Vatican Decision on Prolonging Life

The Vatican released a paper yesterday clarifying their moral position on giving life support to patients in a vegetative state.

From the article: "In a document approved by Pope Benedict, the Vatican's doctrinal department said tube-feeding such patients presumed to be near death was "ordinary" care that should not be discontinued because the patients still had human dignity."

In other words, the Vatican is saying that if a person will continue to live simply by providing them with the basic necessities of life--food and water--we should continue to do that! Sounds simple, doesn't it?

Ahhh, but this gets at an even deeper issue. You see, many argue that the person in a "vegetative" state is really already dead. The brain is gone, but the body continues to live. In effect, the person, according to these arguments, is a vegetable. They have no consciousness, no awareness, no brain activity.

So is a person in this state dead? Why would the Catholic church want to keep a body alive, even after the brain is gone?

The answer brings us to an intersection of two different worldviews. The Catholic Church (and most Christian churches) argue that we are not just brains or bodies or disembodied spirits...no--we are a unity of both body and soul And the two are connected. So long as the body lives, the soul remains. When the body dies, the soul departs.

Modern science, dominated by philosophical naturalism and a view that we are nothing more than matter, doesn't accept that there might be more going on than brain activity. Once the brain is dead, the "person"--the body--is dead. So why bother keeping a "dead" body alive? Surely there is nothing more to keep alive!

I don't agree with the Catholic church on everything, to be sure, but on this one, I think they got it right. We have a fundamental responsibility to care for life, whatever state it may be in. The value of a life is not determined by our awareness, or even our consciousness. If that were true, my worth as a person would decrease every time I took a nap! If our value were based on conscious awareness, then infants would be less valuable than other human beings. Sadly, this is exactly the way some people think in our world today. They feel that children, the elderly who cannot care for themselves, those who are mentally impaired, the severly handicapped, children who have not been born--all of these are less than human in some way.

God teaches us to value human life, not based on how much a person can do or even how consciously aware they are--but because he made it, and it is made in his image, however broken that image may be. It is still a precious gift.