Hoping to catch the attention of Roman Catholics, doctors, scientists, and lawmakers, the Vatican has issued a 32-page instruction document on bioethics. The Church's steadfast pro-life position, that all life is sacred including an embryo,
informs the document "Dignitas Personae" (The Dignity of the Person).
Some
positions include:
- On in vitro fertilization, human cloning, genetic testing of embryos before implantation: These procedures violate the principle that every human life is sacred, and that children should be conceived only through sex by a married couple.
- On stem cell research: Research should not be done on embryos, but using cells derived from adults, blood from umbilical cords, or from fetuses “who have died of natural causes” is acceptable.
To find out what the Church thinks about the morning-after pill and freezing embryos, .
The United Nations is set to vote on a resolution that would call on all governments to decriminalize homosexuality. Yet almost 80 states that still criminalize homosexuality, as well as the Vatican,
oppose the measure proposed by the European Union. Specifically the resolution would condemn the jailing and execution those found guilty of homosexuality,
which happens in countries like Iran.
Thousands of people appeared in St. Peter’s Square yesterday to watch as Pope Benedict XVI gave the Roman Church
four new saints, one of who was of particular importance to Indian Catholics. Sister Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception, is the first Indian woman to achieve sainthood.
The Archdiocese of Cincinnati has released the
most comprehensive list of rules to date addressing behavior between priests and children. Among other changes is the requirement of those who have contact with kids to get background checks. Victim advocates support the new rules but realize they're not a panacea.
Right now Church and State aren't looking so separate in the US. Both the Catholic Church's
opposition to birth control as well as the Bush Administration's similar
attempt to limit access to contraception by defining it as abortion, have been openly criticized this week by contraception advocates.
An open letter, written by over 50 international Catholic dissent groups,
asks the Pope to lift the Church's ban on birth control.
If you were wondering what the Pope was doing
driving around Sydney in the Pope mobile, his Holiness is in town for World Youth Day. The
world's largest youth event, organized by the Catholic Church, has brought almost 125,000 international visitors to Sydney, more than the 2000 Olympics!
Every two or three years the Pope invites young pilgrims to celebrate their faith's international counterparts.
Tom Hanks is a persona non grata in all of the churches of the Vatican and Rome. The Vatican has banned the filming of Angels and Demons, Dan Brown's sequel to The Da Vinci Code because it is "an offense against God."
The head of the Vatican's Prefecture For Economic Affairs
said: [The stories] turned the Gospels upside down to poison the faith.
The leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland plans on lambasting Gordon Brown this Easter Sunday for the prime minister's proposal to use animal-human hybrid embryos for medical research. Supporters of the bill believe that the fusion will lead to
significant advances in combating multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease.
In his sermon on Sunday, Cardinal Keith O'Brien will call the bill "grotesque," "hideous," and an approval of "Frankenstein" experiments.
Thieves are figuring if they're already committing a sin, they might as well go large. A recent
spate of church robberies is forcing some Russian priests to consider bearing arms to protect their religious icons. One such attack inside the Golden Ring in Russia (near Moscow, with long historical ties to orthodox Christianity) ended with thieves holding a priest at automatic gunpoint while they relieved the church of its prized medieval icon.
Osama bin Laden took a break from condemning America, instead
taking aim at the European Union and the Catholic Church. In an audio tape tentatively attributed to the fugitive terrorist, his first message of 2008, bin Laden threatened the European Union "grave punishment" for publishing offensive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. His new single is titled: "The Response Will Be What You See, Not What You Hear."
