CNS on a recent Vatican-sponsored convocation:

Specifically, Pope Benedict asked the Vatican academy to gather top-notch neurologists and other experts together to present statistics on cases of brain death. The pope wanted to know if the growing science of transplantation had influenced the ascertainment of brain death. He also asked to see how the criteria determining brain death were applied.

The Vatican academy invited some 20 neurology experts from all over the world to take part in a Sept. 11-12 working group on "The Signs of Death" to go over the latest evidence. The closed-door meeting brought doctors and researchers renown for their work on brain damage resulting in coma, persistent vegetative states and brain death.

snip

Dr. Alan Shewmon of Los Angeles, a participant at the Vatican seminar, said he doesn’t consider total brain destruction a criterion of death. Brain death alone "results in a terminally ill, deeply comatose person, not a dead person," said the vice chair of neurology at the University of California.

In his opinion, criteria signaling the death of a person include cessation of blood circulation to the point where there is "irreversible damage to a critical number of organs and tissues throughout the body." That is when decomposition has begun, he said during a roundtable discussion at the Vatican. The discussion was published by the Vatican Sept. 11.

Shewmon’s view is rare among neurologists, but it does represent an opposing view that death of the brain is not the end of life.

Meanwhile, Pope John Paul said in 2000 that actual death was defined as the moment the soul leaves the body, "an event which no scientific technique or empirical method can identify directly."

But doctors can only observe the visible signs of death, and for now the Vatican has based its judgment of what those signs are, which include brain death, on established medical opinion.

Bishop Sanchez said that as a result of its September meeting, the academy has reaffirmed Pope John Paul’s position on brain death being equivalent to the death of the person.

For the Vatican academy, he said, "there are no reasons to again go over" the criteria accepted by the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists.

However, the bishop said he will have "to wait and see from the Vatican."