Vatican: Popes can't be organ donors
Francis X. Rocca Religion News Service
VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI was once a card-carrying organ donor, but the offer expired when he assumed the papal throne, according to the Vatican.
By Pier Paolo Cito, AP
Pope Benedict XVI, shown here at St. Peter's Basilica Tuesday, flanked by bishops Franco Camaldo, right, and Guido Marini, can no longer be an organ donor. He supports donation but had to relinquish his donor card when he was elected pope.
A donor card acquired by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in the 1970s "became ipso facto obsolete" with his election as pope, according to Monsignor Georg Ganswein, Benedict's private secretary, as reported by the German website of Vatican Radio on Wednesday.
Ganswein recently wrote to Dr. Gero Winkelmann, a German physician, to refute frequent references to Benedict's donor card in lectures and articles promoting organ donation.
In a 2008 speech, Benedict praised organ donation as an "act of love," provided that extraction of the organs is done with "informed consent" of the donor, and not as part of a business transaction.
The Rev. Federico Lombardi, director of the Holy See Press Office, said that Ganswein's statement did not reflect any change of heart by the pope on the value of organ donation.
"But the idea that a man of his age, when he dies, that somebody might present himself seeking his organs, makes no sense," Lombardi said. "It's surreal."
According to the Associated Press, Polish Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski, head of the Vatican's health office, told La Repubblica newspaper that it was understandable that a pope's body remains intact because it belongs to the entire church. "It is also understandable in view of possible future veneration," he said, referring to future sainthood. "This doesn't take anything away from the validity and the beauty of the gift of organ donation."
Until the last century papal organs were removed to make embalming more durable. The organs of 22 popes are preserved as relics in the church of Saints Anastasio and Vincent near the Trevi Fountain in Rome. The custom of removing the organs was abolished in the early 1900s.
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