For your edification

I meant to get to this before, but fortunately veteran Chicago newsman Tom Roeser did (thanks, Dolores, for catching it).

Once again a weird display is being shown in Chicago without so much as even a feeble outcry. It is the plasticized horror of dead bodies being put on display for entertainment and educational enjoyment and which is now on exhibit in Chicago. I credit one of the more perceptive priest journalists and philosophers Fr. Richard John Neuhaus with the discovery that most of the corpses on display have bullet holes in the base of their skulls, so the corpses have been unduly appropriated. Body Worlds gets most of its cadavers from China where a bullet in the back of a head is the speediest way of execution…

Writing about this in Commentary magazine, Michael J. Lewis, who teaches art history at Williams College notes that the exhibit contains some 200 dead human bodies that are displayed in a creative variety of poses, some really very funny. I mean: very funny-as funny as dead bodies who are redesigned to do things their owners never imagined would happen with themselves can be…The whole thing is the brainchild of Gunther von Hagens, a German doctor who began by plastinating cadavers for medical schools when the idea struck him that there were big bucks to be made by doing this for entertainment.

Especially with complicit museums paying out to put them on display.

China has already been profiting from the bodies of executed prisoners.

All of which should horrify the sensibilities of anyone who believes in the inherent dignity of each and every human person.