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Jesus was an “embryonic person" and is forever identified with all embryonic persons.

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (Catholic Online) - Dated September 8, 2008, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Vatican Congregation responsible for the protection of Doctrine (The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith) recently released a clear, well written and passionate defense of the dignity of every single human life from the moment of conception until natural death. As is the custom with “magisterial” documents, the title of this instruction was taken from the first line, “The dignity of a person must be recognized in every human being from conception to natural death”. The document continues, “This fundamental principle expresses a great “yes” to human life and must be at the center of ethical reflection on biomedical research, which has an ever greater importance in today’s world.”

Since the release of this document the Press has been filled with reports on this instruction. Some have accurately described the content and properly affirmed its significance. Others have been based on mistaken caricatures of the Catholic Church and not on the substance of what is presented. Still others demonstrated that the writers did not read the document or, if they did, did not like what it had to say and chose to mislead the public. Finally, some were based on old tired assertions of the Catholic Church as being “out of touch” or “anti-technology” or “anti-sexuality” or any number of other absolutely inane, untrue and groundless assertions.

The Instruction continues the clear and consistent defense of the dignity of every human life, respect for the goods and ends of marriage and the insistence on having authentic moral criteria with which to evaluate alleged advances in medical science as presented by the Catholic Church through her teaching office. The Catholic Church is not against science. Rather, she simply insists that good science must always respect the first goods; life, marriage and the common good of our life together.

All Catholic Christians should read this well written teaching document. It is a “doctrinal” statement of the ordinary magisterium (teaching office) and must be given the full assent of our intellect and will. This is of particular importance given the number of Catholics in significant positions of authority in the incoming Obama Administration. I encourage the Vice President - Elect and all of his fellow Catholics in the incoming administration to read this instruction. Finally, the document is not only for Catholics, other Christians or even just people of faith. It is addressed to “all who seek the truth”. It presents the truth by drawing upon the “light both of reason and faith and seeks to set forth an integral vision of man and his vocation”.

The document does not discourage progress in biomedicine. In fact it encourages it within an ethical framework, one which accepts that science must always be placed at the service of the human person, the family and the common good. Any use of the so called “new technologies” must also respect that the human body is never an “it” - but an “I” - some-one who must never be treated as an object, “The body of a human being, from the very first stages of its existence, can never be reduced merely to a group of cells. The embryonic human body develops progressively according to a well defined program with its proper finality, as is apparent in the birth of every baby.”

The insistence upon this framework for evaluating biomedicine finds support in the history of other true advances in Medical Science. The ethical criterion is revealed in the Natural Law; the fundamental right to life and the dignity of human persons. This right is knowable by and binding upon all men and women and is not simply a “religious” construct. Footnote 7 within the document cites Pope Benedict XVI’s presentation to the United Nations in April of 2008 which summarizes this point well: “Human rights…in particular the right to life of every human being “are based on the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations. Removing human rights from this context would mean restricting their range and yielding to a relativistic conception, according to which the meaning and interpretation of rights could vary and their universality would be denied in the name of different cultural, political, social and even religious outlooks. This great variety of viewpoints must not be allowed to obscure the fact that not only rights are universal, but so too is the human person, the subject of those rights”

It is in light of this fundamental moral criterion that the instruction discusses human sexuality and marital love, procreation and infertility treatments and the “manipulation of the embryo or the human Genetic Patrimony”. The section concerning gene therapy and the therapeutic use of stem cells, distinguishing both the types of cells and the techniques used to ...