on the tax-payer only because, with the case so much in the media spotlight, the clinic couldn’t very well throw her out on the grounds that the bills couldn’t be paid.

So jaundiced, jaded and cynical is our view of marriage and of the relationship between a man and a woman that we cannot even begin to understand or give credence to a situation like this. We cannot believe Mr Schiavo’s fierce loyalty to his wife’s wishes, and his determination to beat down the interference of her parents. Why not? Malta is teeming with invasive in-laws who believe that they somehow have a ‘closer’ relationship with their son or daughter than their son or daughter has with his or her spouse.

They refuse to relinquish emotional ‘ownership’ of their ‘child’. They assume that the spouse doesn’t love, know or understand their ‘child’ as much as they do; they assume that their wishes and influence should take precedence. They cause untold trouble and strife, and a wise husband and wife will put them firmly in their place and not give in to them.

It is quite obvious from Mr Schiavo’s attitude towards his in-laws that this is the situation we are speaking of. We are not looking at a situation that suddenly erupted over the hospital bed of Mrs Schiavo, but at what one suspects to be a much longer history than that. Mrs Schiavo was a bulimic, and the root of bulimia in young women lies in adolescence. People love to blame ‘man’ trouble for bulimia, but more often than not, the real cause is ‘parent’ trouble, which leaves the woman ill-equipped to cope with the emotional problems of adult life. Even the notorious bulimia of the late Princess of Wales was rooted not in her marriage or her husband, dreadful as both were, but in the fact that she was deserted by her mother at a vulnerable age.

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Our tumultuous and confused view of marriage has also rendered us unable to understand that there are different forms of love between men and women. Why should we assume that because Mr Schiavo now lives with a woman, with whom he is raising a family, that he no longer loved the woman who remained his wife at law, and whom he knew for most of his life? Surprisingly, most of this cynicism comes from Catholics who believe in the eternity of the marriage bond. Yet we are so cynical that we assume no love between men and women is possible without sex – in other words, of course he no longer loves her; he can’t have sex with her. This is shocking argumentation, and deeply warped. The fact that Mr Schiavo chose to fulfil his wish to have children – for which purpose he did the right thing and made sure to raise them in a family environment rather than as a single parent – is not proof of his lack of loyalty to his wife in her vegetative state. It was simply a rational acceptance of the fact that she could never be a wife again, because of that persistent vegetative state. Some people may think he should have proved his love by staying in celibate, childless bond to her for as long as it took. They can dream on. Who would have done that? They probably wouldn’t, and if he were their son, they would justify it and be correct in doing so.

Please, let’s be less cynical. Some men do love their wives. Some men are willing, dangerous and troublesome though it may be, to protect their wives from challenging and overbearing in-laws and parents. Some men do continue to care for and to respect the woman they once married even when she has long been unable to fulfil her role as wife, and this role has been taken up by another. We should not be so sarcastic and suspicious. We should not be so ready to support parents against spouses when we know that parents can do so much damage, sometimes far more damage than spouses, and when we see so much of this in the lives of those around us.

***

The battle goes on, even after her death. He wants to have her body cremated, after a funeral mass, and to have her ashes scattered at a location that had private and personal meaning to them both, without her parents present. He will not tell her parents where the ashes are to be scattered, not because he wishes to be unkind to them, but because he doesn’t want them “coming along with the media and turning it into a circus.” In this, he is entirely correct, and we can see in that one remark just what he thinks of his in-laws’ behaviour. Had I been in his position, I would have behaved in exactly the same way. It is Mr and Mrs Schindler who provoke scepticism in me, with their constant need to have the media in tow, and with their disgusting invasion of their daughter’s privacy, releasing as they did that intimate video of her in bed, with her head lolling.

Mr Schiavo is right, too, in his decision to have Mrs Schiavo’s remains cremated, and not buried. There is nothing wrong with cremation; it is not ‘against’ the Catholic religion, even if Mrs Schiavo were a Catholic in the first place. The decision is the right one because Mr Schiavo knows that her grave would turn into a shrine to which thousands of hysterics would feel obliged to make pilgrimages, and where her parents will perform for the media on a regular basis. She would quite literally not be allowed to rest in peace.