Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

IS THE BRAIN-DEAD PATIENT REALLY DEAD? 295The Papal Address on Brain Death, August 29, 2000As noted in the introduction, John Paul II’s statement to the18 th International Congress of the Transplantation Society onAugust 29, 2000, was heralded as the long-awaited magisterialpronouncement on BD. In light of Alan Shewmon’s critique ofBD, however, I suggest that the philosophical and theologicaldebate over BD cannot be closed simply because the scientificand medical facts that are presupposed by both sides of the controversyhave been disputed.The Pope’s argument in support of the TBD criteria is relativelystraightforward. First, the Pope adopts a biological definitionfor death. He says that the “death of the person is a singleevent, consisting in the total disintegration of that unitary andintegrated whole that is the personal self.” According to thePope, this disintegration results from “the separation of the lifeprinciple(or soul) from the corporal reality of the person.”Presupposed in this definition of death is a Christian anthropologythat acknowledges two truths. First, the human being is anembodied spirit, a substantial unity of body and soul. 52 Second,the soul is the formal principle of the body, that principle thatintegrates and unifies the body, making it what it is. 53 Note thatthis definition of the soul is extremely important because it liesat the heart of the Pope’s argument: If death is the separation ofthe soul from the body, and the soul is the integrating principleof the body, then the only empirical data for the absence of thesoul will be the loss of bodily integration. Next, the Pope presumesthat the scientific and medical communities have shown52“The human body shares in the dignity of “the image of God”: it is ahuman body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is thewhole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, atemple of the Spirit.” Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 364.53“The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to considerthe soul to be the “form” of the body, i.e., it is because of its spiritual soulthat the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter,in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a singlenature.” Catechism, no. 365.