Connacht Tribune: Don’t die at night if you want the Last Rites
Patients who die after 9pm at University Hospital Galway (UHG) may not get the ‘Last Rites’ because the HSE has stopped providing a 24-hours-a-day chaplaincy service at the West of Ireland’s only major acute hospital.
The Connacht Tribune has learned that some patients who died unexpectedly overnight at UHG in recent months were not given the Last Rites due to a rationalisation of the service by the HSE to comply with employment legislation.
Link to full article: https://connachttribune.ie/dont-die-at-night-if-you-want-the-last-rites-549/
Last Rites or the Anointing of the Sick can be performed if requested at any stage in the person’s illness. We, Baptized laity, in an emergency, can today perform almost all the liturgical and sacramental actions that a Catholic Deacon can. EXCEPTIONS: Deacons and baptized laity cannot consecrate the Eucharist, cannot hear confessions, cannot administer the Anointing of the Sick. Life can present us with unsolicited emergencies when we are the only person available to provide spiritual comfort.
An old friend (in both senses of the term) in a nursing home has just asked me if she could put my name on her care plan as the person to be called for the Last Rites/ Sacrament of the Sick. I said yes.
Considering that Jesus before his Passion was anointed by a woman..
Soline,
That is so beautiful and so right!
Soline, I would find it a great comfort to have you at my beside if I were ill,
The crux of the situation is that we laity cannot administer the Sacrament of the “Anointing of the Sick.” …another reason for you to seek women’s ordination.
I had a vague idea that in cases of need this sacrament could be administered by lay people — how wrong I was:
The Code of Canon Law, in can. 1003 1 (cf. also can. 739 1 of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches) exactly reflects the doctrine expressed by the Council of Trent (Session XIV, can. 4: DS 1719; cf. also the Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1516), which states that “only priests (Bishops and presbyters) are ministers of the Anointing of the Sick”.
This doctrine is definitive tenenda. Neither deacons nor lay persons may exercise the said ministry, and any action in this regard constitutes a simulation of the Sacrament.
From the Offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Rome, 11 February 2005, the Memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
Prefect
Seems to have more to do with keeping Luther in the wrong than with any pastoral concern: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20050211_unzione-infermi_en.html
People express shock that Mary McAleese should speak of Baptism in cold legal terms, mentioning concerns of Justice — surely Baptism is a cosy sacrament not a matter of Canon Law? Surely a Sacrament cannot be a crushing legal burden?
But in fact all the sacraments come clothed in a coat of legal armour — just think of the topheavy juridical machinery erected on the exchange of vows in Matrimony, and the legal towers reared over Holy Orders, over Confession, and even over the Eucharist (as the same President McAleese discovered when she received the Eucharist on the other side of the sectarian divide, only to be denounced as enacting a hoax or a sham).
Jesus put human welfare unambiguously first (“If one of you has a child or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull it out?” Luke 14:5).
The complexities of Canon Law have blinded the Church and the world to the simplicity of the Gospel.
Thank you Ned, M G-B and Joe for your responses.
I am not the only one, nor the first and definitely not the last.
These realities need to be brought into the open honestly and courageously during our Irish Synodal Pathway if we are to discern truly what the Holy Spirit is doing and asking of us at this time.