Paper short abstract:

Post-mortem organ donation and diagnoses of brain-death have challenged religious experts to evaluate their understandings of death, burial rites, personhood and charity. This paper will contextualize articles of German Catholic theologians from the 1960s-80s to reconstruct paths of argumentation.

Paper long abstract:

Transplant surgeons, who have an interest in the history of religion, like to point to the miracle leg transplantation conducted by the Arab physicians and Christian Saints Cosmas and Damian, as a clear indication, that transplantation surgery is the fulfillment of a long held dream of mankind. The first successful human heart transplant in 1967 by Christiaan Barnard was celebrated by media outlets as such a 'medical miracle', but at the same time posed a fundamental moral question: "Is everything that is medically possible also ethically justifiable?".

This paper will focus on how German Catholic theologians reacted to the early successes of post-mortem organ transplantation. Post-mortem organ donation and the diagnoses of brain-death have challenged religious experts to evaluate their understandings of death, burial rites, personhood and charity. Especially brain-death put theologians in the position to engage with current findings of neurology and technologies of neurological testing, such as measuring electrical activity of the brain with an Electroencephalography (EEG). How could they argue on basis of 'foreign knowledge' (neurology) but also claim authority as religious experts? To reconstruct those paths of argumentation, articles from the 1960s-80s have been collected and surveyed. The recurring arguments will be further situated in the wider context of a post-fascist Germany and papal statements on the subject. The results show, how religious experts weigh up ideas about death, burial customs, concepts of personhood and charity against promising medical innovation.

This paper is based on the draft-chapter on the history of organ donation in Germany of an ethnographic PhD project on contemporary decisions on organ donation and religion.