Claudia Bignion

In June 2011 my book was published: The Holy See And The Human Body in The 19th And 20th Century. The influence of the Catholic Church on people all over the world prior to the 19th and 20th Century had been monumental. Historical evidence indicates that the Catholic Church set forth edicts on how to live one’s life. Even in the area of how to treat one’s body, the Vatican created dogma that would affect the health of human beings. However, as succeeding Popes have attempted to maintain their influence in this area, Catholics in the 19th and 20th Centuries have increasingly turned to their physicians, rather than abide by the Pope’s edicts. Research in the area of health Sciences and the physicians who provide health care has supplanted the relevant dogma of the Catholic Church. Literature published by the Vatican, as well as historical documents on medical and ethical questions demonstrate that progress in the medical field has affected the political landscape and resulted in skepticism about the church’s role in health care. Napoleon’s victory marked a changing political environment for everyone, including the Catholic Church. Since that time, the Vatican’s influence in the area of health, has diminished and slowly faded over the next two hundred years. During the Renaissance of the 19th C, people gradually became aware that they could affect their own destiny and didn’t need to rely so heavily on the dogma of the Catholic Church. The science of health developed through intelligent research and application which positively changed people’s distrust of the medical community and shed them of their belief that disease simply had to be suffered. It heralded a new era of treatment and prevention of disease. The efforts by the Catholic Church to shepard their flock in the 19th C continued to flourish, however. Although the doctrine of “The Immaculate Conception” predated Pope Pius IX in 1854, an edict at that time was proclaimed to emphasize Catholicism’s adherence to the belief of inborn sin. It appears as though it was an effort to harness the longing of Catholics to be autonomous by invoking the idea that their inborn sins could only be forgiven by God, thus promoting dependence on Catholic Church. In 1859, the sacrosanct teachings of the Catholic Church were weakened when the Biblical text of Genesis was put into question as a result of the work and publication of Charles Darwin’s book, “On the Origin of Species.” So just as medical and health ...