Vatican Debates Transplantation?

Vatican Debates Transplantation? by Judie Brown

It has come as a surprise to some that the Pontifical Academy for Life is co-hosting a November 2008 conference with the theme "A Gift for Life." I have known that the conference has been on the drawing board for some months now. This past June, when concerns were first expressed to me, I, as an Academy member, joined with Professor Joseph Seifert to ask the Academy's leadership to reconsider the topic of the conference and perhaps postpone it until Academy members could discuss concerns privately in a closed-door meeting.


Professor Seifert has written and spoken of his concerns about the validity of the "brain death" criterion for many years. In a 1998 Catholic World Report article, we read the following:

It is often said that in the brain-dead patient, certain organs remain alive, although the brain ? and thus the patient himself ? is dead. On the contrary, argues Seifert:


We have to consider that the human life is not like a tree life. Each twig and each little part of the tree has some life; it's a living cell, and the life of the whole organism is in a certain way like the integrated totality of life processes in the different parts of the tree. But when it comes to persons, you have the source of the real personal life, the human soul, which is indivisible ? it cannot be divided into many parts. Therefore the new question is whether functions of the brain are the only thing that keep body and soul together, that bind the soul to the body, or that are the source of the incarnated presence of the soul. That, I think, is extremely doubtful. . . . The mystery of how body and soul are united exceeds just brain function. It's not just an isolated presence in a single organ.

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