New Catholic archbishop of Brussels raises hackles in Belgium
The long-awaited announcement of the successor to the retiring Catholic archbishop of Brussels, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, has sparked an unusual outcry in Belgium. The new archbishop, André-Mutien Léonard, is sometimes called “the Belgian Ratzinger” for his conservative views. Danneels ranks as one of the last liberal prelates in a Church hierarchy that has turned increasingly traditional under Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict.
Léonard has been a controversial figure in Belgium for his critical stands on homosexuality, same-sex marriage and condom use. He has been an outspoken opponent of abortion and euthanasia, both of which are legal in Belgium, and criticised the Catholic universities of Leuven and Louvain for their research into assisted reproduction and embryonic stem cells.
The most outspoken comment came from Deputy Prime Minister Laurette Onkelinx, who is the country’s health minister. “Church and State are separate in Belgium, but when there are problems in our society, all the social partners sit down around a table, including representatives of secularism and of religion,” she told RTL radio. “Cardinal Danneels was a man of openness, of tolerance and was able to fit in there. Archbishop Léonard has already regularly challenged decisions made by our parliament.”
Onkelinx said Léonard’s appointment could upset the balance between secular and religious that Belgium has found. “Concerning AIDS, he’s against the use of condoms even while people are dying from it every day. He is against abortion and euthanasia … The pope’s choice could undermine the compromise that allows us to live together with respect for everyone.”
The Socialist Party said it “insists that Archbishop Léonard respects democratic decisions taken by the institutions of our country. For the Socialist Party, the rights and duties that people take on democratically take precedence over religious traditions and commandments, without any exception.”
Bert Claerhout, editor in chief of the Catholic weekly KERK&leven (Church and Life), said the choice of Léonard “is clearly a conscious choice for a totally different style and approach: for more radical decisiveness rather than quiet diplomacy, for more confrontation with the secular society instead of dialogue, reconciliation and the quiet confidence that the tide will ever turn.”
Philippe Van der Sande, president of the Christian Solidarity Movement (BCS), welcomed the appointment. “The Church in our country is led by Monsignor Leonard certainly a church where Jesus is central again in the Sunday liturgy. Many people have never had the chance to experience Catholic liturgy, the Catholic prayer and spirituality or with the Catholic doctrine of the Catholic world church. We hope we can now definitively close the era of the experiments in the wake of May 1968 in favor of an open and proud Catholic Church that is faithful to the Catholic faith and the Gospel of Our Lord.”
U.S. approves first “ethical” embryonic stem cell lines
The U.S. government has approved the first 13 batches of human embryonic stem cells, enabling researchers using them to get millions of dollars in federal funding as promised by President Barack Obama in March.
According to Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the stem cell lines met strict ethical restrictions. The cells, for instance, have to have been made using an embryo donated from leftovers at fertility clinics and parents must have signed detailed consent forms.
As our Health and Science Editor Maggie Fox reports, Collins described these criteria as an acceptable compromise between those who want this research to go ahead and critics who oppose it because human embryos are destroyed in the process of making these stem cells.
“I think the broad consensus among most of the public … is that stem cell research of this ethically acceptable kind should go forward,” he told reporters in a telephone briefing on Wednesday. “These were derived from embryos derived under ethically sound consent processes.”
Collins said these embryonic stem cells are still needed for research even though scientists have found ways to turn ordinary cells into what resemble embryonic stem cells. “I think one could make a very strong case that we need both,” he said.
Is this an acceptable compromise? Is there an ethical difference between embryos created just to produce stem cells and embryos left over at fertility clinics?
What a sad state of affairs this is that human embryos are referred to as “leftovers”. Is this deliberate desensitization or what? The more we use this type of language the more we negate the humanity of man at his/her earliest stages. Please just state what they are even if it means typing in a few more words. These are embryos that parents are chosing not to implant. Calling them leftovers turns my stomach.
Vatican editor defends himself against U.S. conservatives
When Gian Maria Vian took over as editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano in late 2007, most observers yawned. No-one really expected much change at the staid newspaper. But within a few months, the paper started to rock and roll — at least as much as a paper like that can.
Slowly but surely, change has come to the 148-year-old mouthpiece of the Vatican, considered by many in the past a bland broadsheet at best and once called the “Catholic Pravda”, a reference to the communist party organ in the former Soviet Union.
It started publishing color pictures and more articles by and about women — not bad for an institution that is still a male bastion. It also began including more international cover, war cover and economic cover. Some of its unorthodox commentaries have also been lighthearted and provocative. To wit: it ran an editorial saying that perhaps the washing machine had done more to liberate women than the pill or the right to work. It post-humusly forgave John Lennon for once boasting that the Beatles were more famous than Christ. And, it finally set the record straight that no, the pope does not wear Prada.
Vian has become a player in his own right, giving interviews on a range of topics from Pius XII (Vian has just written a book defending him) to President Barack Obama. He came under fire from Catholic conservatives in the United States after he stated that Obama was not a “pro-abortion” president. He has now given a very interesting interview to Rome-based religion expert Delia Gallagher in the National Review. The interview, which is very readable and insightful, is worth reading in its entirety.
Gallagher, a Californian with a masters in philosophy and theology from Oxford University, has returned to Rome, where she started her professional career as managing editor of the magazine Inside the Vatican in 1998. She was a Rome-based Vatican analyst for CNN from 2002-2005 and was CNN’s Faith and Values Correspondent from 2005-2009, based in New York.
I would say it’s well past the time for Gian Maria Vian to go to work for the New York Times, the Washington Post, or CNN, and quit bringing shame upon the Catholic faith.
A selection of religion reports: week of March 8
Reuters publishes many more reports on religion, faith and ethics than we can mention on the FaithWorld blog. We sometimes highlight a story here, but often leave an issue unmentioned because it was already covered on the wire, or we have neither the time nor any extra information for a blog post. Here’s a sample of some of the stories we’ve published over the past week:
Philippines says open to amending Muslim autonomy law 13 Mar 2009
China says willing to meet Dalai Lama’s envoys 13 Mar 2009
Jews ask pope for Holocaust studies in schools 12 Mar 2009
Turkey denies firing editor over Darwin article 12 Mar 2009
Pope says pained over “hate, hostility” against him 12 Mar 12 2009
Vatican reaffirms stand against IVF, designer babies, cloning
The Vatican issued a major document on bioethics today, “Instruction Dignitas Personae on Certain Bioethical Questions,” that outlines Roman Catholic teaching on the latest procedures concerning human reproduction. This is the third major Vatican document on bioethics in recent years after Donum Vitae (Gift of Life) in 1987 — issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), like today’s document — and Pope John Paul’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae (Gospel of Life) in 1995.
Our news story on the document is here, accompanied by a list of procedures it declared morally unacceptable and acceptable and selected quotes from the text. The full text in English is here. The Vatican also has comments from the news conference presenting the document (here all in Italian).
Much of this is a restatement and updating of known Vatican positions. The wording is in places quite strong and sound-bite-like, which may mean those passages could be intended for use in national political debates about bioethics. There is too much to comment on individually here, so go to the links for details.
John Thavis of Catholic News Service has a useful “Vatican bioethics document at a glance” and John Allen has a detailed analysis at “Vatican issues new document on biotechnology.”
One interesting angle is the argument in the conclusion that modern societies have already banned other practices that violate human dignity such as “racism, slavery, unjust discrimination and marginalization of women, children, and ill and disabled people.:” It encourages Catholics to show “courageous opposition to all those practices which result in grave and unjust discrimination against unborn human beings, who have the dignity of a person, created like others in the image of God.”
The document also speaks of spare frozen embryos as “orphans” but says it would be against human dignity to use them for research or give them up for “prenatal adoption” as some anti-abortion voices have suggested. “The thousands of abandoned embryos represent a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved,” it says.
Incidentally, Slate columnist William Saletan also writes today about “The frozen ones: the morally deserted world of spare embryos.” He says there are about 500,000 such frozen embryos in the United States alone and many parents have just left them in that limbo. An abortion rights advocate, he makes no mention of the Vatican document and uses no religious argument. But he also bemoans the fact that the increased freedom and choice brought by these new reproductive measures have not been matched by increased ethical concern about the results:
Chris,
Since you seem so knowledgeable on those with no brains and condescendingly chide people to “get educated,” it’s spelled h-y-p-o-c-r-i-s-y.
You’re welcome.
Does global warming trump all hot-button ethical issues?
Imagine you go to a conference on major bioethical questions — controversial issues like abortion, embryonic stem cells, assisted reproduction and euthanasia — and a keynote speaker uses all his allotted time warning about global warming. Is this the wrong issue to discuss — or the only one worth talking about?
The question arose at the annual conference of the European Association of Centres of Medical Ethics (EACME) that ended at the weekend in Prague. Dr. Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, told the assembled bioethicists they had to look beyond their usual issues to consider the far larger ecological threat he said could soon end up destroying mankind.
The issue is urgent for bioethicists, he said, because the healthcare industry in the rich OECD countries is a major source of carbon dioxide emissions. It also spends vast amounts to prolong patients’ lives, about half of it in the final months before death. “The more effort we put into saving individual lives, the more likely we are to doom the human race to extinction,” he said.
“Just being a little bit more green isn’t the answer,” he insisted. Rich countries will have to find ways to cut their carbon emissions almost completely within the next few years. His outlook for the healthcare industry was summarised in a bleak PowerPoint slide:
Possible changes in medicine
- close most hospitals and concentrate on good-quality primary care
- reverse the brain drain and send redundant health workers to developing countries
- outlaw assisted reproduction
- stop medical research undertaken for utopian or financial reasons.
If western countries closed all their hospitals, he said, life expectancy there would drop by only eight months.
“What is more important,” he asked, “maintaining our wealth and economies for 20-30 years until climate change wipes them out, or trying to ensure that as much as possible of the human race survives?”
Wow! How much passion there is to attack Dr Nicholson for merely raising awkward issues ! No attempt from the critics commenting here to process the fact that we could instantly double life expectancy for people in developing countries to our standards by just ensuring they got basic medicines and fed properly .
No, their valuing of human life is pretty selfish and selective and revolves around the personal ignoring the pain, suffering and death routinely brought about by inequality on a massive scale as this is just an impersonal fact of life to them , a given, that we must all, presumably , accept as unremarkable and take for granted because, well, we really dont want to discuss human problems as resource management issues do we ? even as the global population races towards a projected 9 billion by 2050 and our own innate grasp of the most basic of math must surely tell us that we are overshooting the carrying capacity of the planet.
Science helps religion in stem cell debates
Science and religion are sometimes portrayed as adversaries, especially by the “new atheists“, but the real picture has always been more complex. The latest breakthrough in stem cell research shows how quickly opposing sides can become allies. On Nov. 20, two research teams announced they had transformed ordinary skin cells into stem cells without destroying human embryos in the process. That meant that scientists could solve an ethical dilemma they had effectively created when they began using human embryos to produce stem cells.
Religious groups critical of embryonic stem cell research immediately hailed the breakthrough as an advance that opened the door to ethnical use of these potential wonder cells. They have now begun to use it as a welcome argument to bolster their positions in disputes on the issue. This must be happening in quite a few places, but here are two examples that show how science is helping religion in this case.
In Germany, the Roman Catholic Church has severely criticised the governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party for agreeing to loosen tight restrictions on embryonic stem cell research there. The law bars German scientists from working on stem cell lines developed after January 1, 2002. Researchers say this is hampering their work and want the cut-off date to be moved up to 2007.
When the CDU agreed to this last week, two outspoken Catholic cardinals, Joachim Meisner of Cologne and Karl Lehmann of Mainz, condemned this as a betrayal of the Christian principles the party’s name claimed to represent. Meisner was especially critical of Research Minister Annette Schavan, a Catholic. He said the CDU decision was baffling, coming as it did “when science is opening up perspectives that present no ethical problems.”
Lehmann issued a statement as head of the German Bishops’ Conference: “The notable new successes in adult stem cell research and the reprogramming of cells are an additional argument against expanding embryonic stem cell research … so we call for a significant restructuring of European and German research funding from embryonic to adult stem cell research.”
In Belgium, the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) thinks the breakthrough will help it keep its official Catholic status endangered by its stem cell research. The Vatican has been quietly investigating the university’s fertility centre, which does embryonic stem cell research that is firmly opposed by Catholic teaching. The university, with the support of Brussels Cardinal Godfried Danneels, has been arguing it needed to continue that work until research into adult stem cells — which it also does — finds an ethical way to produce them. No steps have been taken, but no compromise seemed possible. If the Vatican stripped KUL of its Catholic status, it could lose many Catholic students who study theology there.
“This reduces the bones of contention with Rome,” said KUL Vice-rector Mark Waer. “If these insights are confirmed, at some point it shouldn’t be necessary anymore to experiment with embryos.”
Stem cell breakthrough — science the ethical way?
We noted here just the other day the all-but-absent ethical angle in the Daily Telegraph story about the creator of Dolly the cloned sheep and a new technique for creating stem cells without embryos. Now, we have two reports from Maggie Fox, our Health and Science Editor in Washington, that address the scientific and ethical issues.
Our story length limits meant the two had to be broken up, but they should be read in tandem.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Two separate teams of researchers announced on Tuesday they had transformed ordinary skin cells into batches of cells that look and act like embryonic stem cells — but without using cloning technology and without making embryos.
The other deals with the ethics :
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists and ethicists alike welcomed the news on Tuesday that two groups had been able to reprogram ordinary skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells — the body’s ultimate master cell.
Now, that’s more like it.
a look into the future – ain’t that a look into life as it comes ?!
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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Is an opposite view undemocratic? Different polictical parties express conflicting views.It is called a free society. A democracy! What is wrong with Archbishop Leonard expressing his views.Germany had a democratic vote that brought into power Adolf Hitler.Democracy got it wrong. It is not infallible.It can be influenced by vested interests with power of press and propaganda.It does not guarantee truth, or if you like, the common good.There is strong evidence that abortion is harmful for the individual and society as a whole.But fear of having a good examination of that scientific data illicits head in the sand attitudes. It has become politically correct to oppose an alternative view to the right to abortion. A lot of us may not be in existence had we been a foetus in this present era.Its a gamble nowadays whether one gets through that stage.I would challenge this so called liberalism as being more right wing selfish pragmatism, assisted by egotistical ideology or more approprietly codology.It has also developed into an industry with huge monetary gain.How like sheep to the slaughter society has succumbed to.We have seduced words to incite emotional response against any person or utterence that questions the philosophy of abortion.What is abortion? Getting rid of an inconveniance. Science states that this inconveniece has the whole human properties of a person,just needing time and nourishment to grow into itself. By jeepers We might have lost many a genius who may have stopped this economic scandal that is upon us. Bring back the forum for fair debate.