Medicine: Questions of Conscience

France’s third heart-transplant patient is a man to whom the ethics and morality of the procedure are of more than usual concern. Father Damien Boulogne is a former professor of philosophy at Dominican seminaries. Two years ago, the priest had suffered a series of heart attacks that left him to tally disabled. Now 57, Father Damien got his new heart at the Hôpital Broussais-La Charité in Paris, where he is now recovering in sterile isolation. From there he wrote for La Vie Catholiqué an account of the soul-searching that preceded his operation.

Father Damien had no problems regarding the donor. “The donor,” he wrote, “is in no way ‘sacrificed’ by the doctors. He has already been in a closed circuit [heart-lung machine] for days, and is therefore already dead (flat electroencephalogram, etc.). His survival is artificial. So, no problem.”

Nor was Father Damien concerned about personality changes as a result of receiving a new heart. He cited the Vatican’s position that the heart is nothing but a pump—”an admirable pump, but ‘stupid,’ a machine having its own circuit.”

His own role was more problematic: “Should I consult my superiors? I asked and obtained their consent.” That still was not enough. In accepting artificial prolongation of his life, was he denying the will of God? “That question lies between one’s conscience and God. Here the conscience, in confrontation with the love of God, takes its risks. In solitude.”

Father Damien’s own resolution of the risks was in favor of the transplant, which he received May 12. Last week, building himself up on a gourmand’s menu of pepper steak and Beaujolais, with a midnight snack of lamb chops among his five daily meals, he was busy correcting the proofs of his latest work—on St. Thomas Aquinas, who, says Father Damien, also believed that individual conscience, in individual circumstance, could and must override other rules in order to refer to the unwritten law of God.