By Carol Glatz
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – To offer clearly and accurately the Catholic Church’s positions on abortion, contraception, genetic engineering, fertility treatments, vaccines, frozen embryos and other life issues, the Vatican released an expanded and updated guide of the Church’s bioethical teachings.
The “New Charter for Health Care Workers” is meant to provide a thorough summary of the Church’s position on affirming the primary, absolute value of life in the health field and address questions arising from the many medical and scientific advancements made since the first charter was published in 1994, said Msgr. Jean-Marie Mupendawatu.
The monsignor, who is the secretary delegate for health care in the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, said the charter “is a valid compendium of doctrine and praxis,” not only for those directly involved in providing medical care, but also for researchers, pharmacists, administrators and policymakers in the field of health care.
The charter “reaffirms the sanctity of life” as a gift from God and calls on those working in health care to be “servants” and “ministers of life” who will love and accompany all human beings from conception to their natural death, he said.
While the charter does not offer a completely “exhaustive” response to all problems and questions facing the medical and health fields, it does add many papal, Vatican and bishops’ pronouncements made since 1994 in an effort to “offer the clearest possible guidelines” to many ethical problems facing the world of health care today, said the charter’s preface, written by the late-Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski, president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry.
The council and three others were merged together to create the new dicastery for human development.
Vaccine Concerns
One issue partially dealt with in the new charter is vaccines produced with “biological material of illicit origin,” that is, made from cells from aborted fetuses.
Citing the 2008 instruction “Dignitas Personae” from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and a 2005 paper from the Pontifical Academy for Life, the charter said everyone has a duty to voice their disapproval of this kind of “biological material” being in use and to ask that alternatives be made available.
Researchers must “distance” themselves by refusing to use such material, even if there is no close connection between the researcher and those doing the illicit procedure, and “affirm with clarity the value of human life,” it said.
