I watched a repeat last night of a UK Channel 4 documentary, The Falling Man. A few tentative identifications were made of the figure in the well-known photo, and they interviewed the family of one of the possibilities. The family were devout Catholics and what particularly interested me was the vehement denial by the daughters that this could be their father, because whatever the circumstances he would never have committed the mortal sin of suicide.
They really did believe that their father would have been condemned to the fires of hell if he had indeed jumped…
So my question is: does the Catholic church make an exception for taking one’s own life when faced with the certainty of appalling death, or is suicide a mortal sin whatever the circumstances?
Catholics believe that failing to take action to save one’s own life is the same thing as intentionally taking one’s own life. The man in question was presented with a choice: either stay put and have a 100% chance of dying or jump and probably die. According to the Church, you are required to do everything you can to save your own life, so he did not commit a sin. The section from this page on “Positive and indirect suicide” gives a full explanation.
I don’t have a cite, but the Church has always said that intent is the major factor in determining the sinfulness of an action. So if you run across the street and knock someone down because you’re a jerk who likes hurting people, that’s a sin. If you run across the street and knock someone down because there’s a bus bearing down on them and they don’t see it, it’s not a sin.
So if you jump out a window because you can’t face life anymore and want to end it, that’s a sin. If you jump out a window because the room your in is on fire and the pain is agonizing and there’s no other way out, that’s not a sin. Your intent is not to end your life (even if that’s the near certain result of your action), it’s to escape the fire.
I’ve always been bothered by people who describe the jumper’s decision-making process in such simple terms:
“That fire and smoke are killing me, I am going to jump to escape it.”
I think the two most likely scenarios that force someone to react suddenly to something that is happening works like this:
You inhale and you feel your lungs burn in a way that just about forces you to escape, possibly your mouth throat and lungs are instantly burned, and like someone running from a killer bee nest on a roof, you instantly react and make your jump.
or
The temps are so high that you are being cooked alive…your skin starts melting/peeling and that instant where it is unfathomable to deal with it, you react and jump.
I don’t think the Catholic church would have a problem when you dodge death and fall into death, quite literally, as a human reaction.
Exactly. The distinction is intent. If you intend to kill yourself, it’s a sin. If you kill yourself accidentally doing something stupid, it’s probably a sin. If you kill yourself trying to avoid being killed, it’s not a sin.
That’s a far more reasonable stance. I couldn’t believe that the Roman Catholic church would condemn the jumpers as suicides. The attitude of the daughters seemed bizarre (“My father would never have left us willingly, he would never commit suicide”, etc). I don’t think they had any conception of what things must have been like up there. One can only hope that their priest set them right later.
Not true at all. There are several cases of people falling from thousands of feet and surviving. Cite. I agree that you can assume you would die, but the minuscule chance of surviving the fall is better than the zero chance of surviving an inferno.
I also believe that nowadays, the church is starting to recognize and take mental illness into account, rather than just automatically condemn suicide as a sin.
The point is, No, you don’t. You know staying in a burning, collapsing building will inevitably cause your death. You know jumping out the window will probably result in your death. But you might survive with multiple broken bones. There’s a remote chance you’ll impact something resilient, springy. Yeah, chances are high you’ll die from the fall (well, technically, from the impact after the fall). But in a case like that, gambling on the difference between certainty of death and high probabhility of death is a legitimate exercise of judgment.
I seriously doubt that was the intent of the 9/11 jumpers, though. I strongly suspect they were choosing the relatively sudden and less painful death over the protracted and agonizing one.
Yes indeed. I have seen some reports of people trying to hold on to table cloths as they jumped like primitive parachutes, naturally this failed. For those people one could argue were trying to escape.
The medical examiner classified all their deaths as homicide. These were not people who went to work that morning thinking “I’m g0nna jump out my office window today.” There was no intention of commiting suicide. They were people stuck between a rock and a flaming place, and their only choice was jump or die of smoke inhalation.
How does one not excommunicate suicides? A dead person, regardless of how they died, is no longer capable of receiving the Eucharist. About all one can do about a suicide is to speak harshly about them.
I wonder how much pain was caused to families of suicide victims from the refusal of a Catholic burial before the CC got more lenient.
From this reading it is difficult to understand how one could be condemned by killing oneself. This is certainly not the view the Catholic church had in the past. In my own family I had a great uncle who committed suicide and was refused a Catholic funeral, he could not even be buried in the cemetery with the rest of his family members. It caused a great deal of anguish for my great aunt and their children.
I think that’s the key point. Obviously, there’s no way to know what happened in each individual case, but from what I’ve read, it’s likely that the people who jumped were being burned alive. In that situation, I think jumping is basically an involuntary action – a reflex, rather than a rational decision. They could no more have stayed in the building, than you or I could hold our hand against a red-hot stove burner and leave it there.