Appearing this week before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Dr. Kevorkian displayed a megalomania not matched in what may be the most egocentric of cities. He declared that everything anyone ever needed to know about physician-assisted suicide could be found in his writings; that his interpretation of state, federal and common law was supreme; that he was lowering himself (against his own superior judgment) to appear before the media at all; and that even other supporters of euthanasia were beneath his contempt.
His sneering derision of Pope John Paul II and Catholicism was blatant, as would be expected. He is naturally contemptuous of anyone or anything that stands in the way of his personal crusade to be the final judge of who lives and dies (regardless even of their level of suffering and of whether or not they are terminally ill). What was startling, however, was his declaration that the Pope secretly controls the U.S. Supreme Court, a charge that never occurred to the fevered minds of even the most virulent anti-Catholics of the last century.
Not content to disdain the Pope, Dr. Kevorkian went on to blaspheme by declaring that Jesus would have had a more dignified death if Dr. Kevorkian had been given the chance to euthanize Him in the back of the "rusty old van" in which he has killed so many others.
But there is something more disturbing than Dr. Kevorkian's ego, paranoia and messianic complex. It is that a large number of Americans, including Catholics, are unwilling to condemn his crusade to lower human life to the level of stray animals that must be "put down" for their own good.