News

By Catholic World News - Current medical criteria for diagnosing “brain death” are woefully inadequate, and more than half of organ donors who have been declared “brain dead” are still alive. These are the conclusions of a group of 151 Catholic doctors, ethicists, theologians, and others, in a statement released on February 27. The statement, entitled Catholics United on Brain Death and Organ Donation: A Call to Action calls for an immediate moratorium on the transplantation of vital organs.

By Fr. Gerald E. Murray, The Catholic Thing - “It is essential to safeguard the deposit of faith,” Cardinal Robert McElroy affirmed in his recent address to the Los Angeles Archdiocesan Religious Education Congress. Yet he next posed this question: But how do the doctrinal tradition and history of the church restrict the church’s ability to refine its teaching when confronted with a world where life itself is evolving in critical ways, and it is becoming clear that on some issues the understanding of human nature and moral reality upon which previous declarations of doctrine were made were in fact limited or defective?