Morose Musings

(Anton Casta via e-mail)


"And now, a lighter topic to take people's minds off the U.S. elections -- cannibalism. The issue came up today over brunch with the kids. Don't ask. Okay, ask. Discussion flowed from a historical work on the Templars, to the novel Alive (both penned by the steady hand of Piers Paul Reid), to the Church's teaching on cannibalism.

I managed to find this pithy and clear argument within an American Life League document on Medical Cannibals: the moral implications of fetal tissue vaccines:

Neither analysis considers a more closely-related example: enforced cannibalism. The use of tissue to generate vaccines which may save other's lives is a kind of cannibalism. On October 13, 1972, a plane with 40 people aboard, all Catholic, crashed in the Andes. Due to the total lack of food in the snowy wasteland, the survivors of the crash were forced to eat the bodies of those who had died in order to maintain their own life. The Church ruled the cannibalism to be acceptable in this instance, because the bodies of the slain were treated with great reverence and the need for sustenance was life-threatening. While it is true that most of those whose bodies were eaten had not given their consent, it is also true that none were murdered; their deaths were unforeseen and unpreventable. By removing the issue of will, this example better corresponds to the abortion event, while simultaneously highlighting the moral problem: the manner of death and the reverence due the human body in death must be considered.

'If I were a healthy Argentine soccer player frozen in the Andean snow and you were starving , (dear wife), I argued, 'I'd like you to eat my legs. They'd be my best part'. She winced and after a brief pause replied, 'I'd rather die'.

So much for self sacrificial agape love, I thought. So much for chivalry and steel toed armour. It's time to go jogging and work on those calves and quads :-)

If you're a United Statesian teetering on the precipice of exercising the pinnacle of your freedom in a liberal democracy -- putting card stock into a wooden box, the morality of cannibalism and the surrounding issues touched on by the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), and Mr. Obama's promise as executive to sign it wholeheartedly, is very much an "alive" topic. As a friend in Wyoming said recently, "as a Catholic, one simply cannot vote for Obama...Now, a debatable question is whether one is morally permitted not to vote for McCain. I think one is. One may vote for McCain or not, or not even vote (at this point, it does seem prudent to vote for McCain, but I am still uncomfortable about it).

Mea culpa. That political vortex drew me in again."

...........................................................


(Those Canadians!)

.