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.

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

China says it must approve Dalai Lama reincarnation 12 Mar 2009

U.S. says some states curb free speech in name of religion 12 Mar 2009

Australia says may quit UN racism conference 12 Mar 2009

Pope admits Holocaust denier affair was mishandled 12 Mar 2009

Pope to visit Rome synagogue in autumn 12 Mar 2009

Malaysia Christians battle with Muslims over Allah 11 Mar 2009

“Big Love” network apologizes to Mormons 11 Mar 2009

Catholics protest Connecticut church finance bill 11 Mar 2009

Russia church offers to help Kremlin weather crisis 11 Mar 2009

Pope admits Holocaust denier affair was mishandled 11 Mar 2009

Cardinal says bad bankers must ask God’s pardon 11 Mar 2009

US fertility patients want final say on embryos 11 Mar 2009

Dalai Lama slams China over Tibet “suffering” 10 Mar 2009

Cameroon demolishes street stalls for Pope’s visit 10 Mar 2009

Stem cell go-ahead puts Obama at odds with pope 10 Mar 2009

Somali cabinet votes to implement sharia law 10 Mar 2009

FACTBOX: Embryonic stem cells, the ultimate master cell 10 Mar 2009

Stem cell advocates finally get their Obama moment 09 Mar 2009

French filmmaker slammed for likening illegals to WWII Jews 09 Mar 2009

Vatican paper: Washing machine liberated women most 09 Mar 2009

Chechnya wants newborns to be named after Mohammad 09 Mar 2009

Obama to let health institute decide on stem cells 08 Mar 2009

US stem cell announcement only a first step 08 Mar 2009

Pope to visit Holocaust memorial during Israel trip 08 Mar 2009

Turkish Mosque Holds First Official Kurdish Sermon 08 Mar 2009

(Photo credits from top: Romeo Ranoco, Philippe Wojazer, Alessia Pierdomenico, Larry Downing, stringer)

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.

(Photo:Pope kisses baby at Vatican, 8 Oct 2008/Max Rossi)

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.”

(Photo:A microscopic view of undifferentiated human embryonic stem cells)

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:

That freedom doesn’t eliminate moral obligation; it intensifies it. Each of us has to decide how to respect life in all its complexity. To me, embryos aren’t people, but they’re the beginnings of people. They aren’t to be created, killed, or frozen lightly … Don’t make or freeze embryos without thinking through what you’ll do with them. And if, after talking it over, you can’t stomach the options ahead, maybe you should reconsider whether you’re ready for this. That’s a lot to ask, I know. But nobody said choosing would be easy.”

What do you think about the Vatican document? And what should be done about spare frozen embryos?

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?”

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.”

Cardinal Danneels agreed: “This is joyous news that can bring a turnaround on an important ethical question, the manipulation of the embryo. I’m very happy about this.” He also told the weekly Tertio that he always thought “the embryo problem might solve itself. Hasn’t Leuven been working all this time researching how equally good results could be reached with adult stem cells?”

There have been articles reporting that Asian laboratories had an advantage over those in countries with Christian traditions because Eastern religions had fewer qualms about using human embryos. The New York Times had a feature on Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka, one of the researchers pioneering the new technique. He gave no religious or philosophical reason for wanting to avoid destroying human embryos and simply said his scientific career changed when he saw a human embryo through a microscope: “When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realised there was such a small difference between it and my daughters … I thought, we can’t keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another 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.

One deals with the science:

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.

Despite all the optimism, this doesn’t mean the ethical debate is over. As Maggie’s second story explains, scientists will still work on embryonic stem cells because they could prove more powerful in the end. My question in the last post was whether opponents of embryonic stem cell research would support public funding for the new technique. Now I’m wondering how the debate about funding will play out between these two techniques.