A Gift of Ourselves

by Editor · May 22, 2016

Fr Xolisile Augustine Kondlo, who needs a lung transplant, has found that God’s mission for him is through his illness

Readers will be touched this week by the story of a Port Elizabeth priest with a debilitating illness who is campaigning for awareness on organ donation.

Fr Xolisile Augustine Kondlo, 37, is himself in need of a lung transplant. Alas, South Africa has a desperately low number of registered organ donors — people who give their explicit consent to having their organs harvested for transplant upon their death.

Fr Kondlo is correct in noting that the Catholic Church in Southern Africa generally has done little to promote organ donation. Of course, there are many other important issues the Church concerns itself with, so some causes tend to slip between the cracks. The priest therefore issues a timely reminder with his #1DonorSaves7Lives campaign.

While the Church might lack the resources to launch a national awareness campaign on organ donation, there is no reason why dioceses and parishes shouldn’t.

The process of registering is simple, and the reasons for doing so are compelling.

According to the Organ Donor Foundation, currently there are more than 4300 adults and children on the waiting list for solid organ and cornea transplants in South Africa— and many more aren’t even on waiting lists — but fewer than 600 people receive transplants a year.

This means that every year hundreds of people die who might have had life-saving transplants. Meanwhile, tens of thousands are buried or cremated with such life-saving organs intact.

The willingness to be an organ donor could be described as an ethically imperative act. It is, of course, also a gift of love, and therefore a Christian imperative. Organ donation has unqualified papal support. In October 2014 Pope Francis described the act of organ donation as a “testimony of love for our neighbour”.

Pope Benedict XVI, who as a cardinal used to carry an organ donor’s card on him, saw the posthumous gift of viable organs to those who need them to live, or live better, as an act of love.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes organ donation as “a noble and meritorious act [which] is to be encouraged as an expression of generous solidarity” (2296), with the proviso that a patient is not euthanised to save another person’s life (never mind the crime of live-harvesting).

The papal and doctrinal support of organ donation should put to rest theological unease which Catholics may have.

There has been an abiding concern that one’s corpse should be maintained intact, in as far as natural burial allows, for the promised bodily resurrection on the last day. This is the reason why for centuries the Church discouraged cremation. However, the magisterium does not regard organ donation as an obstacle to our final-day resurrection. It is necessary that leaders in the Church and society promote organ donation to address cultural and religious misconceptions about it. Fr Kondlo does this through his self-sacrificing campaign.

Priests can join him from the pulpit. Parish-based organisations can do so by taking concrete action in signing up parishioners.

Some people even volunteer to become organ donors in their lifetime.

Live organ donation — usually of a kidney, a lobe of the liver or lung, or bone marrow — are entirely licit in Catholic teaching, provided these donations are not harmful to the donor’s health, are freely offered, and are not subject to financial transactions.

Longtime readers may recall the loving gift of a kidney to a teenager by Fr Maximilian Kolbe Jacobs OSB in 2002, in response to an appeal in The Southern Cross. Live donations are more common within families. In whichever circumstances they occur, the donors are heroic examples of selfless love.

As Christians we are called to act in solidarity with those who are suffering — people such as Fr Kondlo as well as the thousands whose names do not appear in print. One way of doing so is by making our organs available for transplants after death.

In doing so we, we may echo St John Paul II: “It is not a matter of giving away something that belongs to us, but of giving something of ourselves. There is a need to instil in people’s hearts a genuine and deep appreciation of the need for brotherly love, a love that can find expression in the decision to become an organ donor.”