eedwickham@yahoo.com	Mon, Jun 5, 9:21 PM (5 hours ago)
to lifetreemail@gmail.com

Friends of LifeTree,

Bishop Gracida’s 100th birthday is June 9 at the end of this week.  This email from him reminds me of why we bonded so quickly when I called him early in 2015 and asked for his advice on how to fight the wing of medicine who were pushing palliative care.  It was the Jacobian Third Path way to euthanasia — the subtle wing.  

The phone call was followed by a mini-workshop here in Raleigh sponsored by LifeTree in the summer where he was the guest of honor.  We called it a brainstorming session.   His presentation on the Feast of St. Benedict was titled the “Cultural Virus of Proportionalism.”  

I am reminded by this email below that Bishop Gracida was one of the first bishops who did not buy into the argument that it was morally licit to withhold and withdraw food and water from vegetative patients.  Even the Vatican was slow to clarify the truth with their arguments about extraordinary and ordinary care.  It wasn’t until later in John Paul II’s Pontificate that he specifically identified hydration and nutrition as ordinary care.  By that time the palliative care movement had become almost mainstream.  The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation had spent 5 years at 5 major medical centers preparing the way for palliative care using their SUPPORT Study of the mid-80s and George Soros entered the list of societal change agents in the early 90s with his Project on Death in America.

In this email we are told that Bishop Gracida did not waver one inch in standing for the truth about food and water.  He tells us that in 1991 he and one other bishop in Texas went on record as disagreeing with the other Bishops of Texas who gave their approval to withdrawing food and water from certain patients.  In the early 1990s Bishop Gracida stood the moral high ground against the subtle euthanasia movement!

THANK YOU, BISHOP GRACIDA!!  May God bless and and may the angels surround him on his important day.  

Elizabeth D. Wickham

LifeTree.org