On Friday, December 19, 2025, at the Marasleio School in the Phanar, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew officially opened the proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Ecological Well-Being, entitled “Decisions on the End of Life.” The conference is organized by the Laboratory of Applied Philosophy of the Department of Philosophy at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and is held under the auspices of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.
In his address, the Ecumenical Patriarch observed that the conference theme closely aligns with that of the 3rd Conference of the Bioethics Committee of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which was held in Crete last October. He went on to emphasize that
the conclusions of the Conference held in Crete highlighted euthanasia as “one of the most delicate and complex issues confronting contemporary societies.” He stressed that the Church’s and theology’s response to this challenge “must always be articulated with pastoral sensitivity and not through generalizations or a legalistic mindset.”
Special reference was made to the call addressed to all believers “to care for those at the final stage of life,” as well as to the Church’s encouragement of the establishment of palliative care centers and its appeal to each person to devote time and energy to caring for patients in their homes. In such settings, he noted, patients are embraced within a community of solidarity, feel loved, accepted, and valued, and are able to live the remainder of their lives with dignity, confidence, and security.
The Ecumenical Patriarch expressed his sincere gratitude to the Chairman of the Bioethics Committee of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Archbishop Makarios of Australia, to the members of the Committee, and to all those who contributed to the organization and success of the Conference through their work and participation.
Finally, he recalled that paragraphs 30 and 31 of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s text For the Life of the World are devoted to the issues of old age, death, and euthanasia. The document rightly underscores the responsibility of the ecclesial community, noting that as people grow older they become increasingly vulnerable to illness and disability. This reality, he observed, can become “an opportunity to deepen humility and to grow in faith,” both for those who age and for those who care for them (§30).
It is rightly underscored that, according to the teaching of the Church, “there are no limits to the innate spiritual dignity of the human person, regardless of whether the body or the mind may have been impaired over time.”
Of particular importance is the characterization of suicide in §31 as both a “tragedy” and a “profound affront to the dignity of the human person,” together with the affirmation that suicide “can never be considered a permissible solution to worldly suffering.”
At the same time, it is clarified that “it is entirely permissible for those approaching death to refuse emergency medical interventions and technologies that artificially prolong physical life beyond the point at which the body would naturally surrender the spirit.”
Regarding euthanasia, it is stressed that “even in the case of people suffering from severe and incurable illnesses, death must not be hastened, regardless of how philanthropic such an act may appear.”
Euthanasia is described as “a practice alien to the Christian understanding of life.” At the same time, it is emphasized that “it is entirely permissible for those approaching death to refuse emergency medical treatments and technologies that artificially prolong physical life beyond the point at which the body would naturally surrender the spirit. It cannot be the duty of a Christian to prolong bodily suffering out of fear of the inevitable end or to cling irrationally to this world.”
Finally, it is underlined that the Church offers consolation to the bereaved and prays for the departed. For Christians, who “await the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come,” death “in the grace of God should not be feared.”
On the issue of euthanasia, there is no consensus among the Christian Churches and confessions, nor, of course, among religions more broadly. However, even within the context of an individual Church or confession, decisions on this matter rarely enjoy universal acceptance.
It is a fact that many contemporary dilemmas surrounding euthanasia have emerged as a result of the remarkable progress of medical technology and the growing ability to prolong life through intubation and other life-sustaining methods. At the same time, ambitious research projects are currently underway aiming to identify and even reverse the mechanisms of aging.
In this regard, we read: “Some visionaries in Silicon Valley have founded research institutes that do not seek merely to reduce mortality incrementally by treating diseases one by one, but to reverse the very mechanism of aging itself and to upgrade our cellular equipment to a version without this flaw. The result they hope for is an increase in human life by fifty, one hundred, or even one thousand years” (Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, Dioptra Editions, Athens, 2021).
In his homily, the Ecumenical Patriarch emphasized: “We Christians insist: we resist an ‘objectified life’ devoid of the breath of resurrection and without heaven. Reality is not limited to scientific knowledge, rigid logic, and measurable data alone. There is also mystery, the depth of things, meaning, beauty, and art, which deepen rather than diminish the mystery of the world.”
There exists a religious longing, a profound human desire for all that is precious and exalted, which humanity itself is unable to provide. In our time, predictions that “humanity is moving toward an era without religion” have been clearly refuted. No serious analysis of global society today can be complete without reference to the role of religion.
The Church will continue to be a place where the coming Grace is experienced, and theology will continue to illuminate the existential depth and salvific truth of our faith in Christ, who is “consubstantial with the Father according to divinity and consubstantial with us according to humanity, in all things like us except sin,” according to the unsurpassed dogmatic formulation of the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451).
It will also proclaim that, without reference to the living God, humanity is incapable of creatively confronting the boundary situations of life: the inevitability of death, metaphysical anxiety, and the innate longing for eternity.
The life of the Church resounds, in all its dimensions, with the victory over death. Humanity is not Sein zum Tode (“being toward death”), but is created for eternity and thus called to being toward life. The resurrectional, “ineffable and glorified” joy of life in Christ is the “new wine” that bursts the “old wineskins” (Matthew 9:17). It transcends the notion of death as the soul’s liberation from the body conceived as a “prison” or an “obstacle,” and rejects any view of immortality that denies the fullness of embodied existence.
Christian life within the Church is, precisely, the revelation of the “mystery of the person”, the “enigma” which, according to Nikolai Berdyaev, is “the most unfathomable of all for philosophical thought” and that which “above all else stands in need of Revelation” (Nikolai Berdyaev, Five Reflections on Existence, Athens, n.d., p. 194).
Earlier, Professor Evangelos Protopapadakis, Director of the Laboratory of Applied Philosophy at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and of the MSc program Animals: Ethics, Law, Welfare, addressed the audience. In addition, during the inaugural session, Archon Konstantinos Delikostantis, Professor Emeritus of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, delivered a speech.
In the course of the Conference proceedings, presentations were also given by the Grand Ecclesiarch Aetios, Director of the Private Patriarchal Office, as well as by Deacon of the Series Anatolios Doxastakis, who is currently pursuing his studies at the same Department.
The inaugural session was attended by Metropolitans Apostolos of Derkoi, Eirinaios of Myriophytos and Peristasis, Chrysostomos of Myra, Theoleptos of Iconium, Stefanos of Kallioupolis and Madytos, Andreas of Saranta Ekklisies, and Theodoros of Seleucia; Ambassador Konstantinos Koutras, Consul General of Greece in Constantinople; Archons of the Great Church of Christ; members of the clergy; university professors; and students participating in the Conference.
