Suicide - Have things changed?

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YinYangMom

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In reading an article recently about an actor who committed suicide, it naturally brought back to mind the deaths of a couple of other people I’ve known over the years who did the same.

As a young Catholic, I knew only that suicide was certain damnation to hell and that was enough for me. I never really looked into the Church’s position on the matter.

Now that I’m an adult, having experienced the stress of everyday living, and learning more about mental disorders I wonder now if that sentence is as clear cut as it was back then.

It occurs to me that a person would have to be seriously distraught to even consider taking one’s life…and if they’re that distraught, most likely it could be the result of some psychiatric condition.

How then, would a person who is mentally ill at that moment be condemned to damnation rather than lifted to the heavens in comfort?

My heart just breaks for these people, it truly does. I don’t want to believe they will not be saved, especially since many of them were really good people in life - just terribly haunted and lost. As a parent, it’s difficult to explain to my kids because it doesn’t portray a very loving, forgiving, comforting picture of God.

Have things changed with regard to the Church’s teaching on suicide?
 
I think you understand the situation just fine.

Willingly taking a life is a grievous matter worthy of mortal sin. This includes taking ones own life. Therefore, suicide can condemn a person to hell.

HOWEVER,

For something to constitute mortal sin, it must have 3 qualities:
  1. The sin must be a grievous matter. (Check)
  2. The commiter must recognize it is a grievous matter. (Usually so in suicide.)
  3. The committer must be fully conscious and willing in the act.
As you so aptly pointed out, No. 3 is the kicker in this case. To committ suicide is rarely something someone “freely” chooses. It is for this reason that God may still have mercy on one’s soul after suicide, and the church NEVER can state someone is in hell. Not even Judas.

Josh
 
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YinYangMom:
Have things changed with regard to the Church’s teaching on suicide?
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The church’s teaching is that there is no way to know the state of the mind of a person committing suicide so we can not determine for sure whether the person was in a state of sin when they died or not morally responsable for committing sin.

If a person knowingly commits suicide and is in their right mind and doesn’t repent right before death, it is assumed they died in mortal sin, but nobody on Earth can know if all of those things happened.

The only person that can make the total judgement on the soul of a suicide is God.

I believe the church at one point would not allow suicide victims to be buried in a Catholic cemetary. I don’t know if this was church-wide or diocese by diocese. That restriction is no longer in place.

To see a response on EWTN’s page that covers this go here:
Link
 
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Marauder:
To see a response on EWTN’s page that covers this go here:
Link
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Thank you for the link. What a relief! At least it’s good to know they can have a Catholic mass and burial.
 
I’m going to share this although it’s difficult to do so, but I believe that it stresses the point. Please don’t think me less for this struggle.

When I was a teen my family experienced a great upheaval amidst the angst of teenage-dom…and I was lost. I was really lost.I believed in God, I believed in Jesus and the Saints and Angels, I read the Bible, and I actually went so far as to seek out prayer…this was before the internet.

I felt alone, socially condemned, and after a few years of this getting steadily worse instead of better, I began to seriously contemplate suicide. I was 15 when the real event took place.

My mother was mentally ill, diagnosed with bipolar. She had a lot of medications and through her trials and education, I also recieved mine…and her meds were not locked up.

I read the Bible every night and prayed to God to deliver me, to help me with all the issues surrounding me but it just got worse. I remembered the platitudes about God not giving one more than they could carry. Repeatedly I told God it was too much…but the load got heavier.

Finally, after much planning and debating, I solidified my resolve. There was no God, there must therefore not be a Helll…and I was going to end my suffering since no one, not even God, cared.

(( cont in next post…think I may be cut off…)))
 
(continued)

Well, I remember planning everything perfectly. My brother was either gone or sleeping, and would be gone by the time I woke up. Mom had just gotten new meds…so had a full bottle. I was well versed in their application and effects…and knew exactly what I was looking for.

Please note, all of you, that I believed in Hell. Even though I discounted it and denied God at that time, at heart I still held these beliefs…But I didn’t care anymore. I actually believed that my life was worthless and that God didn’t care for me either.

I had actually expressed my ideation in a Jr. High argument…and the response…to go ahead and do it because no one would miss me. It sealed my opinion of not only myself, but my belief. I was done.

So I waited. I heard my Mom get up and take her meds, sat up in bed and looked at the clock to be sure I wasn’t mis-timing. My plan was not to be found until it was too late. I didn’t believe in the “cry for help” mentality that so many “victims” had…I was serious. I did not want to be found and rescusitated.

I HAD FULL WILL AND KNOWLEDGE OF WHAT I WAS ABOUT TO DO. I ACTUALLY BELIEVED THAT I WAS GOING TO HELL FOR MY ACT OF SELF-MURDER.

I remember raising my hand and pointing to heavan while berating God for not responding. At that point I think I may have really lost faith but for 1 thread. I told God in no uncertain terms what my plan was and that since I was already in Hell and he had ignored me, that clearly he wanted me there…so I was going to get there on my own. I told him that it was his last chance to tell me different because I would be dead by morning. And I didn’t care because I didn’t believe in heaven anymore.

I finished and since nothing had changed and God had apparently not heard I was about to get up for the drugs.

Suddenly a very bright bluish-white light opened in the ceiling. A big, strong hand reached down, touched my upraised and accusing hand…and disappeared.

I looked at the clock, thinking that I had fallen asleep and dreamt. Nope. The time was 1 minute later. And my desire for suicide was gone…and has not returned.

I KNOW I would be in Hell right now had God not intervened. Anyone may choose to denigrate this experience as a dream…but to my knowledge and education, suicidal ideation doesn’t disappear with a dream and never return.

Sin involves full knowledge and consent…I had both. I knew it was a sin and although I didn’t “care” clearly I still believed because I prayed before I committed the act. I don’t know why God saved my physical life and not others…and only He can reveal that secret.

Please don’t think poorly of me because I struggled with this. Please, help others understand through my story that God is good and He will listen and respond as we need when we need him.
 
quote=JCPhoenix

Please don’t think poorly of me because I struggled with this. Please, help others understand through my story that God is good and He will listen and respond as we need when we need him.
[/quote]

I had a very similar experience about six weeks ago. Only I had taken a bottle of one of my meds. My husband caught me just in time. He called 911. When I was loaded into the ambulance, the EMT and I started talking. He noticed my cross and Miraculous medal. He said he assumed I was Catholic and that he was as well. I asked him which parish. He said it was one in another county and told me which city. I couldn’t believe it because it was the parish my grandpa had attended before he died. I knew God had sent that EMT to look after me. At that point, I looked at the other seat in the ambulance which was empty. I put my hand up on the rail because I could feel Jesus sitting there and he held my hand. The next day I had several friends call me out of the blue to see how I was doing. God was looking after me, plain and simple. After that, I have looked at life differently every day and would NEVER think poorly of anyone who struggled with this issue.
May the Peace of our Lord be with you always,
Maggie:amen:
 
quote=JCPhoenix

Please don’t think poorly of me because I struggled with this. Please, help others understand through my story that God is good and He will listen and respond as we need when we need him.
[/quote]

I know nobody will think poorly of you. I don’t, God Bless and thanks be to God that you are here with us to share your story of truth.
 
JCPhoenix, thank you for sharing your story and God Bless.

I too suffer from bi-polar disorder and severe depression. Several times, I too have gone through the motions of meticulously planning how to end it all. Tears streaming down my face, I would wander the house, looking for exactly what I needed, asking God to forgive me because I knew that I had failed my trust in Him, what I was about to do, and I was going to Hell because I could not trust Him and His love for me.

God, in His infinate wisdom, would show His love for me in a special way. When I was about to break, He showed me that there are those in my life who have given me and still continue to give me unconditional love. He showed me my precious babies, asleep peacefully in their rooms. He knew, during my planning, I still thought of my babies; thought of how long after I was done before their father got home.

He used my smiling babies to show me His love. This last time, God also used my wee unborn baby to remind me that I was loved, and I was being selfish. A few minutes afterwards, my husband came home.

I still continue to struggle with this depression and I know this next post-partum period will be more difficult than the last. But as I struggle with this emotional affliction, my trust in God strengthens.
 
God Bless you guys and thanks for sharing very personal things. I believe your stories 100%

Please consider buying, and having blessed, St Benedict Medals as well as Miraculous Medals. 🙂
 
Faithful 2 Rome:
Please consider buying, and having blessed, St Benedict Medals as well as Miraculous Medals. 🙂
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What is St. Benedict the patron saint of? (forgive my poor grammar)

Maggie
 
Thank each of you for sharing your stories. I have benefited very much from your stories in regard to my fathers suicide.

Sincere Thanks,
Chris G
 
I just thought I’d share a story a priest friend told me a few weeks ago regarding suicide.

One day, a mother got the news that her son had taken his own life by jumping off of a high bridge. The mother was distraught, and had no idea what to do. She could not be consoled.

A friend of hers told her about a wonderful priest in Ars, who might provide her with comfort. So she went to see him, but when she got there, the priest was obviously hearing confessions from a long line of penitents. So she sat down on a pew and began to cry quietly for her dead son.

Suddenly, John Vianney, the Cure de Ars, left the confessional. He went up to the mother and said, “Between the bridge and the ground, your son made his peace with God.” St. John Vianney then went back to the confessional.
 
Although people have mentioned that grave emotional duress can mitigate one’s responsibility in suicide, sometimes it is also helpful to quote exactly current Church teaching.

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church, I am excerpting 2 of the 4 paragraphs under the topic of suicide. The first two paragraphs say it is wrong, pretty much what you would expect. The last two state:
2282 If suicide is committed with the intention of setting an example, especially to the young, it also takes on the gravity of scandal. Voluntary co-operation in suicide is contrary to the moral law.
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Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide. (emphasis added)
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2283 We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.
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Thank you for sharing your testimony.
 
I had a friend who was an atheist, who loved to argue with fundamentalist Christians. Nevertheless, he was one of the most intelligent people I’ve known. We were introduced by a mutual friend and that first night we got to know each other we stayed up late talking. It turns out we had a lot in common, including a history of seizures and depression. But he matter-of-factly mentioned that he suspected he’d one day either die in a car accident or he’d take his own life.

He had contempt for people who follow a religion just because that’s how they were raised, or because that’s the thing to do. He respected me because I’ve carefully examined various points of view rationally and have settled on one I believe true. On the other hand, he had a rocky relationship with his brother, who was a fundamentalist. He tried to repair the breach at the brother’s wedding, but the brother spurned him.

In 1995 I moved to the town where he was living. He’d finished college there, graduating with honors, but he could only find dead-end jobs, and he was trying to figure out what to do next. He was working on an autobiographical novel about his family’s history of alcoholism. But despite the fact we lived less than a mile from each other, I rarely saw him.

He was engaged to a Hispanic girl. Her family wanted her to marry an upwardly-mobile, Hispanic, devout Catholic MBA, not a downwardly mobile, white, atheistic, philosophy major. Eventually he agreed that if they had kids they could be raised Catholic, as long as he could tell them his side of things.

Then things began to fall apart for him. He came home one day to find his fiancee having sex with one of his friends, and in the bed they’d purchased as their matrimonial bed. He distanced himself from his old friends and took up with a new crowd that drank heavily and did serious drugs.His depression hit an all-time low (if they had anti-depression meds back then he wasn’t taking any).

One night he called me at 2am, very drunk and almost in tears. He told me how badly things were going for him (though he held back a lot too).He said he’d found a huge box full of letters I’d written him the years, and remembered what good friends we were.

He asked when I was going to move back to a certain town (we both hated the college town we were in). I said I hoped it’d be that summer.He said he hoped I was successful, that he needed to move to that town, because this college town was killing him. It was almost like he thought he needed me to prop him up and watch over him if he also managed to move to that other city too. I’d never heard him that vulnerable before or being close to tears.I told him since we lived so close together we needed to get together more often.He agreed.

I considered sending him an off-color postcard to remind him to come visit, but I never got around to it.

A few weeks later I got a call that my friend had committed suicide.

[continued]
 
[continued]

He’d become more and more withdrawn, had shaved his head out of depression, and became known in local bars as a bad, blackout drunk. On either Maundy Thursday or Good Friday some friends convinced him to go along with them to a party, but he disappeared from there.

He was declared a missing person after no one was able to find him in the usual places. Then his roommate, either on Easter or the day after, found he’d moved up into the attic, and had blown his brains out with a sawed-off shotgun that had been in the house when they moved in.

His family was scattered all over the world. His dad was working in Saudi Arabia, his mom was cruising up the Nile, and his sister, who was married to an Italian, was 8 or 9 months pregnant and grounded in Italy. It took a week and a half for the parents to get back here. So his fundamentalist brother was left to make arrangements.

The funeral was awful, designed by the family to make my friend into something he wasn’t.They had a Baptist minister presiding, and there were all sorts of hymns sung and played. Many of these were songs I’d loved, but on that day they seemed hypocritical, like curses–it’s hard to explain the effect those songs had on me. It was like for a few minutes I got a glimpse of how ugly and evil and distorted he seemed to consider fundamentalist Christianity.

Various people I didn’t know got up a said he’d been their best friend. Very little I saw or heard had any connection to the friend I knew. The only high point was that his sister had sent a message from Italy, saying that at the hour of the funeral in the US, she’d be at the Cathedral in Assisi, lighting a candle and saying a prayer for her brother. Strangely, that seemed the only appropriate commemoration for him.

(Some time later, a friend asked if I’d ever heard our friend talk about his European travels. I hadn’t. “Oh, that’s a shame. You should’ve heard him tell about all the cathedrals he visited.It was fascinating because he knew all the history. He even developed an interest and grudging admiration for Medieval and Renaissance Catholicism while he was there.”

That really caught me off guard.)

After the funeral we gathered at the home of my friend’s aunt. I talked with his brother. I thought him a jerk, and I confess I privately thought that the wrong brother had died. Although he didn’t come out and say it, the brother gave off this vibe that he thought his brother pretty much got what was coming to him for being an atheist. He seemed not so much grief-stricken as quietly smug.

He said, “You know he was engaged, don’t you? But that broke up because he absolutely refused to let the children be raised as Christians.” Let him go ahead and believe that if it makes him happy, I thought. Why waste my breath?

[continued]
 
[continued]

But I couldn’t accept that my friend, a writer, wouldn’t leave a note. Everyone said there hadn’t been one. So I asked the brother point blank if there was a note. He got a weird look on his face, looked over both his shoulders, and quietly said I needed to talk to his mom.

She took me into her room and took out the notebook in which her son had been writing his novel. She flipped through the pages. One had been torn out, with a xeroxed copy of the page put in its place.This had to be the note. The police probably had the original.

I tried to explain to this woman the way I had come to understand her son.It was a struggle, but I finally concluded that he “believed in belief, but at a much deeper level than most people. I think his contempt for religion was really a contempt for those who claimed to believe for inadequate reasons, who took important questions too lightly.”

I tried to read the note. It was short. It wasn’t titled, “My Suicide Note” or anything like that, but it was clear that’s what it was. It was at best three or four lines long. It’s never taken me so long to read something that short, but it was very difficult to read a dear friend’s farewell to the world he felt had forsaken him.

And I remember nothing about what the note said, except for the first line:" The God has won."

I have been pondering over that line ever since.
 
In the late 70s, I was part of a very painful mess that involved a murder/suicide and the terrible double standards that sometimes surround this issue.

My friend Randy was in his early 20s and worked as a bouncer at a neighborhood bar with my oldest brother. He came home from work at 4:00 am one morning and found his mother and stepfather in an argument…his stepfather had pulled a gun and was threatening to kill Randy’s mom. Randy got between the two of them and demanded the man put down the gun. He refused. This went on for a few minutes, then the gun went off and Randy was dead. Feeling distraught when he realized what he’d done, the man turned the gun on himself and blew his brains out.

Beyond everything, Randy’s mom had to deal with the loss of her husband and her son, and had to plan two funerals. Obviously they didn’t want one funeral because there were too many people who wouldn’t want to celebrate the life of the murderer at the same time they celebrated the life of the victim. But what happened next was, by all accounts, a complete abomination. The crusty old parish priest was more than happy to allow the murderer who also committed suicide to be buried from the church and in consecrated ground…but not Randy. It seems Randy had never joined the parish as an adult and was never confirmed. Forget that he went to mass there every week of his life, was a lector and sang in the choir. He wasn’t a “registered” parishioner and wasn’t confirmed because that was the week his own father had died and the bishop was only “available” that one day.

OK, put yourself in the shoes of a bunch of teens and young adults, all very devout Catholics who attended Catholic schools since the first day of first grade, went to Catholic high schools and Catholic colleges. We’re being told that one of us is unworthy, but someone who committed two mortal sins was worthy? It didn’t sit well. In fact, we might have witnessed a mass exodus if not for a young associate pastor and a brand new bishop who had a heart.

The associate pastor was only there a few months, but he was astounded at what he was told. After pleading with the pastor for hours, he went over the pastor’s head to the diocese. First the Vicar, a wonderful monsignor who just recently died, listened, then made his own calls. Next came the bishop, who also just recently died. The bishop made his own calls and the pastor took the 30 minute drive to Saginaw. The message was very clear, we bury Randy with all the honors of the Church, in a Catholic cemetary of his mother’s chosing, and the Diocese would cover the cost of the plot.

The priest still refused burial from his parish (as though any priest owns the church where he’s assigned). Notably, he retired just a few months later. But there was a wonderful funeral mass held at the funeral home (SRO) and then the procession took almost 50 minutes to file into the cemetary. The police estimated there were nearly 400 cars. Meeting us there was the bishop himself, who stood off to the side as the young associate pastor interred our friend.

There are a few defining moments in everyone’s lives. Mine was knowing that I wasn’t alone in the pain that a certain priest caused…and that my bishop cared enough to stand with me and everyone else who was in severe pain. There was tremendous healing that day, and there are two wonderful men to thank for it.
J
M
J
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I refuse to believe that my grandfather, who shot himself, is anywhere but in heaven. My grandma was incredibly mean to him (that’s an understatement) and I am sure there were other factors too. During every Mass when we remember those who have gone before us I always think of my grandfather and hope he is ‘looking’ down on me, approving of my actions.
 
I have known several people who did successfully take their own lives. It seems to me that no one, not even the person who attempts or commits suicide, can fully know the state of his own heart and soul. We are not truly competent to judge even ourselves. That is why we rely wholly on the mercy of God. I’ve heard it said that perhaps those who have taken their own lives have already experienced their purgatory, and their hell, right here in this earthly life. The mercy of God awaits them in the next.

JimG
 
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