A note: some may find this post upsetting. Know that is not my intent, but on some level what you are about to read should upset you.
The mass on the morning of Friday, January 11th started like any other mass we attended in Haiti. This morning’s mass would also be a funeral mass. However, despite the two bodies that lay in the chapel before us, the congregation at Friday’s mass consisted entirely of Italians and Americans. Father Rick took the unusual step of starting mass in English and Italian. Admittedly, I was glad for being able to understand what was going on during mass in both English and Italian that morning. This was also the first morning that mass was being held within the beautiful little chapel (rather than outside), and I was struck by the simple beauty of this place.
Everything changed halfway through the mass when several men from the hospital unexpectedly arrived and brought a third body into the chapel. Several people scrambled to make room for the third “casket”. By this point, a few locals had arrived, and Father Rick proceeded in Creole as well. His sermon, however, he delivered in all three languages.
As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, and as several friends and family members can attest to, I am not a deeply religious person. Father Rick’s sermon changed that for a least a little while that day. He spoke about death – again, a topic all too familiar here in Haiti – about mourning, about the soul leaving the body and meeting God in heaven. How in Catholic belief, the soul does not depart from the body for three days. He pointed to the unexpected arrival of the third body (whom I’ll refer to as “A”), and described how A was likely still warm and that according to God, A was not ready for that journey to heaven. A’s soul had not yet departed from this earth.
In the moment after Father Rick said that A’s family probably didn’t know that A had even died, I shed a tear. To imagine that we, as complete strangers, knew of A’s death and yet her family did not felt wrong, foreign, and impossibly heart wrenching. To know that those of us in that little chapel, completely unrelated to A, would serve as the witnesses to her funeral mass was both astonishing and upsetting. That her family would not be able to properly mourn A’s death during mass was distressing and unfortunate. And yet a part of me couldn’t help but wonder how commonplace an occurrence that was here.
The almost mystical and magical combination of three bodies present and three languages spoken during mass was both beautiful and overwhelming. The rest of the mass proceeded uneventfully, until the end when the burial clothes were removed from the caskets and body bags. Suddenly, it made sense why Father Rick read five names during the funeral blessing. To my shock, the last body was not merely one body, but that of three small children. Three tiny bodies that had already departed from this world. Three small lives cut incredibly too short. Part of me wondered if these children were better off, having potentially escaped a lifetime of hardship. Part of me sensed the feelings of pain and anguish from my female colleagues who are themselves mothers, and I wondered where the mothers of these little ones were and why they were not present. But most of all, my heart broke a little that day – for three mothers who had lost their precious children and for three children who would never know what amazing lives they might have lived, for the experiences they would never have, and for the impact they could have made on their communities.
I left mass that morning once again humbled by what was so tragically commonplace in Port-au-Prince, and for the lives we so easily take for granted in the United States. And I lamented how things had turned out this way.
heavy heart.
Hard to imagine seeing this and harder to put this experience into words I’m sure…
Really interesting story, but FYI, Catholic teaching actually does not teach that the soul does not separate from the body for three days after death. Rather, they believe separation happens instantly at death. The Catholic Church simply believe that we cannot trust science to be able to tell us exactly when death occurs and that the only way we know for sure is when decay occurs.
Here is some documentaion about Catholic beliefs on the subject, primarily involving the topic of organ donation:
“In case of insoluble doubt, one must resort to presumptions of law and of fact. In general, it will be necessary to presume that life remains, because there is involved here a fundamental right received from the Creator, and it is necessary to prove with certainty that it has been lost.”6 (Emphasis added.) Also, Pope Pius XII in an Address about corneal transplantation, stated “Public authorities and the laws which concern the use of corpses should, in general, be guided by these same moral and human considerations, since they are based on human nature itself, which takes precedence over society in the order of causality and in dignity. In particular, public authorities have the duty to supervise their enforcement and above all to take care that a “corpse” shall not be considered and treated as such until death has been sufficiently proved.”7
Pope John Paul II in 1991, to a Group on Organ Transplants, stated: “Furthermore, a person can only donate that of which he can deprive himself without serious danger or harm to his own life or personal identity, and for a just and proportionate reason. It is obvious that vital organs can only be donated after death.”8
Pope John Paul II to the Participants of the 1989 Pontifical Academy of Sciences stated: “The problem of the moment of death has serious implications at the practical level, and this aspect is also of great interest to the Church. In practice, there seems to arise a tragic dilemma. On the one hand there is the urgent need to find replacement organs for sick people who would otherwise die or at least would not recover. In other words, it is conceivable that in order to escape certain and imminent death a patient may need to receive an organ which could be provided by another patient, who may be lying next to him in hospital, but about whose death there still remains some doubt. Consequently, in the process there arises the danger of terminating a human life, of definitively disrupting the psychosomatic unity of a person. More precisely, there is a real possibility that the life whose continuation is made unsustainable by the removal of a vital organ may be that of a living person, whereas the respect due to human life absolutely prohibits the direct and positive sacrifice of that life, even though it may be for the benefit of another human being who might be felt to be entitled to preference.”9
In the same Address Pope John Paul II stated: “Death can mean decomposition, disintegration, a separation (cf. Salvifici Doloris, n. 15; Gaudium et Spes, n. 18). It occurs when the spiritual principle which ensures the unity of the individual can no longer exercise its functions in and upon the organism, whose elements left to themselves, disintegrate.”10
Pope John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae, (n. 15), stated: “Nor can we remain silent in the face of other more furtive, but no less serious and real, forms of euthanasia. These could occur for example when, in order to increase the availability of organs for transplants, organs are removed without respecting objective and adequate criteria which verify the death of the donor.”11
It follows that the question must be asked: Are criteria that are used objective and adequate to verify the donor’s death when a heart and other organs are taken for transplantation? That is, is life no longer present when the heart is beating and there is a recordable blood pressure, normal temperature, normal salt and water balance and many internal organs and systems are functioning and maintaining the unity of the body?
The statements of Pope Pius XII, Pope John Paul II, the Council of Vienne, the Council of the Fifth Lateran, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, combined with knowledge of biology, biochemistry, medicine, jurisprudence, and theology make clear to us that the unity of the body is present until excision of organs. At the very least, if the separation of the body and life cannot be verified, or if there is doubt about the separation of the body and life, organ excision is morally prohibited and should not be allowed.