Sandro Magister

"Wojtyla stands out as a leading figure in the Church's new phase of openness towards the East, moving beyond the purely diplomatic sphere."

"Karol Wojtyla burst onto the scene in the 1980s with the solemn gait of the most famous pope in history. Famous, but not celebrated. [...] After fifteen months of pontificate, Pope Karol Wojtyla is no longer an unknown figure: yet the more the world knows him, the less it loves him."

"(About the Jehovah's Witnesses ) Their founder was a former Presbyterian and then Adventist, Charles Taze Russell. He preached the imminent end of this evil world and the advent of God's Kingdom on earth. And so he instilled in his followers the feverish activism of the great eve. They went from house to house, in pairs, to spread the Bible and a magazine, ‘The Watchtower’, founded in Brooklyn in 1879 and since then translated into all the languages of the world, the repository of their doctrine. A true organisational talent, Russell was the first to apply door-to-door advertising methods, the potential of a popular press such as Reader's Digest, and the appeal of the nascent cinematic arts to religious preaching. A magnificent film was, in fact, their advertisement."

"Well, science has not yet been able to prove that the vital principle of the human organism resides in any organ of the body. The integrative system of the body, considered as a “whole”, cannot in fact be localised in a single organ, however important, such as the heart or the brain. Brain and heart activity presuppose life, but they are not strictly speaking the cause of life. Activities should not be confused with their principle. Life is something elusive that transcends the individual material organs of the living being and cannot be measured materially, let alone created: it is a mystery of nature, which science is right to investigate, but over which science has no control. When science claims to create or manipulate life, it becomes philosophy and religion itself, slipping into “scientism”."

"(On brain death) The irreversibility of the loss of brain functions, ascertained by a ‘flat encephalogram’, does not prove the death of the individual. The total loss of the unity of the organism, understood as the ability to integrate and coordinate all its functions, does not in fact depend on the brain, nor even on the heart. The ascertainment of the cessation of breathing and heartbeat does not mean that the heart or lungs are the source of life. If legal and medical tradition, not only in the West, has always considered that death should be ascertained through the cessation of cardiovascular activity, it is because experience shows that the cessation of such activity is followed, after a few hours, by rigor mortis and then the beginning of the disintegration of the body. This does not happen in any way after the cessation of brain activity. Today, science allows women with flat encephalograms to carry their pregnancies to term and give birth to healthy babies. An individual in a state of “irreversible coma” can be kept alive with the support of artificial means; a corpse can never be revived, even if connected to sophisticated equipment."

"The truth is that the definition of brain death was proposed by Harvard Medical School in the summer of 1968, a few months after the first heart transplant performed by Christian Barnard (December 1967), to ethically justify heart transplants, which required that the heart of the donor still be beating, meaning that, according to traditional medical standards, he was still alive. In this case, the removal of the heart was equivalent to murder, albeit carried out “for a good cause”. Science posed a dramatic moral question: is it permissible to kill a sick person, even if they are terminally ill or irreversibly injured, in order to save another human life of superior “quality”?"

"The real problem is that the price to pay for saving these lives is the tragic one of suppressing others. The utilitarian principle that one can do evil to achieve good is being replaced by the Western and Christian maxim that it is not permissible to do evil, even to achieve a greater good. Whereas in the past the traditional “signs” of death were used to ascertain that a living person was not considered dead, today the new Harvard criterion treats the living as corpses in order to be able to transplant them."

"His sweet life Padre Pio began by flying to heaven [...], because he was never blessed on earth."

"(About Padre Pio) His profile of holiness is everything except what one usually imagines: blue, haloed, joyful. Quite the opposite."

"Padre Pio always lived between heaven and earth. Literally."

"Padre Pio never theorised anything. The epochal disputes of the conciliar Church did not even touch him."