Death

The Fall, 2012 issue of Communio is dedicated to the theme of “Death.” In his book Eschatology , Joseph Ratzinger points out a “remarkably contradictory” attitude toward death prevalent in modern society: “On the one hand,” he writes, “death is placed under a taboo. It is unseemly. So far as possible, it must be hidden away, the thought of it repressed. . . . On the other hand, one is also aware of a tendency to put death on show, which corresponds to the general pulling down of shame barriers everywhere.” . . .

“Through the vulnerability and dependence of the dying person, we discover a call to reach beyond ourselves to those around us and ultimately to God Himself.”

“The medical question for us now is whether the irreversible loss of all brain function is accompanied by the disintegration and loss of unity to which the Pope refers.”

"[The] accusation that I am in conflict with Church teaching about death relies . . . not only on a mischaracterization of my position, but also on a mischaracterization of Church teaching itself. In point of fact, the Magisterium does not formally oblige us to hold that the brain is the master organ of somatic integration, or that its death is therefore the death of the human being as such. Nor does the hylemorphism espoused by Boethius, Aquinas, and the Council of Vienne entail any such claim."

“The Risen Lord has victoriously filled death with the only substance and intelligibility it can have: himself.”

“The technical management of life and death implies an avoidance of the necessity of love, or put better, it implies a kind of falsification of love and its fruit.”

“There is a mysterious but real continuity between the body that dies and the body that is raised.”

“On the way to the Parousia, the action of Jesus Christ expands to the whole living body of the Church and, through his action, to the body of the world.”