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AndrewHickey comments on How Many of Me Are There? - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's also not true. Catholicism holds that only those who commit suicide while the balance of their mind is not disturbed are incapable of going to heaven - and in practice they assume anyone who commits suicide has a disturbed mind. In effect they're saying "If you kill yourself deliberately just so as to annoy God, then you're a sinner. Otherwise you're not." I don't know how recently that became their standard belief, but it's been so for at least the last few decades...
Yes and no. The Catholic Church has indeed backed off from the days when they refused to have funeral services for suicides on the presumption that they are hellbound; now they generally give the benefit of the doubt to people who commit suicide from depression, on the grounds that they may not have been sane enough to be morally responsible for their act.
However, the dogma still considers it a mortal sin if chosen deliberately by a sane person, and in particular suicide among the terminally ill is a matter of moral concern for them (or rather, keeping euthanasia illegal is a matter of political concern for them). They're supposed to freak out at the suggestion, like a priest did in a certain recent movie where euthanasia becomes a part of the plot.
I hadn't heard that before. My understanding is based off of a conversation with a devout catholic, but not a church official. The notion of a disturbed mind is something I haven't heard ago. Thanks for the info.