"Death with dignity"? Dignity is profound respect and caring for ourselves as beings created by a loving God. He is the Author of our life and we are responsible for being good stewards of this gift by living life in accord with His plan. So "death with dignity" is taking care of our bodies best we can until such time as God recalls our immortal souls back to him.

To purposely shorten our earthly existence directly opposes God's will and inflicts spiritual as well as mortal harm, codified thousands of years ago in the Ten Commandments ("Thou shalt not kill"). Yes suffering is a great mystery which we will understand only when we get to "the other side." We simply have to trust that our Loving Father wants only the best for us.

And there are many ways to relieve pain and suffering today - palliative care - that people only dreamed of not so long ago, exemplified most elegantly by hospice care where every need is carefully assessed and addressed in the most loving way possible.

Let's face it: Part of suffering is the existential dilemma created by having an immortal soul trapped in a mortal body. We resent it. We want power and control over our human existence and we can't have it. We are asked to submit to the absolute authority of The Other and we don't like it because we are wary, untrusting, and hurting. That is why talking and listening to God for direction - prayer - is such an important adjunct in our lives.

Euthanasia rejects God's sovereignty over human life. It is a linguistic trick to purport that it is "dignified" when it desecrates a human being and is a perversion of mercy. True compassion is the sharing of another's pain, not killing them. To codify such behavior in law would make normative a criterion of productive efficiency according to which a hopelessly impaired life has no value.

I shudder to think of the consequences of such legal justification for murdering people, not the least being a further weakening of our democracy by more ethically relativistic thinking replacing conformity to moral law based upon absolute truth as our unwavering standard. It would place itself alongside abortion as a law that totally lacks juridical validity, and it must be vigorously rejected at every opportunity.

Dr. Gregory Polito is president of the California Association of Natural Family Planning, and a member of St. Mary of the Assumption Church, Whittier.