Assisted Suicide and The Despair of Our Time

At the same time that the transhumanists are chasing the goal of immortality, more and more states are legalising what in Canada is called MAiD (medical assistance in dying).

From Rorate Cæli

By Roberto de Mattei

The Despair of Our Time

Corrispondenza Romana September 9, 2026

In recent days, news has surfaced of the approval in Veneto of a regional law regulating assisted suicide. Veneto is the fourth region to pass such legislation, but the first governed by a center-right administration. The fact therefore carries a political and cultural significance that extends well beyond regional borders: it shows how the principle of absolute self-determination has now penetrated coalitions that, at least nominally, are supposed to be committed to the defense of life, the family, and the natural order.

Assisted suicide consists in the deliberate pursuit of death on the part of someone who, believing he no longer has reasons to live, asks public institutions to help him end his own existence. The question therefore does not concern a purely private decision. The moment the law intervenes, suicide ceases to be regarded as a tragedy to be prevented and becomes a recognized and institutionally organized possibility. This choice is presented by the media as the exercise of a right and a noble act of self-determination — one that the law should not prohibit and moral judgment should not censure. One hears of "freedom," "dignity," "informed choice," and "rights," while carefully avoiding any reminder that every request for suicide contains, prior even to a will to die, a desperate cry of pain.

When voluntary death is described as a courageous and dignified choice, the message that reaches the public is devastating. The elderly person who feels burdensome, the sick person who fears being abandoned, the disabled person who senses the economic and psychological cost of care may convince themselves that dying is an act of generosity toward their family, or the most honorable solution to their condition.

A profound contradiction manifests itself here. When a desperate person attempts to take his own life, society mobilizes doctors, psychologists, and law enforcement to save him. When that same will is expressed under certain clinical conditions and translated into a legal procedure, it is celebrated as a manifestation of freedom. In the one case, it is affirmed that life must be defended against the despair of the moment; in the other, that very despair is accepted as the foundation of a right.

In the same days in which the regional law on assisted suicide was passed, the front pages of newspapers reported on heinous crimes committed above all within the family unit: fathers who annihilate their loved ones, mothers who kill their children, men who murder their wives or partners and then take their own lives. There is certainly a moral and juridical difference between one who kills members of his family and one who asks to be helped to die. Yet at the origin of both phenomena one can recognize the same sentiment of despair.

Despair is the absence of all hope. It is one of the most profound consequences of the materialism that dominates contemporary society. Materialism does not consist merely in an attachment to money or material goods. It is, more radically, a conception of reality that reduces the human person to his biological, economic, and psychological dimensions. Within this framework, the value of life depends on the pleasure it yields, the autonomy it permits, the health one enjoys, and the success one achieves. When these conditions disappear, so too does the very reason for living. In the most terrible cases, those who have lost all hope do not merely take their own lives but seek to drag down with them those whom they consider part of their fate. The family — which ought to be the place of protection and love — becomes the theater of an ultimate will to domination: "If my life no longer has meaning, neither shall yours continue." This is the diabolical inversion of love, which no longer seeks the good of the other but wishes to possess him to the point of annihilating him.

Contemporary society promises happiness through well-being, pleasure, success, and the absence of all limits. But it is precisely this false promise that prepares despair. Those who have been educated to believe that happiness coincides with the satisfaction of their desires are not prepared to face illness, loss, abandonment, or failure. If a person regards material reality as the sole horizon of his existence, he is no longer capable of giving meaning to his own life. A civilization that has promised autonomy and the fulfillment of every desire, but has taken away God and the hope of eternal life, leaves the human person defenseless before pain and death. Despair is therefore far more than an individual psychological state: it is the spiritual and social sickness of our time. This deep evil is not healed by juridical or political instruments. What must first be restored to the human person is true hope — the supernatural hope that has never deceived anyone. But to restore hope, one must first restore to the human person the faith that is hope's foundation and presupposition.

And what faith, if not faith in God, Creator and Lord of history; in Jesus Christ, Redeemer and Savior of humanity; in his Cross, which has conquered sin; in his Resurrection, which has defeated death?

Those who embrace the immense and consoling vision of faith understand that they are not the product of chance, nor beings destined for nothingness, but creatures loved by God and called to eternal life. Hope, born of faith, is the certainty that life does not conclude within the narrow confines of earthly existence, and that the human person is called to possess eternal goods — even when everything around him seems to collapse.

Christian hope does not diminish the gravity of trials. It teaches, however, that no suffering accepted and offered is in vain, that no tear escapes the gaze of God, and that even from the deepest darkness Providence can draw a greater good. When all seems lost on the human plane, the horizon of eternity remains open. It is this horizon that prevents despair from having the last word.