Organ Donation from a Canonized Saint

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HumbleIOughtToBe

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“what happens if you receive an organ transplant from someone who becomes a canonized saint?
Would YOU be a reliquary? Would you be REQUIRED to go on tour with the Knights of Columbus? Would people KISS your stitches?”
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I shamelessly take this good question off of Catholic Twitter to ask CAF. I promise this is not me advertising for Tommy Tighe.
 
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It could be evidence of heroic faith to be a donor in the first place 🙂

Please, consider donation!
 
TheLittleLady said:
It could be evidence of heroic faith to be a donor in the first place 🙂

Please, consider donation!
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Donation is wonderful — as long as the donor is actually dead. If I were in extremis and could be foreseen certainly to die if my life support were removed (i.e., it’s the only thing keeping me alive and that will never change), I would be pleased to give my life by having my organs excised — death by organ removal, you could say — and given to those who need them. But that’s not our call. I cannot give permission for the attending surgeon to become a murderer. I realize Catholic theologians have approved of organ donation in cases where irreversible brain death has occurred and the donor is only being kept alive mechanically, but you never know what could happen, and what kind of shenanigans the secularists could come up with. Keep in mind who gave us partial-birth abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia.

Actually, though it’s intended as a humorous piece, the OP brings up a very interesting question. Consider this scenario:
  • Organ is taken from donor
  • Organ is received by patient
  • Donor is canonized a saint
  • Recipient dies in mortal sin and, regrettably, goes to hell
  • The Second Coming and the end of days takes place
  • The dead rise from the grave, and soul and body are reunited
  • The General Judgment takes place
Who gets the liver?

This sounds like something George Carlin would have come up with, but one must admit, it’s an interesting thought experiment. Keeping our Catholic intellects sharpened with things like this enables us to think like a Catholic should and must think.
 
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Cruciferi said:
Who gets the liver?
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Well, sort of. Obviously bodies return to the elements (despite morticians’ efforts to the contrary), and eventually, over hundreds and thousands of years, it’s all atoms and molecules. I heard of a case where they went to exhume someone, and there was nothing left — no coffin, no bones, no teeth, no hair, nothing, just soil (and, I think, what little metal there had been in the coffin, nails, handles, etc.). There are soils and environments where such a thing is possible. Everybody will be “put back together” in a way we don’t understand, but it will not be a “new” body, it will be the “old” body reconstituted.

A more precise way of putting it might be to create a time frame that is utterly unrealistic, just to illustrate the point:
  • Organ is taken from donor on Day 1
  • Organ is received by patient on Day 1
  • Donor is canonized a saint on Day 2 (talk about “santo subito”!)
  • Recipient dies in mortal sin and, regrettably, goes to hell on Day 3
  • The Second Coming and the end of days takes place on Day 4
  • The dead rise from the grave, and soul and body are reunited on Day 4
  • The General Judgment takes place on Day 4
Both saint’s body and patient’s body have just barely begun to decompose, and the patient still has the saint’s liver in his body. What happens then?
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HomeschoolDad said:
What happens then?
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Revelation 21:1

‘Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.’

That donated liver and those corpses wont exist and neither will those graves. Everything will be recreated and nobody’s gonna argue over swapping body parts.

This “thought experiment” is as silly as the folks joking about the local cemetery being crowded on The Last Day.
 
Since 1588, the time between death and canonization averaged 181 years.
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according to a 2016 cite.

😛

So unless you’re getting an organ donation from Mother Teresa (died 1997, canonized 2016, 19 years) or Pope John Paul II (d. 2005, canonized 2014, 9 years), there’s a good chance the recipient will be dead themselves before canonization is complete. 🙂 Even Pope John XXIII didn’t have a fast-track (d. 1963, canonized 2014, 51 years).
 
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Cruciferi said:
What happens then?
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Perhaps, but it does help us to think about what, precisely, the resurrection of the body will consist of. I would think — and I would look to the Church to define this more precisely (if indeed that is possible, it may be the stuff of mystery) — that bodies will be re-created from existing matter, i.e., the matter that made up these bodies in the first place. In other words, the body never ceased to be, it just disarticulated into its elements.

We will all know soon enough.
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Serious question that just so happened to be asked by a man who is funny.
 
If you should live so long to be able to see the canonization of a particular saint would depend on a number of factors. Is there a legitimate interst in the people for a public veneration of the relics of that saint? Are there other relics that could serve that purpose? What is your situation? Usually it takes years for a saint to actually be canonized. Would the people even want to see your stitches? Even if there were such an interest, would you be willing and or are to go on such a trip? You would be under no obligation to go on such a trip.
 
I would like to remind you that with or without such a situation every one of us by our Baptism is a temple of the Holy Spirit.
 
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