Stop that at once, amen
The Vatican has told us all what’s what again.
The Vatican says these techniques violate the principles that every human life — even an embryo — is sacred, and that babies should be conceived only through intercourse by a married couple.
Why? Because…intercourse by a married couple is sacred, thus matching the sacredness of the embryo? What if the married couple in question has used contraception in the past? Is their intercourse still sacred? Is the Vatican sure it wouldn’t prefer an innocent test tube that has never used any form of artificial contraception whatsoever? Has the Vatican thought this through?
The Vatican’s intended audience is not only individual Roman Catholics, but also non-Catholic doctors, scientists, medical researchers and legislators who might consider regulating stem cell research and other recent developments in biomedical technology.
Of course. The Vatican awards itself the right to dictate to everyone on the basis of its pious superstitious sentimental version of ‘morality’ in which the embryo is all-important and the wishes of adult human beings are as nothing.
Kathleen M. Raviele, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Georgia who is president of the Catholic Medical Association, said she tells her patients: “God creates through an act of love, and that’s not what’s happening in the laboratory. It’s the technician who’s creating. What in vitro does, is it separates the creation of a child from the marital act.”
In other words, Kathleen M. Raviele and the Vatican have some kind of pettifogging aesthetic dislike of in vitro fertilization, and they feel entitled to impose their personal aesthetic dislikes on other people. In other words the Vatican has an unappeasable passion for sticking its nose into everyone’s business. The Vatican can’t get enough of intruding on matters that are nothing to do with the Vatican and none of its business. It’s an unedifying spectacle.
The document is daft, of course. What’s even more baffling – and crazymaking – is the damned bloody deference the NY Times article gives it. It’s written in such a deadpan manner, as if there’s nothing the slightest bit insane about the document, its genesis, its authors, its positions, or its inordinate and disturbing potential for influence. I realize all major newspapers are addled by the cancer of “he said, she said – now that’s Objectivity (TM)!”. But honestly, aren’t we yet at the point where Rome’s dictats deserve at least a bit of a written raised eyebrow?
There’s a baffling deference displayed by the reporter. Check out the lead sentence:
“The Vatican issued its most authoritative and sweeping document on bioethical issues in more than 20 years on Friday, taking into account recent developments in biomedical technology. . “
Authoritative? Really? Ms. Goodstein, did you perhaps mean to say it’s considered the official church position, or did you mean authoritative” in some deeper sense?
And it’s not even really “he said, she said.” It’s “the Holy See hath decreed” and only Josephine Johnston has a problem with it. Only her. One bioethicist gets a dissenting paragraph, her quotation no doubt selected for proper timidity.
Gah – what are we to make of these, the reporter’s own words:
“Under discussion for six years, it is a moral response to bioethical questions raised in the 21 years since the congregation last issued instructions.”
A moral response? Does that mean Laurie Goodstein finds it morally defensible? Or does it mean she’s uncritically accepted the Vatican’s *claim* that it’s a moral response, without questioning whether it’s really an exertion of undeserved power tarted up as deep reflection and concern for humanity?
I really must stop or I’ll hog all the bytes. But it’s the media treatment of these things that I’m convinced is far, far more dangerous than anything the church says. It’s a quite serious problem.
Bizarre! Absolutely, mind-numbingly bizarre! I agree, of course, JoshS, that the problem of the media response is a serious one. But you must also remember that the Vatican speaks to (though not necessarily on behalf of) millions of the ‘faithful’. So the media, in its act of deference and non-offensiveness, plays the game. They go a bit weak at the knees with the thought of popes, cardinals, bishops and such-like fauna.
Funny thing is. When Darwin published The Origin of Species, he was caricatured as a monkey. But along come a bunch of guys who dress like women and claim to speak for all men, and for some reason people have an idea that there’s something superhuman about them. But it was Darwin who actually reasoned; it’s the pope and all the rest who chatter like monkeys!
Ecrasez l’infame!
Ain’t it the truth, about the infuriating deference. NPR is, if anything, worse – it talks about the pope as if he were of genuine importance and as if everyone agreed about that.
I put scare quotes on ‘authoritative’ in the News teaser. ‘Authoritative’ in what possible sense, one wonders. Perhaps it was a typo for ‘authoritarian.’
As Dave Allen said, if you’re not playing the game, don’t make the rules.
The Catholic Church advocates that infertility is a call from God to adopt children because “…[t]he Gospel shows that physical sterility is not an absolute evil. Spouses who still suffer from infertility after exhausting legitimate medical procedures should unite themselves with the Lord’s Cross, the source of all spiritual fecundity.
The RC church in the past had a proud “adoption” record. It was for it a very lucrative business.
“They can give expression to their generosity by adopting abandoned children or performing demanding services for others.”
Who does it think it is in laying down its own laws on the lives of married couples?
It rarely gave expression of generosity to abondoned babies/children who were placed in its care (in loco parentis) in the past. So what credentials has it got to speak out on behalf of embryos. It is all about dominion over vulnerable people.
Magesterium of the holy RC church rules!
Fallen women and its abandoned offspring, in the past, were treated abominably by the RC church. Children were habitually reminded that they were worse than the soldiers who crucified their beloved saviour Jesus Christ.
Abandoned illegitimate children were an absolute evil – and should never have been born outside the precious sanctity of marriage.
Indeed, Marie-Therese! And let us not forget the Church’s charming policy of adopting the children of Jewish families during WWII – and declaring those children dead when the families came looking for them so that the children would be spared the horror of growing up Jews.
Yes, the Vatican should pause before gassing on about “morality” and “adoption” in the same breath, lest people be reminded of the Vatican’s history in that area.
Marie-Therese of course was informed ‘that they were worse than the soldiers who crucified their beloved saviour Jesus Christ’ throughout her childhood – by the nuns of the ‘compassionate’ Catholic Church. The nuns at Goldenbridge lost no opportunity to tell the captive children that they were worse than garbage. I can’t think about it without grinding my teeth…
Eric MacDonald reminded us “of guys who dress like women and claim to speak for all men,” . . .
Shame, Eric! you forgot to remind us that one of ’em affects a triple tiara!
And a bubble car! It’s so unfair!
God creates through an act of love
No, dear. PEOPLE create through an act of FUCKING, which may or may not even be consensual, let alone loving.
Seriously, how do people say this stuff with a straight face? “Love”? Sperm and eggs have nothing to do with love.
Jenavir: You took the words right out of my mouth. Spiritual feckcundity bedamned?!
“The Vatican says these techniques violate the principles that every human life — even an embryo — is sacred, and that babies should be conceived only through intercourse by a married couple”
Pregnant women (penitents) who were incarcerated in Magdalen laundries, for generations, in Ireland, were stripped of their identities and were called by saints names. Also, when their lovely little bairns first saw the light of day – they were instantaneously snatched away from them by the religious, who acted as midwives themselves. They were not, under any circumstances, allowed to ever bond with their offspring. If they showed signs of fighting spirits at all, the religious would threaten/send them to psychiatric hospitals. Where, in all likelihood, they would inevitably live out the rest of their years on this planet.
Could someone please tell me where the sacredness of human life was for these beautiful young women, whose lives and bodies were violated by the RC church.
The Vatican hides in its secret vaults, reams of documents of abysmal sexual abuse, that was perpetrated on children by its clergy, and it has the audacity to speak out to the world on the sacredness of human life, vis a vis embryos. In my book that is ever so conflictual and confusing!!
It’s surprising to me that they had to work on this document for six years, given that they don’t say much of anything new. They could just have printed up five or so pages saying “NO. We BAN that. No no no. Don’t do that.”
On the other hand, the NYT did a service by publishing that charming photograph of the jolly guys (and one gal) at work pronouncing or directing or whatever they call it. . . they do look very very nasty and bossy. This can’t be what that flaming radical Baby Jesus had in mind, could it?
It’s true you know. One of the clerics, at the end of that piece, made a self-flattering claim about the church’s desire or obligation to ‘give a voice to the voiceless.’ They really do have the most unimitigated gall, wrapping themselves in the flag of compassion for the voiceless and powerless and overlooked. Where was the church’s compassion for the voiceless and powerless and overlooked in Irish industrial schools and ‘Magdalen’ laundries for all those decades?
Like a lot of people who refuse to think straight, they apparently think that the voiceless need compassionate protecting until they are born. After that, they are on their own.
Yeah how the hell did that woman get in there? Who let her in?
Perhaps Maria Luisa Di Pietro landed in there on a petri dish. ;-)!
Not only petri dishes. In his encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, John Paul II told us what those who ask for assistance in dying are really asking for: “It is a plea for help to keep on hoping when all human hopes fail.” (section 67) (Of course, he would know.)
There are all kinds of voiceless people. Cells on petri dishes don’t count. The really sad part is that the pope, the mullahs, the neighbourhood priest or minister or pastor, the local witchdoctor: you name it, they’ve got a way to silence voices.
That’s why this new ethical ‘instruction’ from the Vatican (the nerve of them) is so despicable. It silences voices. Women’s voices, the voices of the dying, the voices of those suffering from diseases that research might relieve. It does not speak for the voiceless.
Sorry I forgot the tiara. Well, you’ve got to wear something to the ball.
Eloquently said, Eric – and (like Marie-Therese) you know whereof you speak, unfortunately.
It’s terrible the way they seize the moral high ground with that stuff about the voiceless when it’s such bullshit, and cruel bullshit at that.
They really do have the most unimitigated gall, wrapping themselves in the flag of compassion for the voiceless and powerless and overlooked.
Hey, nobody’s more voiceless than an “unborn child”!
See, women are scary precisely because they’re not voiceless, because they have agency and they might use their voices to tell you they don’t like being perpetually pregnant or stuck for life with an abusive husband.
So you have to keep them voiceless. Then only you can stand up for them, to the extent YOU think proper, and there’s no risk of them seeking what THEY actually want.