Vatican City (AsiaNews) – Health as "complete physical, mental and social well- being" is becoming a new religion that replaces, and at times, undermines Christianity's belief in the respect to which every human being ha a right.

Health understood this way and its alternative are the focus of the 11th General Assembly of the Pontifical Academy for Life which will meet in the Vatican from February 21 to 23 on the theme The Quality of Life and the Ethics of Health.

A child of consumerist hedonism, health as quality of life  is slowly leading to the view that whoever lacks it should be refused, if not eliminated, instead of being helped and cared for. It is coming to mean that, in the name of the 'right to health', people who are born unhealthy can be killed.

In opening the press conference presenting the upcoming General Assembly, Bishop Elio Sgreccia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said that three factors are behind this shift in the meaning of health: a utilitarian and hedonistic philosophy; secular ethics and indifference which prevail in the culture of the West and international organisations; and the presumptive availability of socio-economic well-being as the ultimate goal of politics.

"Quantitatively, society wants medicine to grant eternal life; qualitatively it wants psychotherapy to provide eternal happiness," said psychiatrist and academy member Manfred Lutz.

"Slowly but surely, all religious conventions have found their way to the health care system. Not only are physicians seen as demigods but the new religion of health has its holy sites to visit, heresies and 'diet-seeking ascetic movements', rites, missionary-like health improvement campaigns funded by the state".

"Health, goodness, like almost everything in our society, is seen as a product that can be manufactured," he noted.

This quasi-religious international trend has serious ethical consequences. "If health represents the highest value," Mr Lutz stressed, "then the healthy man is also the true man. And whoever is not healthy, and above all whoever can never be healthy again, tacitly becomes a second or third class man."

This is the crux of the matter in the ongoing debate and discussions over bioethics.

"It is true that the new religion of health has led to greater public focus on finding ways to heal the sick, but it has indirectly sent a message to a public hungry for healing that if one's condition is incurable, if one is chronically ill or disabled, one is destined to live in the periphery and twilight of a health-oriented society."

Slowly but surely, the view is spreading that if 'one cannot live in this [unhealthy] way", one has the "right to a good death" and thus the door to euthanasia ism wide open.

Starting from the same conceptual bases abortion is justified and is increasingly becoming a form of eugenics.

For his part, Bishop Sgreccia explained that "the task of the Academy is to focus on these issues by thinking through the relevant concepts and distinguishing what is compatible and consistent with the dignity of every human being, and his and her right to life, from what is conversely incompatible with such values. (FP)