I expect that this will be my last post in my little series drawing from Pope Benedict’s final encyclical, Caritatis in Veritate.
How can we be surprised by the indifference shown towards situations of human degradation, when such indifference extends even to our attitude towards what is and is not human?” [§75]
We can’t even make up our minds about what qualifies as human anymore. That baby in the womb isn’t human, but if he is born the next day all of a sudden he is. Really? What kind of irrationalist nonsense is that? If we can’t even be clear about that, why would we care about the suffering of some poor guy living under the overpass in a box?
Unfortunately I fear that things will become worse. If we wind up with state-run healthcare nationwide, it is basically guaranteed that some bureaucrat will decide who qualifies as human and who doesn’t. Economic necessity will drive this sort of madness. They refuse to pay attention to natural law (which makes these questions a whole lot less “tricky”), and that means that someone will have to decide how to ration health care. It will be trivially easy to eliminate whole classes of people whose care is expensive and/or lifelong by simply declaring that they do not conform to the standard of who qualifies as human and therefore have no eligibility for healthcare.
Aquinas, Etc. 
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