| International News

Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, head of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry, said state-of-the-art equipment, medical procedures and medicines "are only part of the health care system, and undue insistence on their capabilities" may place more emphasis on meeting the demands of health care providers than on the needs of the patients.

The cardinal made his comments during a Sept. 28 conference on "Health, Technology and the Common Good."

The conference, which drew scholars and experts from the field of health care, genetics and pharmaceutical industries, was sponsored by the conservative U.S. think tank the Acton Institute and had the support of the Vatican health care council.

Cardinal Lozano said the ultimate goal of all technology must be that it is used for the good of all people, and he warned that "everything technologically possible need not be ethically permissible."

Even though scientific developments can appear to be "the most advanced and the most marvelous" ever seen, "technology in itself is blind" and can be used to either destroy or edify human life, he said.

Ethical guidelines are needed to establish "rules of behavior in the area of health and life," he said.

The cardinal criticized a new "paradigm shift" in ethical definitions being furthered by certain international, national and grass-roots groups, including the United Nations and its World Health Organization. He said the World Health Organization's value-based Health for All framework establishes rights only "for the person, not for the human being."

This means as long as an individual can meet the definition of a person and interact with his or her environment either through sensory, mental, social or conscious experience, he or she is a person with basic human rights, Cardinal Lozano said. Human beings such as embryos who are not capable of such interaction do not fit this definition of person and are therefore "deprived of any right that could be described as (a) human right," he said.

"Authentic bioethics" seek to improve all human life from its conception to its natural end, he said. Such bioethics make room for the transcendent, he said, and recognize "the dignity of the human person is inviolable" and life, as a gift from God, is not property that can be doled out or taken away.

Another conference speaker reaffirmed that life, not health, is God's gift to his children. Health is just one of many qualities of life, said Msgr. Jean Laffitte, vice president of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

Illness, according to Christian thought, is not automatically seen as something "foreign to the integral development of the person or an obstacle to that development," he said. Sickness may be debilitating but it can also "offer an occasion for the moral and spiritual growth" of the person, Msgr. Laffitte said.

He said everyone has a duty to safeguard, respect and care for one's health, while at the same time helping those who are ill.

There exists "an obligation for healthy members (of society) to assist the sick," which can include financing public health care systems and doing charitable and volunteer work, he said. Governments and political leaders are ethically obliged to support medical research and the maintenance of health care facilities, he added.