“True ‘compassion’ leads to sharing another person’s pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear. …

“…The request which arises from the human heart in the supreme confrontation with suffering and death, especially when faced with the temptation to give up in utter desperation, is above all a request for companionship, sympathy and support in the time of trial. It is a plea for help to keep on hoping when all human hopes fail. As the Second Vatican Council reminds us: ‘It is in the face of death that the riddle of human existence becomes most acute’ and yet ‘man rightly follows the intuition of his heart when he abhors and repudiates the absolute ruin and total disappearance of his own person. Man rebels against death because he bears in himself an eternal seed which cannot be reduced to mere matter.'”

—Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life)