Harker shrugged. "I'm not capable to judge that. Neither, I'd say, are the men who have developed this—ah—hypothetical process."
"In that case," Carteret said, "the official Church position would be that any human beings revived by this method would be without souls, and therefore no longer human. The whole procedure would be considered profoundly irreligious."
"Blasphemous and sacrilegious as well?"
"No doubt."
Harker was silent for a moment. He said at length, "How about artificial respiration, heart massage, adrenalin injections? For decades seemingly dead people have been brought back to life with these techniques. Are they all without souls too?"
Carteret seemed to squirm. His strong fingers toyed with a cruciform paperweight on his desk. "I recall a statement of Pius XII, eighty or ninety years ago, about that. The Pope admitted that it was impossible to tell precisely when the soul had left the body—and that so long as the vital functions maintained themselves, it could be held that the person in question was not dead."
"In other words, if resuscitation techniques could be applied successfully, the patient is considered never to have been dead?"
Carteret nodded slowly.
"But if the patient had been pronounced dead by science and left in that state for half a day or more, and then reanimated by a hypothetical new technique—?"
"In that case there has been a definite discontinuity of the life-process," Carteret said. "I may be wrong, but I can't see how the Vatican could give such a technique its approval."