Assisted dying: the Senate between shuttle and conscience clause

Senators are called to vote on the Preliminary Question; the Little Sisters of the Poor are awaiting a collective conscience clause without which they threaten to close.

We reported last week that the Social Affairs Committee of the Senate adopted a motion to reject the text on end-of-life assistance before the resumption of the parliamentary shuttle. The week ends with a public appeal relayed by Le Salon Beige, inviting senators to vote on the Preliminary Question in the plenary session this Tuesday, July 7, 2026, to block a text deemed doctrinally unacceptable.

The Fact

The text adopted by the National Assembly on June 30, authorizing end-of-life assistance under conditions, returns to the Senate for a third reading starting Tuesday, July 7. Two main issues dominate the sequence: the existence of a collective conscience clause for denominational institutions, demanded in particular by the Little Sisters of the Poor, and the challenge to the medical principle of non-maleficence. The Conference of Bishops of France recalled, in a solemn communiqué, its frontal opposition to the text. The final vote of the deputies is expected on July 15.

Our Reading, in Light of the Magisterium

John Paul II, in Evangelium Vitae at n. 65, qualifies euthanasia as a serious violation of the law of God, as a morally unacceptable deliberate murder. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, at n. 2277, specifies that no consent, even solicited, makes such an act lawful. A collective conscience clause is therefore not an optional accommodation: it conditions, for the Church, the survival of its sanitary testimony in France. Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees a robust individual conscience clause; its extension to denominational legal entities remains under construction in case law and will have to be defended before French and Strasbourg jurisdictions.

To Meditate and Act

Pray for the senators and for the caregivers, write to your senator, concretely support Catholic institutions (Little Sisters of the Poor, Jérôme Lejeune Foundation, Saint-Joseph hospitals).