London:

The Most Rev. John Sherrington, the Lead Bishop for Life Issues, and Bishop Patrick McKinney of Nottingham in the UK have both issued statements on Indi Gregory, an eight-month-old terminally ill patient at the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham.

They suggested keeping the patient on excellent palliative care if the risks of continuing curative medical treatment exceeded the benefits. Little Indi suffers from a rare mitochondrial deficiency that leaves the cells starving for energy.

They argue that physicians should still give care that keeps patients alive, such as maintaining healthy organs and systems, even if patients no longer get unwarranted therapies. The Church justifies these practices as essential so that the children may die without suffering and humanely.

Although they understood the probable delayed nature of terminal diseases, they underlined that no action, including the withholding of crucial care, should ever be used in an effort to induce death.

They went on to explain that they understood that there was nothing more that could be done, but that everyone should treat the ill with dignity up to the moment of their death, and that they wished the family would find peace in the coming days and weeks. In the end, everyone vowed to pray for baby Indi, her parents, their relatives, and the doctors and nurses who were taking care of her.

Meanwhile, when the British court upheld a previous judgment to terminate life support for Indi Gregory, the Italian government granted her citizenship thus opening the possibility of being treated in the Holy See’s Bambino Gesu Hospital in Rome.