Log in

BY: FR. JAMES F. KEENAN, SJ

Fr. Keenan is professor of theological ethics, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA.

No term in current Catholic thought is more frequently invoked as the theological foundation for health care than "sanctity of life." Surprisingly, the term itself is rather new: No Catholic dictionary or encyclopedia before 1978 had an entry on it. For instance, in the 15-volume New Catholic Encyclopedia of 1967, the term has no entry.¹ (It appeared as a modest afterthought in the later supplement.²) Nor is it found in new theological dictionaries from the United States, England, or Germany. ³ It did not appear in the German Concise Dictionary of Christian Ethics, although there was a passing reference in the Italian counterpart. ⁴

"Sanctity of life" certainly has its roots in modern Christian writings, however. In 1908, the Jesuit moralist Thomas Slater discussed suicide and declared, "The reason why suicide is unlawful is because we have not the free disposal of our own lives. God is the author of life and death, and He has reserved the ownership of human life to Himself." ⁵ At its roots, sanctity of life is about God's ownership: we do not own our lives; God does. Therefore, we are not free to dispose of them.

Later, Pope Pius XI declared in Casti Connubii, "The life of each is equally sacred and no one has the power, not even public authority, to destroy it." ⁶ In a manner of speaking, our life is an object: Human life is something that, because God owns it, only God can dispose of. We, on the other hand, have only the use of life, not dominion over it. ⁷

The phrase "sanctity of life" first explicitly appeared in papal writings in the encyclical Mater et Magistra.⁸ In its original form, "sanctity of life" functioned as a euphemism for God's dominion.⁹ Thus, in Humanae Vitae, life is sacred because its owner, God, willed it so; like other objects that God owned and sanctified—the marriage bond and the temple, for example—life cannot be violated.¹⁰ The sacredness rests not in anything intrinsic to the marriage bond, the temple, or human life; it rests on the claim of God, who made and owns the sacral quality of the marital bonds, temples, and human lives.¹¹

Pope John Paul II has significantly developed the term. In 1987, in his apostolic exhortation, Christifideles Laici, he speaks at length about the inviolable right to life, saying, "The inviolability of the person, which is a reflection of the absolute inviolability of God, finds its primary and fundamental expression in the inviolability of human life."¹² Nowhere does he refer to God's dominion or prerogatives. Rather, the argument is simply that we are in God's image; as God's person is inviolable, so is God's image.

In the same year, in Donum Vitae, the pope wrote: "From the moment of conception, the life of every human being is to be respected in an absolute way because man is the only creature on earth that God has 'wished for himself' and the spiritual soul of each man is 'immediately created by God'; his whole image bears the image of the Creator."¹³ The document continues: "Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the 'creative action of God' and it remains forever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end. God alone is Lord of life from its beginning until its end: no one can, under any circumstance, claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent human being."

This latter section is repeated later in paragraph 53 of Evangelium Vitae and becomes the single text in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraph 2,258) to interpret the Fifth Commandment. The entire paragraph was John Paul II's most extensive statement, before Evangelium Vitae itself, on both the sanctity of life and God as Lord of life.¹⁴ In it we see some of the key elements that later appear in the encyclical: that human life is singular; that it is created in God's image; that it is uniquely created by God for a special relationship with God, which is, in turn, the human's destiny; and that, finally as source and end of human life, God is Lord of life. While not at all abandoning the "God's ownership or dominion" argument, the pope gives it newer meaning by highlighting the uniqueness of the human subject.¹⁵

The act of creation is where God invests each human life with its inviolable character that now lies within the human, the image of God.¹⁶ The human is not to be killed, therefore, because of who the human is. Human life is not an object that God owns: Human life is a subject that bears the inviolable image of God. This image of God is hardly extrinsic. Speaking of the Yahwist account of creation, the pope writes in Evangelium Vitae that we have within us that divine breath that draws us naturally to God.¹⁷

Elsewhere in the encyclical we read: "At this point we come to the decisive question, Why is life a good? Why is it always a good? The answer is simple and clear: because it is a gift from the Creator, who breathed into man the divine breath, thus making the human person the image of God."¹⁸ In John Paul II's personalist writings, all people are invited to see within human life an indelible mark of its sacredness. The pope breathes life into the concept of "sanctity of life."

Sanctity of life now means that the human life as created in the image of God is no longer primarily an object that belongs to God, but, rather, a subject whose inviolability is indisputable. With this understood, I now turn to the notion of body.

The Human Body
Ask ordinary Catholics whether the church has a positive or negative stance on the human body and invariably we answer, "Negative."¹⁹ We shouldn't. The church's tradition has been intractably invested in the human body since the church was first established. First consider, for instance, that the central mystery concerning Jesus Christ is the incarnation! Our religion boasts that God became incarnate, that is, that God became human flesh.

Second, consider that our central sacramental celebration is the Eucharist, a thanksgiving meal in which we eat (!) the body of Christ and drink (!) His blood. We partake in his life through this sacrament, which concretely underlines the incarnateness of God.

Third, consider that the overriding promise for all Christians is the resurrection of the body. Through that promise we understand that who we are now is who we will be in glory: We will be glorified in our bodies. The Scripture scholar Wayne Meeks makes a similar point in quoting St. Paul: "Christ will be magnified in my body, either by life or by death" (Phil 1:20).²⁰ The resurrection of the body makes sense when we understand that God continues to love us precisely the way God made us—in our bodies.*

*But this resurrection is established by the resurrection of Jesus: In the Risen Jesus, made in the image of God, we see our beginning and our end. Michelangelo caught this brilliantly when, in painting the famous ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he depicted the newly created Adam with the same face as the Risen Jesus in the adjoining Last Judgment.

Fourth, consider how we call the church the Body of Christ. Inasmuch as we are in the church through Christ's incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection; inasmuch as, by eating his body, we are made one in Christ; and inasmuch as we share the same promise of participating in his resurrection; then what we are—church—ought to be identified with the Body of Christ.

The body is central for understanding Christianity. Through the body we understand God, our worship, our destiny, and our communal identity. Moreover, as the Jews, who preceded us, taught us, we should, as believers, take human bodies seriously.²¹

Catholics take the appreciation of the body even further, in part, because we have our emphasis on the sacramental, which accentuates our regard for the physical—particularly, the human body. Our language, art, and culture are, therefore, extraordinarily corporeal. Think for a minute of the Sistine Chapel, a very Catholic place. Here is the most important political room in Roman Catholicism: It is where our cardinals, surrounded by the images of nude bodies, meet to elect the Vicar of Christ, the pope.

Consider, also, our respect for relics, in which we locate our attachment to another's holiness precisely through the person's flesh. In her brilliant book, The Resurrection of the Body, Caroline Walker Bynum traces how early and pervasive our concern for relics has been.²² Through relics, we become close to the saints, whose hair, skin, or clothing we can still touch. Through them, we "preserve" the presence of their holiness.

Clearly, then, we Christians take the body seriously. We always have. Paul, for instance, held that the body (soma) was so constitutive of being human that the only way we could conceive of the human was as bodily. The body was not something the human being had; it was, rather, the only way humans could understand themselves. From Paul to contemporary theologians, an attentiveness to the human body can be seen in Christian thought. Robert Brungs, for instance, remarks that "all the major issues agitating the Church today . . . revolve about the meaning of our bodiedness."²³ Not surprisingly, the body is centrally important for Christians. Walter Kasper provides us an important summary:

According to Scripture the body is so vital to humanity, that a being without a body after death is unthinkable (1 Cor 15.35ff; 2 Cor 5.1ff). For the Hebrew the body is not the tomb of the soul as it is for the Greek (soma-sema) and certainly not the principle of evil from which humanity's true self has to set itself free, as it was for the Gnostics. The body is God's creation and it always describes the whole of the human and not just a part . . . . The body is the whole human in relationship to God and humanity. It is human's place of meeting with God and humanity. The body is the possibility and the reality of communication.²⁴

Christianity has traditionally held that the human body constitutes human identity and has combated vigorously any attempts to make the human body an object.²⁵

The issue of the body as object, as some thing we can treat as opposed to some one we meet, is a real problem, however, in contemporary medicine. The notion of treating the patient as person—but the body as object—is rooted in the Enlightenment. Barbara Stafford, for instance, argues that considering the body as an object resulted from the Enlightenment's championing of reason and its devaluation of human feeling or sentiment.²⁶ Eighteenth-century thinkers sought to subdue the visible (the body) for the sake of the invisible (the mind). As a result, an anthropology developed in which mind dominated body, and the dualistic insights of Plato returned.²⁷

The Enlightenment inclination for dualism helped cause modern medicine's tendency to objectify the human body.²⁸ As S. Kay Toombs puts it, "Medicine has, for the most part, adopted a 'Cartesian' paradigm of embodiment (i.e. a dualistic notion that separates mind and body and which conceptualizes the physical body in purely mechanistic terms). . . . This paradigm has been successful in many ways. The body-as-machine is susceptible to mechanical interventions."²⁹ Emily Martin writes, "Many elements of modern medical science have been held to contribute to a fragmentation of the unity of the person. When science treats the person as a machine and assumes the body can be fixed by mechanical manipulations, it ignores, and it encourages us to ignore, other aspects of our selves, such as our emotions and our relations with other people."³⁰

In this light, we can say that Christianity and Judaism offer medicine a healthy reminder that when we recognize human life as sacred, we also understand that the sacrality is in our being embodied.³¹ We must aim to respond to our neighbors as integrated whole persons, as subjects in their bodies, especially in their suffering.

Suffering
One way to recognize the importance of an integrated person is to appreciate the important role that a patient's voice plays in our response to her or his suffering. I came to appreciate that role by reading an essay about torture by Elaine Scarry. She argues that torturers derive their power from the voices of the tortured. The real object of torture is neither to exact a confession nor to learn information, but rather to make the tortured person blame his or her very self; the voice betrays the body when, so broken with pain, the body is unable to keep the voice from submitting to the power of the torturer. The aim of torture, then, is dualism: to tear the voice from its body. As Scarry puts it, "The goal of the torturer is to make the one, the body, emphatically and crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it." ³² The tortured body is left voiceless, once it acknowledges the torturer's "authority."

Scarry notes that, of the tortured person's wounds, the most difficult to heal is his or her voice. To this end, Amnesty International helps tortured people, unable because of shame to tell their own stories, to read and understand the record of what was done to them, so that they may one day articulate the truth of the atrocities. Scarry's work convincingly demonstrates the centrality of the human voice in attaining the integration of body and soul. Her book demonstrates that silencing and other forms of exclusion are physically and personally destructive acts, but that the body as subject can still express selfhood through a verbalized narrative.

Listening thus has an enormous role to play in the ethics of healing, because the healer, in the act of listening, encourages the sufferer to speak.³³ Encouraging the sufferer to speak is a very biblical stance. One such instance is found in The Book of Job. J. David Pleins notes that God, unlike those so-called friends of Job who do not allow him to speak and who try to redirect the purpose of his discourse, allows Job to speak. Not God's absence but "God's silence dominates the discussions of Job with his friends."³⁴ The same listening stance is also apparent in those who, standing helpless at the cross of Jesus, heard his words, even his cry to God: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" They, like God, listen to the cry of the sufferer. Of course, in the face of God's silence, we, like the Psalmist, might ask God, "Are you asleep?" But God's silence, both in Job and at the crucifixion, seems to convey a God both attentive and listening.

This listening stands as an alternative to the all-too-frequent Christian urge to interpret in the face of suffering, which has led, in this decade, to some really terrible remarks.³⁵ I am thinking specifically here of unfortunate moments in which certain Catholic leaders, known for wanting to better Christian-Jewish relations, let their own theology of suffering interpret the Jewish suffering in the Holocaust.³⁶ Worse still is the insistence, on the part of some Christians, on speaking of another's suffering—especially when Christians were the cause of that suffering. Marcel Sarot brings this point out poignantly in his essay "Auschwitz, Morality and the Suffering of God."³⁷ There Sarot calls on his fellow Christian theologians to call a moratorium on invoking Auschwitz as providing testimony necessary for the understanding of faith and suffering. Sarot especially addresses the Christian insistence on answering the Jewish sufferer who asks, "Where is God in all this?" Sarot contends that the primary question Christians should ask in the face of Auschwitz is not, "What concept of God gives most comfort to those who suffer?" Instead, Auschwitz should prompt Christians to ask, "How can we prevent Christianity from ever again providing fertile soil for antisemitism and kindred movements?"³⁸

The Christian insistence on interpreting in the face of suffering must be challenged by the Jewish insistence on listening. The Scriptures urge us in this direction. As Paul Nelson notes, "The psalms of lament . . . make no attempt to explain or palliate. Instead they give voice to human anguish, rage and despair on the apparent assumption that the God of Israel is strong enough to take it."³⁹

The sufferer's need to express his or her suffering is manifold, apart from obeying the religious prescription to encourage lament. As Eric J. Cassell, author of The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine puts it, "Suffering is necessarily private because it is ultimately individual."⁴⁰ Cassell describes suffering as "the distress brought about by the actual or perceived impending threat to the integrity or continued existence of the whole person."⁴¹ Suffering begins, not so much when we become aware of the fact that we cannot do something, as when we become aware of what our future holds. Suffering arises with "the loss of the ability to pursue purpose."⁴² In the face of such vulnerability, we face the loss of the self that organizes purposeful action. The loss of our ability to continually move forward in an integrated manner is the ground of our suffering.

The call to listen to a suffering person is not necessarily easy to respond to, especially when the sufferer cannot or will not speak. Meredith McGuire reminds us, for instance, that suffering results precisely because the body in pain is often unable to express itself.⁴³ Paul Brand captures this phenomenon by considering the way chronic pain constrains the sufferer from doing the only thing that he or she wants to do —communicate the pain.⁴⁴ Brand highlights the empathetic quality of pain, arguing that a witness to someone in pain can sometimes communicate and articulate the depth of the suffering. In the same spirit, Cassell invites medical practitioners to develop an aesthetic sense through which they can try to apprize the suffering of a patient who cannot speak but who can communicate his or her suffering through a variety of movements.⁴⁵

That the body becomes the expresser of suffering is very important. We should, rejecting any soul and body dualism,⁴⁶ recognize that even when there is no voice to express the suffering, the body, as Eli Yasif puts it, "never lies."⁴⁷

Why Christians Are Involved in Healing
Listening and responding to the sufferer as an embodied subject has always been the vocation of the Christian disciple, as Rodney Stark argues in a brilliant work on the rise of Christianity. "Christianity," Stark writes, "was an urban movement, and the New Testament was set down by urbanites."⁴⁸ Biblical cities were dreadful—"social chaos and chronic urban misery," in Stark's words. The dreadfulness was in part due to population density. At the end of the first century, Antioch's population was 150,000, or 117 persons per acre. Today's New York City has a density of 37 overall; Manhattan, with its high-rise apartments, has 100 persons per acre.⁴⁹

Moreover, contrary to early assumptions, Greco-Roman cities were not settled places whose inhabitants descended from previous generations. Because of high infant mortality and brief life expectancy, these cities required "a constant and substantial stream of newcomers" in order to maintain their population levels. As a result, the cities were composed of strangers.⁵⁰ These strangers were well- treated by Christians who, again contrary to assumptions, were anything but poor.⁵¹

Moreover, the Christians' religion was new. Although the gods of the pagan religions had imposed ethical demands on their worshipers, these demands were substantively ritual; they were not neighbor-directed. And, although pagan Romans could be generous, that generosity did not stem from any divine command. Consider, for example, a nurse who cared for the victim of an epidemic, knowing that doing so might result in her own death. A pagan nurse could expect no divine reward for her generosity. A Christian nurse, however, knew that this life was but a prelude to the next, in which the generous were united with God.⁵²

And, although Romans practiced generosity, they did not promote mercy or pity. Since mercy implied "unearned help or relief," it was considered a contradiction of justice. Roman philosophers opposed mercy. "Pity was a defect of character unworthy of the wise and excusable only in those who have not yet grown up. It was an impulsive response based on ignorance."⁵³ Concurring, Stark writes:

This was the moral climate in which Christianity taught that mercy is one of the primary virtues—that a merciful God requires humans to be merciful. Moreover, the corollary that because God loves humanity, Christians may not please God unless they love one another was entirely new. Perhaps even more revolutionary was the principle that Christian love and charity must extend beyond the boundaries of family and tribe, that it must extend to "all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Cor 1:2) . . . . This was revolutionary stuff. Indeed, it was the cultural basis for the revitalization of a Roman world groaning under a host of miseries.⁵⁴

Elsewhere, Stark summarizes his argument: "Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems. To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family."⁵⁵

Stark, with writers such as Meeks and Abraham Malherbe, identifies hospitality and mercy as among the key traits of early Christians.⁵⁶ More recently, the Christian ethicist Christine Pohl has taken a critical look at these virtues and has analyzed the power inequities that occur in any guest/host relationship.⁵⁷ But Pohl turns to the Scriptures, discovering in both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles that the hosts were often themselves once aliens—and thus understood the normative significance of being marginal. In noting this, Pohl captures what so many who write about hospitality and mercy miss—that the host must understand the perspective of the alien, by allowing the newcomer to voice his or her concerns. This was precisely the richness of hospitality in both Bibles.

Quintessential Mercy
I want to close with Pohl's insight, which cannot help but remind us of the Good Samaritan parable, the quintessential story of mercy (Lk 10:29-37). Major theologians from Augustine to Venerable Bede have commented on this parable's evident Christological structure, in which the Samaritan is Christ himself. Christ encounters the wounded stranger (the exiled Adam) lying on the road outside the city (Paradise) and bears him to the inn (the church) where he pays (that is, redeems) the stranger and promises to return. The Good Samaritan parable is a story of Christ as the merciful one who enters into humanity's chaos and brings us into the church, where we await His return.⁵⁸

I began this essay by looking at ourselves in God's image: Therein we derive the notion of sanctity of life. I close looking at ourselves as called to imitate Christ: Therein we derive the practice of mercy. The ethics of healing fits between these two assertions: Recognizing the dignity of the embodied human, we are called to respond to those who suffer and fear the loss of their integrated selves by assuring them that we shall always treat them as they are, subjects and fellow citizens of the kingdom of God.

NOTES

1. New Catholic Encyclopedia, McGraw-Hill, New York City, 1967.
2. New Catholic Encyclopedia: Supplement, 1967-1978, McGraw-Hill, New York City, 1978, vol. 16, pp. 400-401.
3. Joseph Komonchak, ed., New Dictionary of Theology, Michael Glazier, Wilmington, DE, 1987; F. Cross, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1974; and K. Rahner and H. Vorgrimler, Theological Dictionary, Herder and Herder, New York City, 1965.
4. Bernhard Stoeckle, ed., The Concise Dictionary of Christian Ethics, Seabury, New York City, 1979; P. Palazzini, ed., Dictionary of Moral Theology, Newman Press, Westminster, MD, 1962.
5. Thomas Slater, A Manual of Moral Theology I, Benziger Brothers, New York City, 1908, p. 302.
6. Pope Pius XI, Encyclical Letter on Christian Marriage, St. Paul Editions, Boston, 1930, p. 32.
7. The same position is found in more recent teaching. Suicide, like murder, "is to be considered a rejection of God's sovereignty and loving plan," said the Second Vatican Council ("Declaration on Euthanasia," in Austin Flannery, ed., Vatican Council II: More Post Conciliar Documents, Costello Publishing Co., Northport, NY, 1982, p. 512). Gerald Coleman sums up the tradition well: "Human persons, then, have only a right to the use of human life, not to dominion over human life. What makes killing forbidden is that it usurps a divine prerogative and violates divine rights" (Gerald Coleman, "Assisted Suicide: An Ethical Perspective," in Robert Baird and Stuart Rosenbaum, eds., Euthanasia, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1989, p. 108.).
8. "All must regard the life of man as sacred, since from its inception, it requires the action of God the Creator. Those who depart from this plan of God not only offend His divine majesty and dishonor themselves and the human race, but they also weaken the inner fibre of the commonwealth" (Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, 1961, para. 194). The "sanctity of life" phrase became key in Humanae Vitae (1968, para.13). There Pope Paul VI used it to affirm the limited dominion that the human has over human life and human generativity.
9. Richard M. Gula writes: "Closely related to the principles of sanctity and sovereignty is the divine law prohibiting killing as found in the fifth commandment" (Euthanasia, Paulist Press, New York City, 1994, p. 26).
10. See James Keenan, "Sanctity of Life and Its Role in Contemporary Biomedical Discussion," in Ken Bayertz, ed., Sanctity of Life and Menschenwurde: Ethical Conflicts in Modern Medicine, Kluwer Academics, Boston, 1996; and Joseph Boyle, "Sanctity of Life and Suicide: Tensions and Developments within Common Morality," in Baruch Brody, ed., Suicide and Euthanasia, Kluwer Academics, Boston, 1989, pp. 221-250.
11. St. Thomas Aquinas underlined this positivistic nature of "sanctity." In distinguishing one meaning of sanctity as purity, he wrote of the other, "it denotes firmness, wherefore in older times the term sancta was applied to such things as were upheld by law and were not to be violated. Hence a thing is said to be sacred when it is ratified by law" (Summa Theologica, II-II 81, 8c).
12. John Paul II, "Christifideles Laici," Origins, February 9, 1989, p. 579.
13. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Vitae, 1987, Introduction, para. 5, available at www.nccbuscc.org/prolife/tdocs/donumvitae.htm.
14. See James Keenan, "The Moral Argumentation of Evangelium Vitae," in Kevin Wildes, ed., Choosing Life: A Dialogue on Evangelium Vitae, Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, 1997, pp. 46-62; and "History, Roots and Innovations: A Response to the Engaging Protestants," in Reinhard Hutter and Theodore Dieter, eds., Ecumenical Ventures in Ethics: Protestants Engage Pope John Paul II's Moral Encyclicals, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, 1997, pp. 262-288.
15. Pope John Paul II, "Evangelium Vitae," Origins, April 6, 1995, pp. 689, 691-727.
16. Early, in "Celebrate Life," John Paul II quoted from his address in Poland: "The Church defends the right to life, not only in regard to the majesty of the Creator, but also in respect of the essential good of the human person" (The Pope Speaks, vol. 24, no. 4, 1979, p. 372). In the pope's thinking, the essential good of the person emerges more clearly as the years of his pontificate advance. Often it appears in language regarding the sanctity of life.
17. Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, para. 35. Of course, for the pope all this must be understood by locating in God not only the source of this initiative but the end, as well. "The plan of life given to the first Adam finds at last its fulfillment in Christ" (para. 35). By Christ's blood we are both strengthened and given the ground of hope that God's plan will be victorious. In fact, in that piercing by which Christ gives up his spirit, he gives us his spirit; through his death, he gives us life. "It is the very life of God which is now shared with man" (para. 51). Because of its origin and destiny, human life remains from its very beginning until its end sacred.
18. "The Vatican's Summary of Evangelium Vitae," Origins, April 25, 1995, p. 729.
19. See, for example, James Nelson who writes, "For most of the Christian era we have mistrusted, feared, and discounted our bodies" (Body Theology, Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville, KY, 1992, p. 9).
20. Wayne Meeks, The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1993, p. 134.
21. For recent Jewish literature, see Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, ed., People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, State University of New York, Albany, NY, 1992; and Paul Morris, "The Embodied Text: Covenant and Torah," Religion, vol. 20, no. 1, 1990, pp. 77-87.
22. Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, Columbia University Press, New York City, 1995; see also "Material Continuity, Personal Survival and the Resurrection of the Body," in Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, Zone Books, New York City, 1991, pp. 239-297.
23. Robert Brungs, "Biology and the Future: A Doctrinal Agenda," Theological Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, 1989, p. 700.
24. Walter Kasper, Jesus the Christ, Paulist Press, New York City, 1976, p. 150.
25. See Gedaliahu Stroumsa, "Caro salutis cardo: Shaping the Person in Early Christian Thought," History of Religions, vol. 30, no. 1, 1990, p. 25. See also my bibliographical survey: James Keenan, "Christian Perspectives on the Human Body," Theological Studies, vol. 55, 1994, pp. 330-346.
26. Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991; see also Raymond J. Deveterre, "The Human Body as Philosophical Paradigm in Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty," Philosophy Today, vol. 10, no. 4, 1976, pp. 317-326.
27. Mark Johnson argues, against the claims of the Enlightenment, that "any adequate account of meaning and rationality must give a central place to embodied and imaginative structures of understanding by which we grasp our world" (The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988, p. xiii). Johnson's aim is simple: to "put the body back into the mind" (p. xiv).
28. Richard Zaner, The Context of Self: A Phenomenological Inquiry Using Medicine as a Clue, Ohio University Press, Athens, OH, 1981).
29. S. Kay Toombs, "Illness and the Paradigm of Lived Body," Theoretical Medicine, vol. 9, no. 2, 1988, p. 201.
30. Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, Beacon Press, Boston, 1987, pp. 19-20.
31. See, for instance, Joel Shuman, The Body of Compassion: Ethics, Medicine and the Church, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1999.
32. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press, New York City, 1985, p. 49.
33. This idea is developed further in James Keenan, "The Meaning of Suffering," in Edmund Pellegrino, ed., Issues in Biomedical Ethics: Comparison of Jewish and Christian Perspectives, Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, 1999, pp. 83-96; and in James Keenan, "Listening to the Voice of Suffering," Church, vol. 12, no. 3, 1996, pp. 41-43.
34. J. David Pleins, "'Why Do You Hide Your Face?' Divine Silence and Speech in the Book of Job," Interpretation, vol. 48, July 1994, p. 230.
35. Some Christians differentiate suffering from pain by noting that, as Joseph Selling argues, "pain demands a response, while suffering demands an interpretation" (Joseph Selling, "A Credible Response to the Meaning of Suffering," in Jan Lambrecht and Raymond Collins, eds., God and Human Suffering, Peeters, Louvain, Belgium, 1990, p. 181).
36. See, for example, Robert Hirschfield, "Rabbi Marshall Meyer: A Prophet's Agenda," The Christian Century, April 26, 1989, pp. 438-439.
37. Marcel Sarot, "Auschwitz, Morality and the Suffering of God," Modern Theology, vol. 7, no. 2, 1991, pp. 135-152.
38. Sarot.
39. Paul Nelson, "The Problem of Suffering," The Christian Century, May 1, 1991, p. 491. See also Daniel Simundson, Faith under Fire: Bibical Interpretations of Suffering, Augsburg Publishing House, Minneapolis, 1980, p. 144.
40. Eric J. Cassell, The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine, Oxford University Press, New York City, 1991, p. 31.
41. Cassell, p. 24.
42. Cassell, p. 25.
43. See Meredith McGuire, "Religion and the Body: Rematerializing the Human Body in the Social Sciences of Religion," The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 29, no. 3, 1990, pp. 283-296, especially pp. 287-289.
44. Paul Brand, In His Image, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI, 1987, pp. 226-291.
45. Eric Cassell, "Recognizing Suffering," Hastings Center Report, vol. 21, no. 3, 1991, pp. 24-31, especially pp. 29-31.
46. See Keenan, "Christian Perspectives on the Human Body," as well as James Keenan, "Dualism in Medicine, Christian Theology and the Aging," Journal of Religion and Health, vol. 35, no. 1, 1996, pp. 3-46.
47. Eli Yasif, "The Body Never Lies: The Body in Medieval Jewish Folk Narratives," in Eilberg-Schwartz, People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, pp. 203-222.
48. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1996, p. 147.
49. Stark, pp. 149-150.
50. Stark, p. 156.
51. Stark, pp. 28-47. See also Robin Scroggs, "The Social Interpretation of the New Testament," New Testament Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 1980, pp. 164-179; and Marta Sordi, The Christians and the Roman Empire, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, 1986. Stark, pp. 73-94, describes the effect of Christian nursing during two epidemics in the first three centuries of the Christian era.
52. Stark, p. 88.
53. E. A. Judge, "The Quest for Mercy in Late Antiquity," in P. T. O'Brien, ed., God Who is Rich in Mercy, Macquarie University Press, 1986, Sydney, Australia, p. 107. Quoted in Stark, p. 212.
54. Stark, p. 212.
55. Stark, p. 161.
56. Meeks, Origins of Christian Morality and The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1983; and Abraham Malherbe, Social Aspects of Early Christianity, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, LA, 1977. See also James Keenan, "Jesuit Hospitality," in Martin Tripole, ed., Promise Renewed: Jesuit Education for a New Millennium, Loyola University Press, Chicago, 1999, pp. 230-244.
57. Christine Pohl, "Hospitality from the Edge: The Significance of Marginality in the Practice of Welcome," The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, Society of Christian Ethics, Boston, 1995, pp. 121-136.
58. In James Keenan, "What's New in the Ethical and Religious Directives?" Linacre Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 1, 1998, pp. 33-40, I argue that the Good Samaritan parable is the scriptural foundation of the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services.

Copyright © 2005 by the Catholic Health Association of the United States
For reprint permission, contact Betty Crosby or call (314) 253-3477.