YOUR CATHOLIC NEIGHBOR
Bradley L. Hahn
Attorney helps Catholics with end-of-life issues
By Joyce Coronel | April 16, 2009 | The Catholic Sun
It’s a topic many people would rather avoid, but Bradley Hahn faces it squarely and helps his fellow Catholics do the same.
As an estate planning attorney, Hahn has done a lot of thinking and counseling about death and the decisions family members often have to make about loved ones. For many people, talking with Hahn is an eye-opening experience.
He told of one client who shed tears after listening to his 20-minute explanation of Church teaching on the topic. For many years, the woman had worried that she had made the wrong decision and allowed her aunt to die by euthanasia.
After analyzing what had happened, Hahn reassured her that she had made the correct decision after all and had not allowed an act of euthanasia to take place. In an effort to help explain Church teaching to his clients, he gives every client a copy of a small tome called “A Will to Live: Clear Answers on End of Life Issues.”
“I want them to be 100 percent confident that they’re making the right decision, that they not have any guilt or doubt in their mind. We sometimes bring clergy in to help with that,” Hahn said.
“I customize their living will and health care power of attorney to follow the teaching of the Catholic Church,” he added.
Hahn has also written a book of his own about how people can practice stewardship and create what he calls a Catholic legacy.
“It’s exciting for me to share Catholic teaching with others and to understand that there is absolute truth out there in end-of-life issues and end-of-life teaching,” Hahn said.
In “Discovering and Serving Your Passion for Life: A Catholic Stewardship Guide,” Hahn chronicles how his wife Julie nearly died after giving birth to their son in 2005. He used to think that, as an estate planning attorney, he was well prepared for death. But the experience taught him otherwise.
He realized that he didn’t know what his wife’s wishes were in the event of disability or how she would want her funeral Mass celebrated. His book helps people create what he calls a Catholic estate plan.
“All too often,” Hahn writes, “family members must make very difficult decisions when a loved one becomes disabled or dies. When no thoughtful instructions are provided, family members may be left in a quandary.”
Hahn’s zeal for spreading the Catholic faith seems boundless. He possesses a depth of knowledge about Church teaching and enjoys sharing it with others and participating in faith-based organizations.
The St. Timothy parishioner and father of two young children was recently appointed to the board of the St. Thomas More Law Society and is active in the national Catholic Medical Association, as well as a men’s fellowship group.
He’s also active in Christians in Commerce, the Knights of Columbus, the Seton High School major gifts board and the St. Mary-Basha School finance council.
Hahn will address the topic of moral relativism and Catholics in the public square when he speaks to the Men of Iron group at St. Timothy Parish at 7 p.m. May 8. Catholic men from the Diocese of Phoenix are invited to attend the event.
What is your passion in life?
My passion is to help families with their estate planning and Catholic teaching there, and to help men understand their Catholic role in their family and in the public square. Also, it’s for me to be a better Catholic and to try to help my family. I take the role of spiritual leader in my family very seriously.
Who is your role model?
In a professional sense it would be St. Thomas More, how he stood up against the pressures of the king and still was trying to do the right thing.
What do you love most about being a Catholic?
The depth of the Catholic faith; how the Catholic Church has a great depth of teaching on the social and economic issues in societies, with all the great encyclicals like Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, and how that is so lacking in the Protestant church. They don’t have the rich teaching of the Church.
What do you enjoy most about your profession?
I feel like it’s a way to catechize the Catholic faith, to share it with others who may not have had the time to study the issues. How that affects your estate planning and the legacy you leave behind. Will that legacy be a blessing or a burden for the ones you leave behind?
