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Catholic schools shouldn't bring students to "Bodies" display

Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk has contacted the administrators of the Catholic schools in his archdiocese to advise against school field trips to the Cincinnati Museum Center to view the controversial "Bodies ... The Exhibition" display of twenty human cadavers preserved by a process called polymer preservation, reports Thaddeus M. Baklinski, LifeSiteNews.com.

The communiqué from the Archbishop states: "Catholic moral thought does not regard body and soul as entirely separate. Rather, it recognizes that human beings are embodied spirits. That means the body is more than just a container for the soul. The Church's concern for the dignity of the human person extends, therefore, to the body even after the soul is no longer present.

"The Church has consistently maintained that dead bodies need to be treated in a way that recognizes the dignity of the human person. Within this framework, the use of bodies for scientific research and educational purposes has long been viewed as permissible provided that the consent of the deceased or the deceased's family has been obtained. The public exhibition of plasticized bodies, unclaimed, unreverenced, and unidentified, is a different matter entirely. It is unseemly and inappropriate.

"Whatever the merits of 'Bodies' as an educational exhibit, and however well intentioned the exhibit's creators might be, it seems to me that the use of human bodies in this way fails to respect the persons involved. Therefore I do not believe that this exhibit is an appropriate destination for field trips by our Catholic schools. If parents, as the primary educators of their children, believe that it has educational value, they should be the ones to take their children to see it."

The exhibit includes the plasticized bodies in various poses, such as a cadaver holding its own skin in one hand as though holding a trench coat, as well as about 200 preserved body parts.

Groups opposed to the exhibition, which features bodies obtained from a medical institution in China, question how the bodies were acquired, given China's history of human rights abuses. It has been suggested that the bodies might be those of political prisoners or mental patients who were starved or tortured to death.

In an interview with WCPO TV, Cincinnati residents Janice Jezek and her brother Morris Tsai suggest that, at best, the bodies were those of the poor and downtrodden who never agreed to be dissected and put on display.

"These bodies are on display, the way they are, without informed consent. The university gets the bodies from the government in China, and there are a lot of questionable things regarding the government in China right now. There's human rights issues," said Jezek.

Morris Tsai said that if the bodies came from closer to home more people might object.

"The idea that just using unclaimed bodies is enough of a justification to do things is wrong. I mean, with that really low level of standard you could actually do an exhibit of [Hurricane] Katrina victims," Tsai argued. "There's over one hundred Katrina victims that are still left unclaimed."

According to Tom Zaller, vice president of exhibitions for Premier Exhibitions of Atlanta, the firm that presents the exhibit, the specimens are unclaimed or unidentified bodies obtained from Dalian Medical University Plastination Laboratories in China. The bodies were obtained legally, but the company had permission to display the bodies only from the medical facility, not from any family member.

"Of course, there was no permission," he told The Cincinnati Enquirer. "These were unclaimed or unidentified bodies. There would be nowhere to go for permission."

Rev. Mike Seger, Chair of Moral Theology at Mount St. Mary's Seminary, said people will disagree with the Archbishop's decision, "but we object to the misuse of the body in a way that doesn't respect what the body may have been. These are people who were once alive, had relationships, suffered, bore children. To treat the human body - any body - like 'stuff' is morally offensive and grisly. It reminds me of a carnival show 100 years ago."

[02/01/2008]

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