by Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D. Occasionally we hear disturbing stories in the media about young people who perpetrate abuse against the elderly. In a widely reported 2009 story, for example, caretakers at the Quadrangle Assisted Living facility outside Philadelphia were charged in connection with the abuse of an elderly patient named Lois McCallister. Three employees, aged […]
By Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk THE PROSPECT OF a very attractive, recently married young woman with a terminal illness facing excruciating pain and suffering as she dies is enough to move anyone. The life and death of 29- year-old Brittany Maynard recently captured enormous media attention when she declared she was moving to Oregon to commit […]
Planning for end-of-life situations is important. We should put in place an advance directive before our health takes a serious turn for the worse and we are no longer able to indicate our own wishes or make our own decisions.
Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk clarifies the moral issues regarding artificial insemination for married couples that are unable to conceive children naturally.
A number of serious diseases are known to occur because of defects or mutations in our DNA. Curing such diseases could in principle be carried out by rewriting the DNA to fix the mutated base pairs. Yet until recently, scientists have remained largely stymied in their attempts to directly modify genes in a living animal. Findings described in the March 30, 2014 issue of Nature Biotechnology, however, reveal that a novel gene-editing technique, known as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), can be used successfully in mice to reverse disease symptoms for a liver defect known as type I tyrosinemia.
Among married men and women who undergo surgical sterilization through a vasectomy or a tubal ligation, it has been estimated that anywhere from 10-20 percent will come to regret the choice.
by Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk Discrimination is often understood as acting out of prejudice against persons who differ from us and do not share our views, traits, values or lifestyles. The word “discrimination,” however, has an older meaning as well, namely, to draw a clear distinction between proper and improper, good and evil, to differentiate and […]
by Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk CNN recently profiled the case of Marlise Munoz, who was both pregnant and brain dead. Its report noted that Munoz was “33 years old and 14 weeks pregnant with the couple’s second child when her husband found her unconscious on their kitchen floor on November 26. Though doctors had pronounced her […]
by Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk AT THE BEGINING of December, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a sweeping federal lawsuit against the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops over its Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic hospitals and health care services, alleging that the directives, with their prohibition against direct abortion, resulted in negligent care of a […]
by Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk Guilt has gotten a lot of bad press recently. We live in an age where guilt is practically always something bad, something to get past with the help of a shrink. Particularly when discussing sex, people will declare that religion and morality do nothing more than make people feel guilty. Andrew […]
