She wrote something recently, but she wanted money ...

Dear readers! It is I, your old blogging pal, back from the trenches of the culture war, but not for long. 

This week I have been heavily engaged in what more than one Pole is calling "a battle with the Civilization of Death", by which they mean, unfortunately, the UK Court of Protection that effectively, in the words of a Polish archbishop, "sentenced [a man] to death by starvation." 

You can read all about it here. 

The case of the NHS vs RS was heard on December 15, and I wish to goodness I had known about it by then. As it was, I wrote my first article about it on December 23, and the story got picked up by wPolityce.pl, who ran with it. 

In short, a hard-working Polish man had a heart attack, sustained bad brain damage, and fell into a coma. Although he is by no means brain dead, his wife agreed with the hospital to cease life-sustaining treatment. As he could breathe on his own by December 15, that meant ceasing such basic care as clinically assisted nutrition and hydration until he was good and dead. So much for the corporal works of mercy. 

However, the man's birth family, including his mother, objected to his being starved and dehydrated to death, and his aged widowed mother went through two-thirds of her life savings to stop this. Eventually the devoutly Catholic family turned to a British  Evangelical Christian legal charity called Christian Legal Centre, the same people who fought for the life of Catholic Alfie Evans. 

The Christian Legal Centre has so far spent £70,000 on the "RS" case, and my workplace hit upon the notion of raising at least £50,000 for them. I feel very personally involved in the CLC's unexpected financial burden, and so I am asking everyone I can think of to donate even just £5 towards these legal fees. If everyone who reads my day job writing donates just £5, we will have the money in a brace of shakes. And I don't think I have been so anxious about a fundraising campaign in all my life. 

Anyway, that is all I have to say, really, except to pray that God's will be done in the RS case. 

Polish media are fighting among themselves about whether the Polish Government should annoy the British Government by insisting on their citizen's right to life; from what I've read, Polish Catholics are pretty well horrified that their fellow Polish Catholic is going the way of Alfie Evans. And Alfie, as you may recall, couldn't breathe for himself for very long. RS has been without food or more water than it takes to keep him sedated and (I hope) pain-free for over a week now. Also, Alfie was never able to speak for him, and RS was. One of the things he said was that he was against what the judges did to Alfie. And one of the horrible ironies in this case, is that the Court of Appeal judge who said that Alfie had "the right not to be alive" was one of the judges who held the same for RS, too.