Once more into the breach: the Church’s new bioethical document

We live in a biotech age, and the Holy See knows it. Almost daily we read of attempts to engender new creatures using, for example, cows’ eggs that have had their DNA genetic material replaced with human genetic material.

We learn that vaccines are produced using cell lines developed from tissue taken from aborted babies. We find ads in women’s magazines for cosmetics made from human stem cells. We discover that there are more than 500,000 frozen human embryos in liquid nitrogen. Sometimes it is as though we have walked through an open door into Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, but this is the world we live in today!

In December, the Catholic Church once again raised her voice against these abuses of human dignity in a new formal teaching document known as Dignitas Personae. Indeed, the Church is the sole surviving institutional voice defending humanity against such indignities. On Dec. 12, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Holy See released a document on bioethics which had been officially approved by Pope Benedict XVI on Sept. 8, 2008, the Feast of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The Holy See usually pays close attention to the significance of dates when it promulgates and releases documents. This bioethics document, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the highest doctrinal office in the Church, was formally approved and then released on two great Marian feasts, as if to say that Mary stands as the example of love for God’s precious gift of life. After all, she was the one who bore within her womb the helpless, the vulnerable, the unseen human life of God himself! Her example bears witness for all time to the veneration we should all have toward God’s precious gift of life.

In 1987 — more than 20 years ago — the Holy See issued its first major document on contemporary bioethics known as Donum Vitae. This was issued also by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was headed by then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger on Feb. 22, the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, representing the teaching authority of the See of Rome. It embraced scientific advances in overcoming infertility and rendered ethical assessments on the most commonly used methods for achieving pregnancy.

The Catholic Church is often accused of being behind the times and not scientifically current. Donum Vitae itself, however, puts the lie to that perception. The document was thoroughly conversant with the science of the day. In fact, it judged human cloning to be beneath the dignity of the human person and an illicit way to overcome infertility.

This was in 1987 — 10 years before Dolly the Sheep was cloned. When the Holy See reached that judgment, many mammalian biologists thought it would be impossible to clone a mammal. So we see that rather than being behind the times, the Church was ahead of the curve!

With Donum Vitae, the Church formally taught that in vitro fertilization — or the engendering of human life in a Petri dish — was a violation of human dignity. It violated the dignity of the child at its coming into being by making it susceptible to the life and death decisions of others, and in vitro fertilization was judged to be a violation of the nobility of the means God established for bringing new life into the world — the profoundly personal act of marital intercourse. It warned then of abuses that would occur. Now, 22 years later, the Church speaks again in defense of human dignity in the face of more than 500,000 human embryos frozen in liquid nitrogen, left over from in vitro procedures.

Even as the Church pays close attention to the feast day on which its documents are issued, even so it pays close attention to the opening words, which invariably become the title of its documents. In 1968, Paul Paul VI issued his encyclical on contraception and began it with the words humanae vitae — of human life. In 1987, the document on bioethics was entitled Donum Vitae (The Gift of Life). This most recent document is entitled Dignitas Personae (The Dignity of the Person).

We can see that the Church’s fundamental concern in assessing these human actions — and passing judgment on them — is preserving the dignity, goodness and inviolability of the human person. The Church looks with horror on human life being engendered for experimentation and destruction in our day. It is appalled to see scientists playing God.

John M. Haas is president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center and founding president of the International Institute for Culture. He is a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life.