“We believe that there isn’t a moral gap between humans and other animals, and that saying things like ‘the behavior patterns that wolves or chimpanzees display are merely building blocks for human morality’ doesn’t really get us anywhere. At some point, differences in degree aren’t meaningful differences at all and each species is capable of ‘the real thing.’ Good biology leads to this conclusion. Morality is an evolved trait and ‘they’ (other animals) have it just like we have it.”

That’s a pretty bold statement. If a book declares that in its introduction, it better have to have some strong arguments to back it up. A convincing argument could influence how we view our own morality and its origins, how we understand animal cognition and even how we relate to animals themselves.

Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, a new book by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, presents a persuasive case for some animals being much more intelligent than generally believed. The authors show how these animals have emotions, exhibit empathy, mourn for their dead and seem to have a sense of justice. They draw interesting parallels to similar human behaviour that many people think stems from our moral codes and/or religious beliefs rather than some evolutionary process. All this is fascinating and their argument for open-mindedness about recognising animals’ real capabilities is strong.

The stories they base their thesis on are intriguing. They talk about an elephant with a leg injury whose fellow elephants in her herd slowed down for her and even fed her. They tell how dogs can agree for a session of rough play that’s not supposed to hurt and those that overstep the bounds, by for example by biting too hard, get frozen out of the group. Caged rats taught to push a level for food won’t do it when that prompts the scientists to give a rat in the next cage an electric shock. Vampire bats share the blood they collect with bats that can’t go out to hunt for their daily dose. Some sort of behavioural code is clearly working here, just as a behavioural code is at work when humans do similar things.

But the authors overreach when they say this shows that animals have morality. The problem is with their limited definition:

“We define morality as a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviours that cultivate and regulate complex interactions within social groups. These behaviours relate to well-being and harm, and norms of right and wrong attach to many of them. Morality is an essentially social phenomenon, arising in the interactions between and among individual animals, and it exists as a tangle of threads that holds together a complicated and shifting tapestry of social relationships. Morality in this way acts as social glue.”

Baby elephants in Nairobi, 10 Nov 2008/Radu Sigheti

That’s good as far as it goes. But morality isn’t only a “suite” (“a number of things forming a series or set”) of behaviours. It’s also a wider system of beliefs about what is right and wrong, not just for the person involved but for others and for society as a whole. It’s a system for evaluating actions, their causes and consequences even if we are not immediately confronted with the need to make a choice. Calling morality something “arising in the interactions between and among individual animals” is a bit too reductionist, like saying art boils down to something that comes from brush strokes on canvas. Yes, but there’s something more to it, too, that raises the requirements for any definition.

In arguing against the traditional view that humans and animals are separated by a wide gap, Wild Justice makes the gap too narrow. Human morality includes complex rational abstraction, ongoing debate and changing opinions mediated through language. Some animals have a certain level of intelligence, but not that much. The authors minimise this by deflating the human side of the gap, saying that “Western philosophical accounts of morality are outdated in important respects, for example in ascribing too much volition and intentionality to moral behaviour.” Sure, neuroscience is showing that the “too much” part of that statement is true. But this argument ascribes too little importance to volition and intentionality. Human intelligence allows us to express moral codes in words, debate their merits and change them if we find them insufficient. Without these abilities, we would probably still have “pro-social” reactions described in Wild Justice but not the wider systems known as morality or ethics.

Mother and baby gorillas at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, 28 August 2008/Daniel Munoz

If animals have morality “just like we have it,” could there be any parallel in the animal world to the changing standards and resulting debate over major moral issues such as we see now regarding legalising same-sex marriage and reducing abortion? That may sound facetious, but it highlights a key area of morality that Wild Justice excludes. Opinions and laws concerning homosexuality and abortion have changed enormously in recent decades, leading to heated and sometimes violent clashes between supporters and opponents of such changes. Supporters have successfully used legal and political arguments to champion an evolution of public moral standards. Religious arguments are often used to counter them. It’s hard to imagine any of this would have happened if humans only dealt with moral challenges confronting them directly and couldn’t analyse and debate them abstractly.

This change in public moral standards is a product of the particularly human intelligence that Wild Justice plays down. The authors rightly highlight the way some animals exhibit some aspects of what we call moral behaviour. Research into animal cognition will surely uncover more parallels and challenge our views of morality. But it shouldn’t narrow the definition of morality to make its results look more persuasive than they are.

One of the things that makes France so French is the annual philosophy exam that traditionally kicks off the week-long series of tests for the baccalauréat diploma at the end of the lycée (senior high school). While France is a proudly secular state, the questions asked often pose puzzles with ethical aspects that many religions also contemplate. They are usually very broad — some would say impossibly broad — questions, leaving the student to decide how to understand and discuss them in a long essay.

Here are some of the questions the nervous students were given four hours to sweat over today:

• Is it absurd to desire the impossible?
• Are there questions that no science answers?
• What does one gain by exchanging?
• Does technical development transform humans?
• Does language betray thought?
• Does historical objectivity presuppose an impartial historian?

Are 18-year-olds set questions like this in exams in your country? If not, would it be worthwhile to ask them?

(Photo: President Nicolas Sarkozy chats with students during a visit to Galilee High School in the Paris suburb of Gennevilliers on 10 June 2009/ Philippe Wojazer)

Among the new crop of books with themes that would resonate with readers of this blog, one that caught my eye is Jerry A. Coyne’s recently published “Why Evolution is True”. I rushed out, bought it and read it.

The title says it all and is clearly aimed at an American audience. America’s reluctance to embrace evolution — which is the foundation of modern biology and stems from Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection — sets it apart from almost all other countries in the developed world. Polls generally show that only around 40 percent of Americans believe evolution is true while in most European countries the figure is closer to 80 percent.

A Harris poll in 2007 for example found that only 42 percent of Americans accepted evolution while 62 percent believed in the devil.

Most commentators attribute this to America’s high rates of religiosity. Evangelical Protestants in particular are suspicious of evolution with many accepting the biblical story of creation as they see it as the literal word of God.

There have been various high profile battles over whether or not to teach “alternatives” to evolution in the classroom. “Intelligent design” theory, which has scientific pretensions, is the latest attempt to bring a creationist alternative to evolution into the classroom. In a nutshell, it maintains that the complexity of life can only be explained by an “intelligent designer.”

(Photo: A primate’s skull is displayed in Charles Darwin’s former home Down House, in Kent, southern England February 12, 2009. REUTERS/Tal Cohen (BRITAIN)

Coyne, a professor at the University of Chicago in the department of Ecology and Evolution, is having none of this and he confronts the intelligent design crowd loaded for bear.

Evolution is more than a theory, Coyne points out. It is a fact and is supported — contrary to the claims of proponents of intelligent design — by a wealth of overwhelming evidence. It also makes verifiable predictions. This is why virtually every serious scientist accepts it. (And there are no serious alternative theories to it in scientific circles, another claim made by some of evolution’s opponents. Coyne notes that this does not mean that data or evidence might some day emerge which show Darwinism to be wrong. The point to be made is that none has to date).

Coyne provides many examples to make his case. The fossil record is of course incomplete. But fossils that are found turn up where we would expect to find them (no Precambrian rabbits have been found ). A progression can clearly be seen in the fossil record from simpler to more complex forms of life. The first mammals appear 250 million years ago, arising from reptilian ancestors. This is followed by the first birds and so on. As Coyne notes: “No theory of special creation, or any theory other than evolution, can explain these patterns.”

Much of the discomfort with evolution stems from the fact that many people simply don’t like the idea that humans are related to apes. But the evidence that we are is overwhelming and wishful thinking cannot make it go away. Coyne points out that Darwin himself had conjectured that our species had arisen in Africa because our closest relatives the chimpanzee and the gorilla are found there. Subsequent fossil finds in Africa have indeed shown this to be the case, while DNA testing shows just how close our kinship is to these great apes.

In short, a prediction which was verified.

Critics of evolution also say that there is no “proof” as we have not seen species evolve before our eyes. But what about bacterial strains that evolve — repeat, evolve — to resist drugs? New strains of the tuberculosis bacteria have evolved resistance to all drugs that have been used against them. As Coyne notes, “this is natural selection, pure and simple.”

Biogeography provides some of the strongest evidence for evolution and Coyne notes that it is territory intelligent designers do not even venture into. It is one of the things that got Darwin thinking about evolution in the first place as he noticed that birds on neighboring islands were related but not precisely the same species — a scenario that fits neatly with the idea that they had evolved their different traits in isolation from one another.

Most oceanic islands for example show a similar pattern that evolution eloquently explains but does not make much sense if one is an intelligent designer: they often have an abundance of endemic birds, insects and plants but lack mammals, amphibians and perhaps most tellingly of all freshwater fish. The reasons are clear: such islands arose bereft of life from the sea floor and the animals and plants that made it to them would be mobile (birds and insects fly and the former often have plant seeds in their droppings). Evidence for evolution on them can be seen in the fact that many of the bird species which inhabit them are flightless (flying takes up energy and is not needed if there are no local predators). Freshwater fish don’t show up because they can’t swim in the ocean to get there.

This is just the tip of Coyne’s iceberg and his book has many more examples. (Why can some people still wiggle their ears? Because it seems to be a remnant from when our ancestors needed to move their ears around to help them localize sounds). It is one of many books that will appear this year to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” as well as his 200th birthday. It will certainly raise a few eyebrows in certain circles — and I wonder now if our ability to do so doesn’t have some unknown roots?

Among U.S. religious groups, white evangelical Protestants are the least likely to believe that human activities are contributing to climate change, according to a new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. You can see the numbers, based on a broader 2008 poll, here.

Overall the Pew Forum found that a plurality, or 47 percent, of the adult U.S. population accepts that there is solid evidence that the earth is warming because of human activities. Most scientists have reached the conclusion that the planet’s climate is changing because of human-induced factors, notably the emissions from burning of the fossil fuels that drive the global economy.

Among religious groups Pew found that those who said they were unaffiliated with any faith tradition were the most likely to accept that humanity was warming the planet, with 58 percent of them taking that view.

Among white mainline Protestants the figure was 48 percent, it was 39 percent for black Protestants and 34 percent for white evangelical Protestants, a key base for the Republican Party whose leaders have often cast doubt on the link between emissions and climate change.

Former U.S. president George W. Bush pulled America out of the Kyoto treaty to curb emissions — a move hailed at the time by his Republican base — while President Barack Obama , a Democrat, has made climate a key policy priority.

Many evangelical Christians put their faith completely in the Bible which they see as the revealed word of God and so they also question other widely accepted scientific views such as evolution. Some have even suggested that climate change may be a sign that the biblical end times are drawing near.

But doubt about the link between human causes and climate change is hardly restricted to evangelicals in America. Overall 21 percent of Americans say there is no solid evidence that the earth is warming and 18 percent attribute it to natural causes. This is perhaps not surprising in a country that has an enduring love affair with the automobile.

(Photo: A view of the Manhattan skyline during Earth Hour in New York March 28, 2009. REUTERS/Eric Thayer (UNITED STATES)

U.S. President Barack Obama signaled on Tuesday that he would be open to policy changes on stem cell research if the science on adult stem cells determined that thorny ethical issues could be avoided without harming medical advancement.

Obama lifted restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research earlier this month, angering abortion opponents but cheering those who believe the study could produce treatments for many diseases.

Asked at a White House news conference if he wrestled with the ethics of the issue, given the promise in adult stem cell research, Obama said:

“Now, I am glad to see progress is being made in adult stem cells.  And if the science determines that we can completely avoid a set of ethical questions or political disputes, then that’s great.  I have — I have no investment in causing controversy.  I’m happy to avoid it if that’s where the science leads us.”

But he said based on the potential gains to be made to alleviate human suffering in embryonic stem cell research, he felt he had done the right thing.

  “… what I don’t want to do is predetermine this based on a very rigid ideological approach, and that’s what I think is reflected in the executive order that I signed.”

Many social conservatives are opposed to embryonic stem cell research because it involves the destruction of human embryos. But some staunch opponents of abortion rights support human embryonic stem cell research, which supporters say could lead to insights that could provide treatments for diseases from diabetes to AIDS.

Stem cell experts agree that all types of stem cells should be developed, but it is not clear which offer the best route to a new type of therapy called regenerative medicine, in which it is hoped doctors can replace brain cells destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease, reverse genetic defects like cystic fibrosis, and regrow severed spinal cords.

Obama’s remarks suggest that if the science points conclusively in a direction that avoids ethical or political landmines, then he would be glad to take that route.

(Photo: Obama smiles during news conference at White House, March 24, 2009. REUTERS/Jim Young (UNITED STATES POLITICS BUSINESS)

(Photos: Bernard d’Espagnat, 13 March 2009/Charles Platiau)

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant once wrote that he “had to deny knowledge to make room for faith.” The French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat hasn’t denied knowledge in his long career developing the philosophy that won him this year’s $1.42 million Templeton Prize. He was pursuing knowledge to better understand what we can know about the ultimate reality of the world. But just like his philosophy echoes that of Kant’s with its conviction that there are limits on knowing reality, his work leaves some room — he would say for spirituality — by saying that human intuitions like art, music and spirituality can help us go further when science searching to understand the world reaches the end of its tether.

D’Espagnat’s prize was announced at UNESCO in Paris on Monday. The quantum physics at the core of his work presents baffling insights about reality, but his philosophical conclusions from them sound like common sense. Science is an amazing discipline that opens vast areas of knowledge but cannot go all the way to explaining ultimate reality. There’s a mystery at the core of our existence that we can get a little closer to through the untestable but undeniable intuitions we have. That “little closer” still leaves a large black hole in our knowledge, but it is more than we have if we only rely on empirical science.

As often happens in cases like this, d’Espagnat was available for embargoed interviews several days before the prize was announced. I had the pleasure of meeting him on Friday at the Lutetia, a five-star hotel only a short bike ride from my more modest digs in Paris. Now 87 years old, d’Espagnat can look back on a long and illustrious career as a senior physicist at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, professor at the University of Paris (at its science hub in the suburb of Orsay) and guest lecturer at universities and conferences abroad. His latest book in English, On Physics and Philosophy, came out in the United States in 2006.

At the end, I asked what he would do with his prize money. After paying the taxes on it, he stressed as he started his answer, he would divide it into three equal parts. One would go to promote the study of “negative theology,” a theology that he says fits his spiritualist outlook and conviction that we can only describe God by concepts that say what God is not. The second part would go to associations helping the homeless. And the last third he and his wife would use to make their home more senior-friendly. “My wife is handicapped and she would very much like to remain at home as long as possible,” he said.

You can read our story here or consult the prize website for more information and an extensive collection of links about his work. Some excerpts from my interview with d’Espagnat are on the next page. Taking a page from Paul Krugman’s economics blog, let me put a health warning on it right away — (wonkish).

(more…)

The start of a high-powered Vatican-sponsored acadmeic conference on evolution was anything but fossilized.

The third STOQ International Conference, called Biological Evolution, Facts and Theories, began on Tuesday at the Pontifical Gregorian University (picture right) under the patronage of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture.

The conference, which has been organised together with the University of Notre Dame to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, had barely gotten underway when charges of censorship and undemocratic and unacademic behaviour began flying.

At the end of the first session Oktar Babuna, a Turkish doctor and collaborator of prominent Turkish anti-Darwin campaigner Harun Yahya,asked for the floor to put forward a question. Babuna, a proponent of the Islamic creationist campaign against evolution, spoke about his view that there were insufficient transitional forms from species to species to support the theory of evolution.

After he began speaking two professors on the dias, Francisco J. Ayala of the University of California at Irvine and Douglas Futuyma of the State University of New York were visibly irritated. Someone in the hall can be heard saying “turn the microphone off” and seconds later two organisers approached Babuna. One of them abruptly took the microphone away from Babuna and another ordered him to go back to his seat. Watch it all here

“After I walked back to my seat someone said “only evolutionists can ask questions,” Babuna told Reuters afterwards. “This is very anti-democratic and very unacademic. If this is a scientific meeting … if you have scientific questions to ask, they should be responded to scientifically, everybody accepts that … if you force people to shut up and don’t let them ask any question … then it is not a scientific theory but an ideology.” The spat was filmed by Babuna’s associate Dr Cihat Gundogdu, who put an edited version on the Harun Yahya website.

Both men attended the conference with English and Italian versions of Harun Yahya’s super-slick mega-book Atlas of Creation (picture left) in hand. We have done numerous blogs on Islamic creationism, its proponents and its opponents. Some of the links are listed below. But what do you think about the debate and, more importantly, do you think officials at the Gregorian University were right or wrong to yank the microphone from Babuna at a scientific conference?

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2009/02/05/just-before-darwin-day-pew-reviews-faith-and-evolution-in-us/

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/12/24/a-one-stop-shop-for-the-latest-on-islamic-creationism/

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/11/25/harun-yahya-dangles-big-prizes-for-creationism-essays/

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/10/27/richard-dawkins-rips-into-harun-yahya-and-muslim-creationism/

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/06/19/harun-yahya-preaches-islam-slams-darwin-and-awaits-jesus/

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/04/07/harun-yahyas-islamic-creationist-book-pops-up-in-scotland/

Social and religious conservatives in Texas suffered a setback on Thursday when the State Board of Education narrowly voted to ditch a requirement that high school science teachers cover the “strengths and weaknesses” of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which is more popularly known as the theory of evolution.

A final vote on the entire science curriculum is expected today. You can see reports here and here.

The rule to teach “both sides of the evolution debate” had been in place since the 1980s, but national interest has been rekindled in recent years by attempts to get Biblical creationism taught in U.S. schools in one form of another.

Proponents of intelligent design — which holds that life is so complex that it must have had an ultimate creator — have suffered a number of setbacks.

Some in the pro-evolution crowd — which includes just about all of the mainstream science community in the United States — contend that introducing “flaws” or ”criticism” of the theory of natural selection is a smokescreen for creationists who can claim that just discussing “doubt” does not in itself signal the promotion of a religious agenda.

Many in the scientific community say there is little doubt on this score or at least the kind of doubt suggested by the proponents of creationism and intelligent design.

The Dallas Morning News on Thursday quoted Eugenie Scott, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, as saying that: “There are no weaknesses in the theory of evolution.”

What do you think? Is the Texas school board living up to President Barack Obama’s pledge this week “to restore science to its rightful place?”

(Photo: The new Charles Darwin postage stamp, issued by Britian’s Royal Mail to commemorate his 200th birthday this year and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work. REUTERS/Royal Mail, 29 Dec 2008)

Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn is one of the Catholic Church’s most vocal critics of what he calls evolutionism, which he defines as an ideology that applies Darwin’s theory of natural selection to a wide variety of questions beyond biology. He usually directs his criticism at scientists and philosophers who say evolution proves that God does not exist.

(Photo: Cardinal Schönborn, 16 March 2007/Leonhard Foege)

In an interview with the Austrian provincial newspaper Vorarlberger Nachrichten on Jan. 5, Schönborn, a former student and close associate of Pope Benedict, said his criticism also applied to the current financial crisis:

Q, One of your favourite topics is evolution and creation. Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to devote yourself to more practical things than those that cannot be proven anyway?

A. Look at the current economic crisis. The question of evolutionism and the economic crisis are very closely linked. What we can call the ideological Darwinist concept that the stronger survives has led to the economic situation we’re in today. I think that if education only focuses on making young people fit for the rat race and doesn’t teach them the great human values that society needs, it’s because it’s based on an image of humanity linked to ideological evolutionism. So it has very, very practical consequences.

Q. Where is this discussion leading and what can emerge at the end of it?

A. We can’t say, but (scientific) research continues. Very successful, very exciting. On the one hand, it certainly is going very strongly in the direction that says all life can really be proved to be linked together. In this respect, the scientific theory of evolution is, of course, supported and carried by very strong arguments.

(Photo:Staff at Lehman Brothers in London, 11 Sept 2008/Kevin Coombs)

On the other hand, one must clearly highlight the distinctive qualities of humans, their dignity and their intellectual abilities and responsibility in the face of reductive thinking that understands them in a materialistic way or as just a product of evolution. That is certainly insufficient.

The interview is here in German (registration required) and a summary (open access) in the Vienna daily Die Presse is here.

The Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano published an article over the weekend claiming that the contraceptive pill pollutes the environment massively, contributes to male infertility and causes abortions. Those claims, if true, hit lots of hot buttons about science, ethics, faith and government policy. They should make headlines around the world. But apart from the Italian press, for which this is a home game, they haven’t. Why not?

(Photo: Japanese contraceptive pills, 26 Aug 1999/Kimimasa Mayama)

It’s probably because the article also sets off lots of red lights for anyone trying to assess the validity of its claims. Its author Pedro José Maria Simón Castellví, head of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, makes several scientific-sounding claims but basically asks the reader to accept them on faith. Castellví says his article is based on a 100-page report by a Swiss doctor, Rudolf Ehmann, but doesn’t quote directly from it or say where it can be found.  This can’t be for lack of space, because he fills several lines with florid praise for the report with comments such as: “The original German text is beautifully written … it is written with all the scientific requirements, without any inferiority complex toward any discussion of obstetrics and gynaecology…”

The article’s headline — “Humanae Vitae - A Scientific Prophesy” — also hints its purpose is probably more religious than scientific. Humanae Vitae is the 1968 encyclical that reaffirmed the Church ban on artificial birth control. Its 40th anniversary last July prompted a series of Catholic statements, articles and conferences defending what was probably the most controversial encyclical of the 20th century. The major bioethics paper put out by the Vatican last month made several references to Humanae Vitae to bolster its argument.

Castellví’s article is still only available in the original Italian.  Silvia Aloisi in our Rome bureau provided FaithWorld with this quick summary of the article and comment in the Italian press:

The contraceptive pill is abortive, pollutes the environment and contributes to male infertility, according to an article published in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.  The head of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations (FIAMC), Pedro José Maria Simón Castellví, wrote in the article that the pill had “devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature.”

“We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution provoked by by-products of the pill,” he said.  This was a “clear anti-environmental effect demanding further explanation by manufacturers.”

Castellví gave no further details but said the findings were documented in a 100-page report recently published by his federation. He also said that the contraceptive pill, even when it had low hormone levels, was in many cases abortive because it prevented the embryo’s implantation into the woman’s womb.

The deputy chairman of the Italian Society of Contraception dismissed the article as “science fiction. “Gianbenedetto Melis told Italy’s Ansa news agency: “The pill cannot provoke an abortion because it blocks ovulation, and if there is no egg to be fertilised there can be no pregnancy.” Flavia Fronconi, a pharmacologist, said “the world is full of substances with oestrogen effects … Even a plastic bottle left in the sun releases oestrogen ‘polluting’ the liquid that we drink.”

Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, former president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, was cautious about the link made in the article between the pill and male infertility. “It’s true that the spreading of hormones in the environment increases the chances of multiple births and in turn provokes male infertility,” Sgreccia told the daily Corriere della Sera. “But there are several causes for this. And more than anything else, it stems from the fact that they are used in agriculture fertilisers, so they end up in vegetables and meat,” he said.

After some research on the Internet, I found Ehmann’s full report on the FIAMC website in the original German and a Spanish translation. There was only a four-page summary in English. In his report, Ehmann makes the claims mentioned in L’Osservatore Romano, sometimes with footnotes quoting scientific publications and sometimes not. It’s hard for a non-scientist to assess his scientific claims, but Castellví’s article gives the impression that it aims more to support doctrines than prove facts.  One sceptical blogger who got the same impression asks whether “the people responsible for the conclusion reported by Castellví are the same who were involved in the ‘research’ supporting Intelligent Design.”

Does this article reflect actual Vatican thinking or is it just a trial balloon? That’s hard to say. The fact that these charges are published in the Vatican newspaper doesn’t mean they’re official, but it does hint that someone there takes them seriously. If they want to convince others, they’ll have to provide more proof.