Catholic News Agency by John M. Haas, The National Catholic Bioethics Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Blessed John Paul II cautioned against the advances of a “culture of death” in our day and called for countering it by building up a “culture of life”. These were terms which he employed in his great 1995 encyclical The Gospel of Life, and they were such powerful constructs that they soon entered into the very language of contemporary public debate.
The Catholic Church is at the forefront of the struggle against a culture of death raising her voice against direct assaults against human life such as abortion and euthanasia, in vitro fertilization, embryonic stem cell research and the use of embryonic human beings for research.
In The Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul II declared: “To claim the right to abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others.”
The Pope went on to observe that these evil practices have received the protection of the law so that the coercive powers of the state are now used to protect those who would take innocent human life rather than used to protect the innocent lives that are threatened. Indeed, John Paul observed with dismay that even health care professionals who have given themselves by a sacred oath to heal and to care have been seduced by this notion of freedom which manifests itself as “absolute power over others and against others”. He continued: “It is not only that in generalized opinion these attacks tend no longer to be considered as ‘crimes’; paradoxically they assume the nature of ‘rights’, to the point that the State is called upon to give them legal recognition and to make them available through the free services of health-care personnel.”
John Paul insisted that the recognition of the inviolability of innocent human life was a duty of all people and could and should be recognized by all:
. . . every person sincerely open to truth and goodness can, by the light of reason and the hidden action of grace, come to recognize in the natural law written in the heart (cf. Rom 2:14-15) the sacred value of human life from its very beginning until its end, and can affirm the right of every human being to have this primary good respected to the highest degree.
Mistaken Pro-Life Catholics
It is understandable that pro-life Catholics are going to be very sensitive to any possible violation of the human person’s fundamental right to life. However, on occasion some misunderstand Catholic teaching in their pro-life zeal and deny that certain actions are morally permissible. For example, there are some Catholics who reject the notion of vital organ transplantation and the criteria which are currently used to judge a donor to be dead before the organs are extracted. In the introduction to a recent book entitled Finis Vitae, Dr. Paul Byrne, a physician, writes: “The holocaust of abortion and transplantation of organs from living donors will go down in history as the two most tragic and transcendental events of the last two centuries. Such massacres continue with the protection of law in the Western countries and the unwavering support of the legal and medical professions.” Dr. Byrne claims that those who have been judged dead using neurological criteria are still alive and that the excision of their vital organs is murder. The teaching authority of the Church disagrees with him.
Pope John Paul II Declares Organ Donation a “Gift of Self”
The encyclical The Gospel of Life actually encouraged organ donation as a generous act of self-denial. Pope John Paul spoke of heroic acts of generosity which “are the most solemn celebration of the Gospel of Life, for they proclaim it by the total gift of self. . . A particularly praiseworthy example of such gestures is the donation of organs, performed in an ethically acceptable manner, with a view to offering a chance of health and even of life itself to the sick who sometimes have no other hope.” When he addressed a Congress on Organ Transplants four years earlier in June of 1991, the Holy Father observed that every organ transplant comes from a decision of great ethical value because it is “the decision to offer without reward a part of one’s own body for the health and well-being of another person”. When he spoke of those making this decision during an address to health care professionals involved in organ transplantation in August 2000, he stated: “Here precisely [i.e., in the gift of self] lies the nobility of the gesture, a gesture which is a genuine act of love.”
Moral Necessities: Informed Consent and Dead Donor Rule
There are two basic conditions that have to be met for the moral retrieval of vital organs from donors: the donor must freely consent to it and the donor must be dead. Fortunately, there is broad general agreement in society on these conditions. Within the Church, there is not only general agreement, but unambiguous insistence that the person must be dead before vital organs can be removed for transplantation. This is known as the “dead donor rule”. A controversy has developed, however, in some circles as to how death is to be ascertained.
How Is Death Determined?
Blessed John Paul II cautioned against the advances of a “culture of death” in our day and called for countering it by building up a “culture of life”. These were terms which he employed in his great 1995 encyclical The Gospel of Life, and they were such powerful constructs that they soon entered into the very language of contemporary public debate.
The Catholic Church is at the forefront of the struggle against a culture of death raising her voice against direct assaults against human life such as abortion and euthanasia, in vitro fertilization, embryonic stem cell research and the use of embryonic human beings for research.
In The Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul II declared: “To claim the right to abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others.”
The Pope went on to observe that these evil practices have received the protection of the law so that the coercive powers of the state are now used to protect those who would take innocent human life rather than used to protect the innocent lives that are threatened. Indeed, John Paul observed with dismay that even health care professionals who have given themselves by a sacred oath to heal and to care have been seduced by this notion of freedom which manifests itself as “absolute power over others and against others”. He continued: “It is not only that in generalized opinion these attacks tend no longer to be considered as ‘crimes’; paradoxically they assume the nature of ‘rights’, to the point that the State is called upon to give them legal recognition and to make them available through the free services of health-care personnel.”
John Paul insisted that the recognition of the inviolability of innocent human life was a duty of all people and could and should be recognized by all:
. . . every person sincerely open to truth and goodness can, by the light of reason and the hidden action of grace, come to recognize in the natural law written in the heart (cf. Rom 2:14-15) the sacred value of human life from its very beginning until its end, and can affirm the right of every human being to have this primary good respected to the highest degree.
Mistaken Pro-Life Catholics
It is understandable that pro-life Catholics are going to be very sensitive to any possible violation of the human person’s fundamental right to life. However, on occasion some misunderstand Catholic teaching in their pro-life zeal and deny that certain actions are morally permissible. For example, there are some Catholics who reject the notion of vital organ transplantation and the criteria which are currently used to judge a donor to be dead before the organs are extracted. In the introduction to a recent book entitled Finis Vitae, Dr. Paul Byrne, a physician, writes: “The holocaust of abortion and transplantation of organs from living donors will go down in history as the two most tragic and transcendental events of the last two centuries. Such massacres continue with the protection of law in the Western countries and the unwavering support of the legal and medical professions.” Dr. Byrne claims that those who have been judged dead using neurological criteria are still alive and that the excision of their vital organs is murder. The teaching authority of the Church disagrees with him.
Pope John Paul II Declares Organ Donation a “Gift of Self”
The encyclical The Gospel of Life actually encouraged organ donation as a generous act of self-denial. Pope John Paul spoke of heroic acts of generosity which “are the most solemn celebration of the Gospel of Life, for they proclaim it by the total gift of self. . . A particularly praiseworthy example of such gestures is the donation of organs, performed in an ethically acceptable manner, with a view to offering a chance of health and even of life itself to the sick who sometimes have no other hope.” When he addressed a Congress on Organ Transplants four years earlier in June of 1991, the Holy Father observed that every organ transplant comes from a decision of great ethical value because it is “the decision to offer without reward a part of one’s own body for the health and well-being of another person”. When he spoke of those making this decision during an address to health care professionals involved in organ transplantation in August 2000, he stated: “Here precisely [i.e., in the gift of self] lies the nobility of the gesture, a gesture which is a genuine act of love.”
Moral Necessities: Informed Consent and Dead Donor Rule
There are two basic conditions that have to be met for the moral retrieval of vital organs from donors: the donor must freely consent to it and the donor must be dead. Fortunately, there is broad general agreement in society on these conditions. Within the Church, there is not only general agreement, but unambiguous insistence that the person must be dead before vital organs can be removed for transplantation. This is known as the “dead donor rule”. A controversy has developed, however, in some circles as to how death is to be ascertained.
How Is Death Determined?
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