On this Palm Sunday of 2026, the palms wave in churches and communities as the liturgy proclaims Jesus Christ as King. “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”, we sing with the same enthusiasm as the inhabitants of Jerusalem two thousand years ago.
However, as soon as Holy Week begins, the contrast between that acclamation and the reality of our Western world is sad, disconcerting, and desolate. The same society that remembers the King of Life tolerates, normalizes, and even celebrates a modern crucifixion, the euthanasia of a young woman just over twenty years old, pushed towards suicide assisted by a system that prefers to kill rather than heal, that prefers “dignified” death to the effort of exalting life.
The personal reasons of Noelia Castillo, undoubtedly, were an accusation of her abandonment that led her to a profound existential dilemma. The case is not isolated, but it hurts with special rawness due to the victim’s age and the legal coldness with which it was carried out, even isolated from any form of companionship from family or friends.
A young woman who, according to Father José Guillermo Gutiérrez Fernández, a recognized Mexican priest and academic expert in bioethics, “did not receive the appropriate help”. Instead of offering her integral accompaniment—psychiatric, psychological, spiritual, and social—the public power and the death clinics presented euthanasia as a quick and “compassionate” solution. The selfishness of the system, disguised as autonomy and progress, decided that it was cheaper and cleaner to eliminate suffering than to remedy and alleviate it. Thus, the culture of death tarnishes the gift of Easter, while we remember the crucifixion of innocent Christ, we consent to the legal crucifixion of desperate innocents.
Father Gutiérrez Fernández has said it with painful clarity: the young woman is no longer in our hands. Trusting in the infinite mercy that “is already making her live life in God”. That trust is not naivety or relativism. It is faith in a God who does not abandon those who, in their anguish, make a desperate decision. But that divine mercy does not exempt society from its guilt nor the Catholic Church either. Some will want to condemn the girl for having “chosen” euthanasia as the ultimate end. They forget that the true responsibility falls on those who created the conditions for that “choice” to be the only open door, legislators, judges, doctors, and media who have turned death into a right and life into a negotiable burden.
This Holy Week cannot be reduced to processions or religious tourism of pure spectacle and sentimentalism. It is, or should be, an urgent opportunity for personal and collective conversion. The West is going through a profound anthropological crisis that sinks us into meaninglessness and despair. We have emptied life of transcendence, we have reduced the human being to a set of ‘subjective rights’ and, when suffering appears, instead of redeeming it as Christ did on the Cross, we eliminate it. Euthanasia is not an advance; it is the moral defeat of a civilization that no longer knows how to defend the dignity of the weakest.
In the face of this, Easter shouts that life is always worth it. That pain, no matter how intense, is not the end. That true compassion does not kill the one who suffers, but sits by their side, like the Cyrenian with Jesus. The conversion that this Holy Week demands involves rejecting the utilitarian logic that measures people by their “quality of life” or their cost to the State. It involves demanding policies that invest in mental health, in real palliative care, and in integral accompaniment. Above all, it involves recovering the certainty that every human life is sacred because it is the image of God, even when that image is wounded and broken.
Christ enters Jerusalem mounted on a donkey, not in a triumphal chariot. He comes humble, but king. He comes to reign from the Cross. May this Holy Week of 2026 not be just a pious remembrance, but a call to action. May the same people who today wave palms have the courage to shout tomorrow against the culture of death because if we do not defend the life of the twenty-something young woman who was abandoned to her desperation, then our acclamation of “Hosanna!” is pure hypocrisy.
The Resurrection is near, but we will only rise as a society if we first accept that we have crucified—the innocent one again and again. May this Holy Week truly be the beginning of our conversion which is radically different from transformation