Word: rome
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...murders of two captured Arab bus hijackers. In October a technician at Israel's top-secret nuclear complex at Dimona, Mordechai Vanunu, revealed the purported details of the country's nuclear weapons program, never officially acknowledged, in London's Sunday Times. He was later reportedly lured to Rome by a female MOSSAD agent and kidnaped. The caper put a strain on Israel's relations with Britain and Italy...
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...
...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...
Though the techniques in question may be 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...
...should occur, as the Instruction says, only "in marriage through the specific and exclusive acts of husband and wife," that is, normal sexual intercourse. In the Vatican view, couples must combine the "unitive" (sexual) and the "procreative" aspects of marriage. Artificial methods of producing children consider only procreation, says Rome, while artificial methods of birth control consider only the sexual aspect. Since artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization bypass the normal "conjugal act," neither method is allowed...