It is pretty safe to say that, since its "reform" in late 2016, the Pontifical Academy for Life has become a withered husk of its former self, embroiled in controversy after controversy under its current president, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia - from damaging statements on abortion, to suggestions that the Church's teaching on contraception in Humanae vitae is "reformable", to some of its members (even the 'Catholic' ones!) being openly against Church teaching on life issues.
Perhaps, then, it should not come as too much of a surprise that the Academy's president is in favour of the liberalisation of euthanasia laws. Archbishop Paglia, in a speech to the International Festival of Journalism in Perugia, Italy, said on April 19 that:
[I]t cannot be excluded that in our society a legal mediation is feasible which allows assisted suicide in the conditions specified by the [Italian] Constitutional Court's Judgment 242/2019... The bill approved by the Chamber of Deputies (but not by the Senate) basically followed this line. Personally I would not practice assisted suicide, but I understand that legal mediation can constitute the greatest common good concretely possible in the conditions in which we find ourselves. (Italian text; video)
