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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...
...continue. He might be forced to confront two remaining aides who have been criticized for their behavior in the Iran initiative. Secretary of State George Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger objected last week to the Tower report's critique of their performance in Iranscam. According to the document, the two officials "simply distanced themselves from the program. They protected the record as to their own positions on this issue. They were not energetic in attempting to protect the President from the consequences of his personal commitment to freeing the hostages...