Father Pavone's eyewitness account of Terri

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Terri Schiavo’s Final Hours

*An Eyewitness Account
Fr. Frank Pavone
National Director, Priests for Life
President, National Pro-life Religious Council

You may have seen on the news that I was at Terri Schiavo’s bedside during the last 14 hours of her earthly life, right up until five minutes before her death. During that time with Terri, joined by her brother and sister, I expressed your care, concern, and prayers. I told Terri over and over that she had many friends around the country, many people who were praying for her and were on her side. I had also told her the same things during my visits to her in the months before her feeding tube was removed, and am convinced she understood.

I’ve known Terri’s family for about six years now and they put me on the visitor’s list. Terri was in a hospice but there were police officers stationed outside her room. If I were not on that visitor’s list I could not get in that room beyond the armed guard because the visitor’s list was kept very, very small and very well controlled. The reason? The euthanasia advocates had to be able to say that Terri was an unresponsive person in some kind of vegetative state, coma or whatever terminology they want to use to suggest that she was completely unresponsive. The only way to prove she was responsive was to see her for yourself.

I went down to see her in September 2004 and again in February 2005.

When her mom first introduced her to me, she stared at me intently. She focused her eyes. She would focus her eyes on whoever was talking to her. If somebody spoke to her from the other part of the room she would turn her head and her eyes towards the person who was talking to her.

You know what some of the doctors have dared to say about this? “Oh, it’s just reflex reactions. Unconscious reflex reactions.” Interestingly, that’s exactly the same thing they say about the unborn child when you look at the video The Silent Scream when the child opens his mouth and tries to move away from the instrument that is about to destroy him. They say, “Oh, that’s just an automatic reflex.” That’s the phrase they always use to dehumanize the person.

I told Terri she has many people around the country and around the world who lover her and are praying for her. She looked at me attentively. I said, “Terri now we are going to pray together, I want to give you a blessing, let’s say some prayers.” So I laid my hand on her head. She closed her eyes. I said the prayer. She opened her eyes again at the end of the prayer. Her dad leaned over to her and said, “OK Terri now here comes the tickle,” because he has a mustache. She would laugh and smile and after he kissed her I saw her return the kiss. Her mom asked her a question at a certain point and I heard her voice. She was trying to respond. She was making sounds in response to her mother’s question, not just at odd times and meaningless moments. I heard her trying to say something but she was not, because of her disability, able to articulate the words. So she was responsive.

Now, the night before she died I was in the room for probably a total of 3-4 hours, and then for another hour the next morning – her final hour.

Brothers and sisters to describe the way she looked as peaceful is a total distortion of what I saw. Here now was a person, who for thirteen days had no food or water. She was, as you would expect, very drawn in her appearance as opposed to when I had seen her before. Her eyes were open but they were going from one side to the next, constantly oscillating back and forth, back and forth. The look on her face (I was staring at her for three and a half-hours) I can only describe as a combination of fear and sadness … a combination of dreaded fear and sadness.
 
Her mouth was open the whole time. It looked like it was frozen open. She was panting rapidly. It wasn’t peaceful in any sense of the word. She was panting as if she had just run a hundred miles. But a shallow panting. Her brother Bobby was sitting opposite me. He was on one side of the bed I was on the other facing him. Terri’s head in between us and her sister Suzanne was on my left. We sat there and we had a very intense time of prayer. And we were talking to Terri, urging her to entrust herself completely to the Savior. I assured her repeatedly of the love and prayers and concern of so many people.

We held her hand and stroked her head. During those hours, one of the things I did was to chant, in Latin, some of the most ancient hymns of the Church. One of the chants I used was the “Victimae Paschali Laudis,” which is the ancient proclamation of the resurrection of Christ. There, as I saw before my eyes the deadly work of the Culture of Death, I proclaimed the victory of life. “Life and death were locked in a wondrous struggle,” the hymn declares. “Life’s Captain died, but now lives and reigns forevermore!”

And then we had just times of silence … just sitting there in silence trying to absorb what was happening.

But besides Bobby and his sister and Terri herself, you know who else was in the room with us? A police officer. The whole time. At least one. Sometimes two. Sometimes three armed police officers in the room. You know why they were in the room? They wanted to make sure that we didn’t do anything that we weren’t supposed to do, like give her communion or maybe a glass of water. In fact, Bobby, sitting on the other side of the bed, would occasionally stand up to lean over his sister. When he stood up and did that, the officer would change position. He would move around towards the foot of the bed so that he could have a direct line of sight on what we were doing. The morning that she died we went in there fairly early and I had to go back outside in front of the hospice to do an interview. In order to go out on time I had a little timepiece in my hand and at the beginning of our visit I put it in my left hand, leaned over Terri and extended my right to bless her and we began praying. I closed my eyes and I felt a tap on my left hand. It was the police officer who said, “Father, what do you have in your hand?” I said, “Oh, officer, it’s a little time piece.” “I’ll have to hold it while you’re here,” he said. We couldn’t have anything in our hands. He didn’t even know what it was. Maybe I was going to try to give her communion. Maybe I was going to try to moisten her lips. Who knows what *terrible *thing I was about to do?
 
You know what the most ironic thing was? There was a little night table in the room. I could put my hand on the table and on Terri’s head all within arms reach. You know what was on that table? A vase of flowers filled with water. And I looked at the flowers. They were beautiful. There were roses their and other types of flowers and there was another one on the other side of the room at the foot of the bed. Two beautiful bouquets of flowers filled with water. Fully nourished, living, beautiful. And I said to myself, this is absurd. This is absurd. These flowers are being treated better than this woman. She has not had a drop of water for almost two weeks. Why are those flowers there? What type of hypocrisy is this? The flowers were watered. Terri wasn’t. The other irony is - had I dipped my hand in that water and put it on her tongue - the officer would have led me out probably under arrest. He would have certainly led me out of the room. Something is wrong here.

As you may have also seen, those who killed Terri were quite angry that I said so. The night before she died, I said to the media that her estranged husband Michael, his attorney Mr. Felos, and Judge Greer were murderers. I also pointed out, that night and the next morning, that contrary to Felos’ description, Terri’s death was not at all peaceful and beautiful. It was, on the contrary, quite horrifying. In my 16 years as a priest, I never saw anything like it before.

After I said these things, Mr. Felos and others in sympathy with him began attacking me in the press and before the cameras. Some news outlets began making a story out of their attacks and said I was “fanning the flames” of enmity and hatred.
 
Actually, there’s a simple reason why they are so angry with me. They had hoped that they could present Terri’s death as a merciful and gentle act. My words took the veil of euphemism away, calling this a killing, and giving eyewitness testimony to the fact that it was anything but gentle. Mr. Felos is a euthanasia advocate, and like all such advocates, he needs to manipulate the language, to sell death in an attractive package. Here he and his friends had a great opportunity to do so. But a priest, seeing their work close-up and then telling the world about it, just didn’t fit into their plans.

One of the attacks they made was that a “spiritual person” like a priest should be speaking words of compassion and understanding, instead of venom. But compassion demands truth. A priest is also a prophet, and if he cannot cry out against evil, then he cannot bring about reconciliation. If there is going to be any healing between these families or in this nation, it must start with repentance on the part of those who murdered Terri and now try to cover it up with flowery language.

Another aspect of the Terri Schiavo tragedy is that many people misunderstand its cause and therefore its solution. They think the problem was that Terri did not leave any written instructions about whether she wanted to be kept alive. In order to avoid any such problem in their own lives, they are now told that they have to draw up a “living will.” This is both erroneous and dangerous.

Terri’s case is not about the withdrawal of life-saving medical treatment, but rather about the killing of a healthy person whose life some regarded as worthless. Terri was not dying, was not on life support, and did not have any terminal illness. Because some thought she would not want to live with her disability, they insisted on introducing the cause of death, namely, dehydration.

So what good is a living will supposed to accomplish, aside from saying, “Please don’t argue about killing me, just kill me?”

The danger in our culture is not that we will be over-treated, but rather that we will be under-treated. We already have the right to refuse medical treatment. What we run the risk of losing is the right to receive the most basic humane care — like food and water — in the event we have a disability.

Our culture also promotes the idea that as long as we say we want to die, we have the right to do so. But we have a basic obligation to preserve our own life. A person who leaves clear instructions that they don’t want to be fed is breaking the moral law by requesting suicide.

If you want to make plans for your future health care, do not do so by trying to predict the future. The reason you cannot indicate today what medical treatments you do or don’t want tomorrow is that you don’t know what medical condition you will have tomorrow, nor what treatments will be available to give you the help you need. Living wills try to predict the future, and people can argue over the interpretation of a piece of paper just as much as they argue about what they claim someone said in private.

The better solution is to appoint a health care proxy, who is authorized to speak for you if you are in a condition in which you cannot speak for yourself. This should be a person who knows your beliefs and values, and with whom you discuss these matters in detail. In case you cannot speak for yourself, your proxy can ask all the necessary questions of your doctors and clergy, and make an assessment when all the details of your condition and medical needs are actually known. That’s much safer than predicting the future. Appointing a health care proxy in a way that safeguards your right to life is easy. In fact, the National Right to Life Committee has designed a “Will to Live,” which can be found at www.nrlc.org and which I recommend highly.

I am in regular contact with Terri’s parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, and her siblings, Bobby and Suzanne. They are strong Christians with a beautiful, gentle spirit. If you wish to relay a personal message to them, you can send it to terri@priestsforlife.org and I will pass it along to them myself.

Meanwhile, let us continue to commend Terri to the Lord, mindful of the equal value of every life, no matter how prominent or obscure, healthy or sick.
 
Lisa I’ve read parts of this article here and there, but this is the first time I’ve been able to read the entire thing. I think it is a blessing Fr Pavone was there not only for Terri’s comfort but to be a witness to a murder. I suspect that Felos and Michael S realized their plan backfired and even the ‘pull the plug’ faction started wondering if this weren’t a bit too macabre.

Poor Terri, this is a horrible way to die. That the flowers were kept watered was the ultimate irony. I hope Fr Pavone continues to tell this story.

Lisa N
 
Lisa this is the first time I saw the whole thing posted as well.You bet he will keep telling what happened it will probably haunt him:nope: I know one thing,he will not try to make it fluffy and pretty to keep from offending someone,he will tell it like it is.
 
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Lisa4Catholics:
Lisa this is the first time I saw the whole thing posted as well.You bet he will keep telling what happened it will probably haunt him:nope: I know one thing,he will not try to make it fluffy and pretty to keep from offending someone,he will tell it like it is.
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Thank you for posting the whole story Lisa. I know that it couldn’t have been easy. It never is when one transmits the story of real evil.

I remember crying while I posted the story of the Trauma Surgeon and his soon to be married daughter (Dr. David and Nava Applebaum) who were killed by a homicide bomber as they waitied in line for dinner in Jerusalem.

Thre was the partying in the “West Bank” and Gaza as Palestinians by the 10,000’s celebrated this “great victory” against the “evil Zionists”, a doctor who treated patients irrespective of nationality, religion and ability to pay, his daughter who was to be married the next day, their fellow diners and the Jewish and Arab waiters who tried so desperately to stop the attack.

That was real evil. What Fr. Pavone saw was real evil.

And, In both cases, Real Evil responded as it always does when it’s brough to the light, it blames the one bringing it to the light.

I think we need to bring more LIGHT!

Blessed are they who act to save God’s Little Ones, Michael
 
Lisa: thank you for posting the entire story. It is strengthening to hear Fr Pavone’s words.

Michael: one of my students was from Haifa. She was in Canada residencing here and then went back. Oh! Something about the appalling way the Canadian Medical Association treats immigrants. I think of her often, though, and wonder if she is alright. I’ve actually had quite a few residencing ex-Israelis and I wonder if they have gone back and if they are alright.

I think if we knew everyone alive on the planet, it would be harder to do the terrible things we do to each other. But then again, G-d knows everyone on the planet. If we could all just be friends with G-d, then we could be friends with each other. How could we not be? One can hope. Ani.
 
ANI and Michael and Lisa hope you guys e-mil this to every one you know,so that people know the truth,when you can expose a lie you must or truth is suppressed.I have gotten into sooo many debates with people who ate up every lie being told by the media:crying: They do not know the background or the horror of what happened,it is sad:nope: What happened to her should never be forgotten.
 
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Lisa4Catholics:
ANI and Michael and Lisa hope you guys e-mil this to every one you know,so that people know the truth,when you can expose a lie you must or truth is suppressed.I have gotten into sooo many debates with people who ate up every lie being told by the media:crying: They do not know the background or the horror of what happened,it is sad:nope: What happened to her should never be forgotten.
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You are right, very intelligent people sucked up the MSM’s bloodthirsty approach to the case. I just took my mom to lunch (she’s an atheist BTW) along with my sister. The Sciavo case came up and although my sister didn’t really follow it, as a nurse she was aware of Terri’s medical situation and was appalled that Terri was legally murdered. She said Terri’s parents could have easily taken care of her and that obviously the loved her as she was. My mom (who has a genius IQ btw) said “That CREATURE was not human! She had no brain! Why would they want to keep that body alive?” So much for that maternal instinct :eek:

Needless to say I don’t spend much time with mommy dearest but that is the attitude that so many have. Total Descartes-speak. If you don’t think you aren’t

Lisa N
 
Lisa N:
You are right, very intelligent people sucked up the MSM’s bloodthirsty approach to the case. I just took my mom to lunch (she’s an atheist BTW) along with my sister. The Sciavo case came up and although my sister didn’t really follow it, as a nurse she was aware of Terri’s medical situation and was appalled that Terri was legally murdered. She said Terri’s parents could have easily taken care of her and that obviously the loved her as she was. My mom (who has a genius IQ btw) said “That CREATURE was not human! She had no brain! Why would they want to keep that body alive?” So much for that maternal instinct :eek:

Needless to say I don’t spend much time with mommy dearest but that is the attitude that so many have. Total Descartes-speak. If you don’t think you aren’t

Lisa N
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:eek: :eek: :eek: Oh Lisa I know you had to use extra ordinary self-discipline not to get in a huge debate:eek: Pray for your mom also find a trusted friend that you could trust with life or death decisions for you:eek: For heavens sake do not leave it up to mom.http://bestsmileys.com/scared/3.gif
 
When dealing with my atheist parents, I never say “Church opposes the killing of Terri”, I always say “Church opposes the killing of Terri and homosexual marriage” since my parents strongly oppose homosexual marriage. This is an obvious logical fallicy but since many people fall for it, I’ll use it anyway:D
 
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abcdefg:
When dealing with my atheist parents, I never say “Church opposes the killing of Terri”, I always say “Church opposes the killing of Terri and homosexual marriage” since my parents strongly oppose homosexual marriage. This is an obvious logical fallicy but since many people fall for it, I’ll use it anyway:D
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Very wise I must say:thumbsup: When you find the agreeable the disagreeable goes down much,much better;) 😃
 
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Lisa4Catholics:
ANI and Michael and Lisa hope you guys e-mil this to every one you know,so that people know the truth,when you can expose a lie you must or truth is suppressed.I have gotten into sooo many debates with people who ate up every lie being told by the media:crying: They do not know the background or the horror of what happened,it is sad:nope: What happened to her should never be forgotten.
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What is even sadder, or scarier, I’m not sure which, is that even when some people are told the truth, they just don’t care. They have this “my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with the facts” attitude. I won’t get into more detail, because my heart is broken, but let’s just say, people like this need prayer.
 
Momofone:
What is even sadder, or scarier, I’m not sure which, is that even when some people are told the truth, they just don’t care. They have this “my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with the facts” attitude. I won’t get into more detail, because my heart is broken, but let’s just say, people like this need prayer.
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Momofone:

They have to do that, because otherwise, they’d have to admit that someone was murdered in their sight, and they did nothing to stop it…

It’s kind of like the Germans at the end of WW II who kept on claiming that they just didn’t know about the DEATH CAMP DOWN THE STREET!.

I had a four-day argument with Mr. KABC who, in order to not admit that he just might be wrong, had to impugne my integrity and accuse me of lying to him when I told him I would agree to be bound by the Diagnosis provided by an MRI/PET combo read by a Board Certified Neurologic Radiologist (provided by Code Blue Log - Nationally known) IF HE WOULD…

It turned out he was MORE AFRAID of BEING PROVEN WRONG than ALLOWING AN INNOCENT WOMAN TO DIE!

Call in some “Reinforcements” (Angelic and Saintly - St Michael and some of the Prophets), and then try it. You might ask that Blind eyes be made to see and that the demons blinding them be bound and rendered powerless so they can hear the truth. At the same time, ask God to soften the hearts and open the minds of the people you’re talking to and ask Him to speak through you.

I’ve got a few that way. But, I’ve also lost a few, and it does break my heart as to who they are.

Blessed are they who act to spare God’s Little Ones, Michael
 
Ani Ibi:
Lisa: thank you for posting the entire story. It is strengthening to hear Fr Pavone’s words.

Michael: one of my students was from Haifa. She was in Canada residencing here and then went back. Oh! Something about the appalling way the Canadian Medical Association treats immigrants. I think of her often, though, and wonder if she is alright. I’ve actually had quite a few residencing ex-Israelis and I wonder if they have gone back and if they are alright.

I think if we knew everyone alive on the planet, it would be harder to do the terrible things we do to each other. But then again, G-d knows everyone on the planet. If we could all just be friends with G-d, then we could be friends with each other. How could we not be? One can hope. Ani.
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Ani:

Keep in contact with her and pray for her. Every min. you spend on your knees for her will be a Corporeal Act of Mercy, or a “Mitzva”.

For about a year, I used to post the names and descriptions of those who were killed in Palestinian Terrorist attacks, how they were killed and which terrorist group claimed responsibility. 2 names per day, on the NYT ME Forum - There were days I cried as I posted the names and the descriptions that went with them.

The brother (Danny) and some of his friends were late of a talk show host (Michael Medved) I listen to and some of his friends were late to their usual spot one day about 30 years ago. The “Refrigerator Bomber” placed his bomb right where they WOULD HAVE BEEN.

Michael’s nephew (who was 17) was a 1/2 block away during the attack that took the lives of Dr. and Nava Applebaum. One of the waiters had been blown in half and was using his body to cover his friend so he wouldn’t get hurt any more. He’s seen things no young person should see.

Call your friends and talk to them. Even If they haven’t been hurt PHYSICALLY, there’s some HUGE Psychological and Spiritual damage that’s been done to them. Conservative figures say that at least 1/4 of the people in Israel suffer from some form of PTSD.

I’m sorry if I derailed your thread, but every evil you talk about, I see through the filter of what the people in Israel have gone through.

May your concern bring you a blessing, Michael
 
Lisa N:
My mom (who has a genius IQ btw) said “That CREATURE was not human! She had no brain! Why would they want to keep that body alive?” So much for that maternal instinct :eek:

Needless to say I don’t spend much time with mommy dearest but that is the attitude that so many have. Total Descartes-speak. If you don’t think you aren’t
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My mom, (a nurse), sister (a doctor), in-laws (both physical therapists) would all agree with your mom. Seems like most of the folks I know who are in the medical industry are blinded by the fact that some doctors were declaring her state to be PVS, and not willing to entertain the idea that other doctors were in disagreement or that the original doctors might have had an agenda. And now that I’m a stay at home mom, my IQ seems to have dropped 40 points in their eyes, so . . .

amy
 
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