Catholics link Schiavo case with Good Friday events

AS Christians reflect on Jesus’s death this Good Friday, some also are giving special attention to Terri Schiavo — particularly Catholics who count Ms Schiavo as one of their own, and whose Church has been increasingly vocal this week in calling for the reinsertion of a feeding tube into the brain-damaged Florida woman.

Eternal Word Television Network, an Alabama-based Catholic cable service that reaches more than 100 million homes worldwide, is interrupting previously scheduled sacred programmes for a Friday evening broadcast that will treat the Schiavo case through interviews with family and a neurologist.

News director Raymond Arroyo said the network’s “extraordinary” programming switch was driven by the public outpouring of concern over both Schiavo’s plight and the frail health of Pope John Paul II.

“You have a collusion of events that I think only the spiritually blind would ignore,” Arroyo said. “It’s not hard to see the similarities between the Pope and what Terri Schiavo is going through, to some extent, and the sufferings of Christ that we commemorate Good Friday.”

The Rev Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, visited Schiavo last month. He said many of the hundreds of clergy affiliated with his group planned to preach about Schiavo.

Pavone’s own sermon will “speak about her suffering and to compare that to what happened to Jesus on Good Friday”.

Schiavo has gone about a week without hydration or nutrition, in accordance with what her husband says would be her wishes. Schiavo’s parents have been fighting desperately to have the tube reinserted.

Earlier this week, the Vatican newspaper said Schiavo was an innocent person condemned to an “atrocious death: death from hunger and thirst”, and many Catholic clerics in the US have raised their voices in agreement.