Eastern Oklahoma Catholic July/August 2010 : Page 8
t h e o l o g y 1 0 1 Blood flows through a kidney, turning the organ bright pink, during a transplant surgery performed at St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles. (CNS file photo) present a brief outline of the teaching of the Church on the issue and how the scientific and medical community under-stands the question of what constitutes death. There are two medical and scien-‘signs of death’ will and must continue A Debate over few years ago I never would have given any thought or interest to the issue of the “signs of death” i.e., how to establish with moral certainty when death has actually occurred. However, the more I studied the issue of the standards for determin-ing that death has occurred, the more I realized that there are legitimate questions to be answered regarding the science and ethics of these standards for declaring a Eastern Oklahoma Catholic 8 July/August 2010 | www.dioceseoftulsa.org tific standards for determining death has occurred. The first and most used throughout history is the cardiopul-monary standard, which involves the irreversible ending of repertory and car-diac functions of the body. The second is the neurological standard, which is total brain failure. This would include the brain itself and the brain stem. This neurological standard of death excludes persons who are in a persistent vegeta-tive state because their brain stem is still functioning. The reason these standards for deter-mining death are so important has to do with the need for donor organs for transplantation and the necessity that transplants are ethically legitimate. There must always be a respect for the life of all persons who would be organ donors. Pope John Paul II, in a March 2005 let-ter to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, stated that since the time of Pope Pius XII the Church has encouraged organ dona-tion and emphasized the necessity of the ethical conditions for organ donations. The life and dignity of both the donor and the recipient must be defended. Pope John Paul stated in the letter to the Pontifical Academy: “Within the horizon of Christian an-human person to be dead. The question is important because it is necessary in order to be able to ethically proceed with organ transplantation. The question as to what constitutes proof of death came up again as I wrote last month’s Theology 101 column for the Eastern Oklahoma Catholic on trans-plantation of organs. I initially felt the questions regarding the ethical standard of brain death were asked only by a few fringe groups in the religious and scien-tific communities. My hope is to simply thropology, it is well known that the mo-ment of death for each person consists in the definitive loss of the constitutive unity of body and spirit. Each human being, in fact, is alive precisely insofar as he or she is ‘corpore et anima unus’ (Gaudium et Spes, 14), and he or she remains so for as long as this substantial unity-in-totality subsists. In the light of this anthropological truth, it is clear, as I have already had occasion to observe, that ‘the death of the person, un-derstood in this primary sense, is an event which no scientific technique or empirical method can identify directly.’” St. John Mary Vianney, priest Aug. 4 | Dedication of St. Mary Major Aug. 5 | Feast of the Transfiguration
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