First, if this thread is duplicated elsewhere, mods, feel free to close it. Or if it belongs better in GQ, then feel free to move it.
What if the Pope becomes brain-dead? What then? His body is still functioning, yet all of the signals coming from his brain are minmal or flat-lined. He’s hooked up to a feeding tube and will live for a few months or possibly even a year or so. Who takes over? Would the College of Cardinals convene to elect a new Pope? JP II has been adamant about not stepping down. So, if he’s still alive, he’s still the Pope. But he’s also brain-dead. The personality is gone. Since he previously refused to step down and cannot give consent to do so because of lack of cortical activity, can he be forcibly removed or will the RCC be stuck with a brain-dead potiff? Of course, the idea of removing the tube and letting him die is out of the question. I understand that an administrative head of office to carry about the daily affairs of the Vatican but what about the major decisions?
Or, to add another twist: a few years down the road and the new Pope, JP II’s successor is in office, managing the RCC. He’s only 50 or 60 years old. While certainly not a spring chicken, he has plenty of life in him. But some medical emergency happens and he ends up brain-dead. His body will live as long as it receives nourishment, but his mind is gone, no evidence of high brain activity. As such, his body will live for another 20 to 30 years quite easily, but his personality is gone. This Pope has expressed the same desire to stay in office until his death.
Again, who will govern the RCC? The man is brain-dead and has no personality. There are administrative rules for handling the day to day affairs, but who makes the major decisions while the pontiff brain-dead? Can the College of Cardinals depose him or are they stuck with a living body, but brain-dead pontiff for the next several years, if not decades?
In theory, it could happen, because it has happened, in the case of Urban VI. (the Romans forced his election, and then after, partly because he wasn’t French, and partly because he was crazy), 5 months later, a bunch of cardinals named Robert of Geneva pope, instead.
Of course, in that case, not all of the cardinals abandoned Urban, and both men claimed to be pope, leading to a 40 year split in which two seperate (and for a really brief time, 3 seperate) people both claimed to be pope. So, it didn’t end well. But it could happen.
Fascinating. I know there have been breaks and branchs in papal succession, but I don’t know the whole background story. Do you think such a thing could happen today? I recall, after the untimely death of JP I in 1978, there were rumors about him being killed by various factions inside the Vactican.
If the pope were truly brain dead, then by current Catholic teaching he would be just plain dead, and his body would follow his brain when the ventilator was shut off. There is some concern that sometimes a too loose definition of brain death is being used in order to facilitate organ transplantation, but the majority opinion of Catholic theologians, ethicists and doctors is that true brain death is death.
Where things would get sticky is if the pope wasn’t brain dead, but rather in a PVS or long coma. The pope has declared that nutrition and hydration are ordinary care and may not licitly be removed from a patient, so if he was in such a state he could live for months or years with a feeding tube. Extraordinary means, such as a ventilator, may be removed, but then the patient’s wishes would come into play, and I doubt that the pope’s advance directives (if such exist) will be made public.
As for the possibility of schism if he either resigns or is deposed by a Council or the College, I would expect that to be a very low probability event unless the newly installed pope were to be quite liberal, thus giving the more conservative elements of the Church a reason to rally around JPII as the “true” pope. Since the vast majority of the current Cardinals were selected by John Paul II, getting a big swing in ideology with the next pope is unlikely. Keep in mind that the Great Schism had much more to do with regional politics than with any differences in religious teaching, with countries lining up behind the various competing popes based on political alliances and animosities.
A person who is brain dead doesn’t get a feeding tube do they? Brain dead is much different from PVS.
Regardless, the Pope is 86 and it’s unlikely that he would hold on very long if he were comatose or something like that. His body just wouldn’t be able to fight off infection and other things like that.
True brain death means no brain activity at all, so no respiration or heart beat without artificial means. If you needed to keep the body alive (say, until time to harvest organs for transplant), then IV fluids and/or a feeding tube would be necessary depending on the time involved. There have been cases of pregnant women who have been kept alive-though-brain-dead for weeks in order to allow the baby to come to term. So yes, sometimes a brain dead person may get a feeding tube.
Realistically speaking, I imagine the cardinals would tweak the rules a little, putting up some interim leader with the ability to perform the necessary functions until the Pope’s body finally failed. In the hypothetical case where the body might be around for decades, then they would doubtlessly change the rules to allow for a new Pope to be chosen.
Well, no, obviously something like that wouldn’t happen now. It just happened then because of the enormous power of France in papal politics (in large part because the papacy had been in Avignon for so long before, the violence threatened against the cardinals by the mob if they didn’t elect an Italian, and Urban’s habit, after he was elected, of threatening his allies and assassinating cardinals he thought were plotting against him.
John Paul I, conspiracy theories notwithstanding (and there were some members of the Curia who thought the KGB did it), probably died naturally. He had a bad heart and a history of heart and circulation troubles.
Given this, I would re-state the question: If the Pope should go into a coma or PVS, what would the Church do? By Pope, I’m thinking into the future, a younger man who still has a good deal of life to him, but is in a coma or PVS. Before this happened, he, like JP II, stated he would stay on as long as possible. Can he be deposed by the College of Cardinals or is there some other legal method of removing an occupant from office?
The only authority in the Church that could possibly make a deposition of the pope stick would be an Ecumenical Council. It has been done before (during the Great Schism), but unless the pope was incapacitated for an exceptionally long period (a la Schiavo) it would be very unlikely to to happen, IMHO.
In practical terms, if the pope was incapacitated so that he couldn’t function, it wouldn’t make much difference in the day to day functioning of the Vatican. The Curia and the diocesan bishops could handle most of that stuff on their own. If there was some crisis that needed an immediate decision, it would be decided by the cardinal secretary of state (who, if you haven’t noticed has been making most of the Vatican’s public statements recently).
The only thing they couldn’t easily do is name cardinals.
If the Pope dies, do his organs get donated?
(It doesn’t seem like they would, but wouldn’t it be cool to be able to say, “hey, part of my body once belonged to the Pope!”)
That reminds me of a joke I heard years ago. It actually works better if you act it out, but here goes.
The Pope is ill, and thousands of people gather at the Vatican to pray en masse. A cardinal appears on a balcony and announces, “The Pope needs a heart transplant or he’ll die.”
Everyone starts running around yelling, “Pope-a, take-a my heart!” “Pope-a, take-a my heart!”
The cardinal holds up his hands and says, “Stop! Now, I’m going to drop this feather, and whoever it lands on will donate their heart.”
So now everyone’s running around yelling, “Pope-a, take-a my heart! [poof]” “Pope-a, take-a my heart! [poof]”
(“Poof” meaning, they’re blowing the feather away from them.)
