VATICAN CITY (Zenit): Pope Benedict XVI is encouraging the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to give attention to bioethics.
The Pope, on January 31, received in audience participants in the plenary session of that dicastery, which was being held in the Vatican.
Pope Benedict invited the members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to give particular attention to “the difficult and complex problems of bioethics”.
In this context, he indicated that the “Church’s magisterium certainly cannot and should not intervene on every scientific innovation”.
“Rather, it has the task of reiterating the great values at stake, and providing the faithful, and all men and women of good will, with ethical-moral principles and guidelines for these new and important questions,” he said.
“The two fundamental criteria for moral discernment in this field are unconditional respect for the human being as a person, from conception to natural death; and respect for the origin of the transmission of human life through the acts of the spouses.”
The Pope highlighted new problems associated with such questions, such as the freezing of human embryos, pre-implantation diagnosis, stem-cell research and attempts at human cloning.
All these, he said, “clearly show how, with artificial insemination outside the body, the barrier protecting human dignity has been broken.
