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Brigitte Stegemann, an 83-year-old devout Christian grandmother in Ontario, was put to death by lethal injection on July 10 under Canada's Medical Assistance in Dying program at The Pearl care home in Cannifton, even though she had told her family she wanted no such thing and wished only to die naturally in keeping with her faith.
The Technocratic Automaton of the Canadian medical bureaucracy moved with clinical speed once her granddaughter Brigitte Kranendonk left for a ten-day trip, overriding the grandmother's explicit refusals and the clear witness of her household that assisted death contradicted her Christian convictions.
This act repeats the ancient pattern by which the earthly city, when it seizes the power of life and death, turns first against those whose allegiance lies with the City of God rather than the state's decrees.
The undivided Church from the beginning condemned the taking of innocent life, whether by pagan exposure of infants or by the self-slaughter of despairing souls; the Nicene fathers and the patristic consensus alike upheld the sixth commandment as binding upon rulers and physicians alike.
Canada's MAID regime therefore stands in direct succession to the pagan practices the early Church resisted under emperors who likewise claimed the right to decide whose life held value and whose did not.
When the state substitutes its own mercy for the sovereignty of God over the hour of death, it does not liberate the suffering; it dispossesses the household of its most basic duty of care and the faithful of their final witness.
The family that stood by Stegemann now bears public testimony against this usurpation, and every household that still confesses Christ must reckon with the same machinery that can accelerate a lethal decision whenever a faithful guardian steps away.
The remnant must therefore refuse cooperation with any institution that offers death as medicine and must rebuild the ordered household economy in which the aged are honored rather than assessed for termination.
Only by recovering the ancient Christian prohibition on euthanasia, anchored in the creeds and the law of God, can the people of the covenant once more protect their own from the cold hand of the state.
