Word: documented
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That strongly conservative stand was proclaimed in a 40-page document issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican agency that is responsible for monitoring orthodoxy. Said West Germany's Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the congregation, at a Rome press conference: "What is technologically possible is not also morally admissible." The document is being termed "Ratzinger's catechism" because of its substantial use of a question-and-answer format. Clinical in tone, the text bears the title Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation: Replies to Certain...
...Instruction is not published as an infallible pronouncement but carries definitive authority as an exercise of the church's teaching power. The document, however, does more than insist that Catholics submit to its instructions; it also calls on governments to pass laws prohibiting a number of the controversial reproductive techniques. The Pope clearly expects his bishops to lobby for such statutes. The day after the text was published, the Italian bishops urged their nation's legislators to create a "legal order conforming to the needs of moral...
...Vatican is not only boldly resisting trends in biological research and medicine but, in the case of a few practices commonly in use, also rejecting the opinions of numerous Roman Catholic moral theologians. The document's release quickly provoked widespread debate not only on the ethics of the reproductive techniques it discusses but on the propriety of the Vatican's attempt to influence public policy on a medical issue, particularly in pluralistic societies. Many Americans claimed the words from Rome would have little impact on daily practices...
...complex, Rome's doctrinal opposition to them stems from two simple, if controverted, principles. The first, which also undergirds the church's stance against abortion, holds that from the point when sperm and egg unite, a fertilized egg or embryo must be accorded, in the words of the document, the "unconditional respect that is morally due to the human being." That rules out the embryo manipulations that are often necessary in the research and application of a number of the reproductive techniques. This view provides an argument against the in vitro technique because in that process unused fertilized eggs...
Even though it was armed with earlier papal speeches on biological ethics, Rome decided to prepare a formal document in response to requests from many bishops as the new techniques were becoming more widespread. In fact, some worried Catholics think the Vatican has been too cautious, rather than too bold, by waiting so long to speak out. The Pontifical Council for the Family has received letters from scores of couples, most of them American, asking for guidance or expressing concern about the technologies. The doctrinal congregation spent 20 months writing the text, consulting some 60 moral theologians and 22 scientists...