A neurologist’s perspective
In neurology, the question is never theoretical for long.
A scan lights up. A reflex is gone. A word can no longer be found. Somewhere between the MRI image and the bedside, a quieter question always follows: Is this still the same person?
I have spent my career studying the brain, the organ most often assumed to be the self. Memory, language, judgment, personality, consciousness—all of it runs through neural tissue. If any field were going to dissolve the human person into biology, neurology would be it. And yet, paradoxically, neurology has done the opposite for me. The more I have seen brains fail, the more convinced I have become that a human being is not identical to brain function.
That conviction did not come from theology first. It came from patients.
I have watched brilliant people lose words, then sentences, then names. I have seen executive function collapse while affection remains. I have seen memory disappear while dignity stubbornly stays. Families do not gather at bedsides because synapses are still firing efficiently. They gather because a person—their person—is still there. Catholicism explains this without strain. Meaning is not tied to performance. A life does not lose its value when it stops being impressive.
Modern culture tells a different story. It quietly suggests that meaning comes from productivity, independence, and control. As long as you can think clearly, decide freely, and function independently, life has value. When those things fade, value becomes negotiable. Neurology exposes the weakness of that idea every day. Cognitive decline does not feel like a gradual loss of humanity. It feels like a tragedy precisely because the person remains.
Catholicism names what clinicians already know but rarely say aloud: meaning is not something we invent to stay motivated. It is something we receive. Human life is meaningful not because it is useful, but because it is given. That claim sounds abstract until you stand at a bedside where nothing can be fixed. Then it becomes either obviously true—or obviously necessary.
Questions of value sharpen quickly in medicine. We talk constantly about outcomes, quality of life, and prognosis. These are important conversations. But behind them lurks a deeper one that no scan can answer: what makes a life worth preserving at all? Catholicism answers directly. Human dignity is intrinsic. It does not rise with intelligence or fall with disability. As a neurologist, I have seen how deeply this assumption already shapes care, even among those who would never describe themselves as religious. We know when patients are being treated as problems rather than persons. Catholicism does not invent that discomfort. It explains it.
The beginning and end of life are where these questions become unavoidable. Abortion and euthanasia are often framed in terms neurologists understand well: consciousness, autonomy, quality of life. But those criteria are unstable. If personhood depends on awareness or independence, then it is always conditional. Catholicism refuses that logic. A human being is a person from conception until natural death. Dependence does not cancel dignity. Cognitive impairment does not erase worth.
Euthanasia, in particular, exposes a fault line in modern thinking. Today, dignity is often equated with control—the ability to decide when life is no longer worth living. Catholicism offers a harder, older definition. Dignity is not something we maintain by mastery or lose through decline. Compassion does not mean eliminating the one who suffers. It means staying when there is nothing left to do. Neurology has taught me how tempting it is to confuse relief with abandonment. Catholicism insists we not make that mistake.
Reductionism collapses under clinical pressure. If consciousness alone defined personhood, then advanced dementia, aphasia, or coma would erase the person. Yet no neurologist actually behaves that way. We still speak to patients who cannot respond. We still ask families who they were, not just what they can no longer do. We still grieve deaths that cannot be explained by neuron loss alone. Catholicism explains why these practices feel non negotiable. The human person is a unity of body and soul. Biology matters deeply—but it is not the whole story.
Catholicism does not promise escape from aging, disease, or death. Neurology certainly does not. What Catholicism offers is something medicine cannot: a coherent account of why meaning does not vanish with cognitive decline, why dignity does not erode with dependence, and why a person remains a person even when much of what the brain once did can no longer be done.
After a lifetime studying the brain, I have come to believe that Catholicism is not imposing comfort onto a harsh reality. It is naming a truth that reality itself keeps insisting upon—especially when the brain fails.
Neurology has taught me how fragile the brain is.
Catholicism has taught me why the person is not.
That is why, in the places where life is most vulnerable, Catholicism still explains what it means to be human.