Vatican Expresses 'Perplexity' Over Nobel Awarded To IVF Creator

By Francis X. Rocca
Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY (RNS) The Vatican's top bioethics official expressed "perplexity" after the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded Monday (Oct. 4) to the inventor of in vitro fertilization (IVF).

Bishop Ignazio Carrasco de Paula, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, praised British scientist Robert G. Edwards for opening a "new and important chapter in the field of human reproduction" but blamed him for opening the door to a system of "donations and sales that involve human beings."

"Without Edwards there would be no market for oocytes (unfertilized eggs); without Edwards there would be no freezers full of embryos waiting to be transplanted into uteruses or, more likely, to be used for research or else die abandoned and forgotten by all," Carrasco said.

The Roman Catholic Church condemns the use of IVF in humans because it leads to reproduction without the "conjugal act" of sexual intercourse, and because it frequently involves the production of excess embryos that are eventually destroyed.

While acknowledging that Edwards should not be "underestimated," Carrasco said that "personally, I would have voted for other candidates" to receive the prize.

The Vatican characterized Carrasco's statement as a personal one.

Carrasco's recommended alternatives were Ernest McCullock and James Till, the discoverers of stem cells; and Shinya Yamanaka, who in 2007 was the first scientist to produce induced pluripotent stem cells, which could one day result in stem-cell research that does not involve the destruction of human embryos.

Comments

[Thaag Tidestalker]

07:32 AM on 11/20/2010

They can be perplexed all they damn well like. They are not the ones awarding the prize.

[joeyfoto]

07:09 PM on 10/10/2010

The Catholic Church does not believe in life. The Catholic Church believes that "real life" begins when we die.

Given the fact that that the core belief of the Church is a probable falsehood, if not an obvious lie, they have no rational basis for any ethical criticism of world that we, all of us, live and die in.

This church has been working overtime to turn off the light of reason since before "the Enlightenment" had a name. “Unlawful, unjust, base and shameful.” That is what Pope Innocent III called the Magna Carta, before he declared it 'null and void." There is no doubt which side the Catholic Church is on. For 2000 years of its explicit history, the Church sides with those who support the power of the Church. There is nothing more unethical than that.

In light of that history, I find it hard to believe that anyone takes this sophistry seriously, in the 21st century. This medieval mentality continues to threaten human decency. Medical research — the health of hundreds of thousands of suffering men, women and children — is here held hostage, at the mercy of syllogistic double-talk based upon vacuous assumptions.

In the name of humanity, I ask everyone to recognize this for the shame that it is.

[Moxo]

12:30 AM on 10/10/2010

The Vatican would be even more "perplexed" if the inventor of IVF came up with a way that altar-boys could become pregnant!

[Donns]

11:10 PM on 10/09/2010

Well guy here it is - you condem the use of IVF in humans, we the people condem what you guys do to your alter boys, OK.

[From the Raft]

05:30 PM on 10/09/2010

If it has ANYTHING to do with sex the Vatican is right on it!

Is catholicism a religion or sexology?

[LeftLeanWing]

02:11 PM on 10/08/2010

GIORDANO BRUNO EXECUTED TODAY....
February 16, 1600
Leftleanio Wingeri (AP)

The Roman Catholic Church executed Giordano Bruno, philosopher and scientist, for the crime of heresy. He was taken from his cell in the early hours of the morning to the Piazza dei Fiori in Rome and burnt alive at the stake.

To the last, the Church authorities were fearful of the ideas of a man who was known throughout Europe as a bold and brilliant thinker. In a peculiar twist to the gruesome affair, the executioners , by Vatican Order, tied his tongue so that he would be unable to address those gathered.

Throughout his life Bruno championed the Copernican system of astronomy which placed the sun, not the Earth, at the centre of the solar system. The Copernican system not only challenged the Church's cosmological views, but also the rigid social hierarchy of feudalism. The previous neatly ordered view of the universe, with the Earth at the centre, reinforced the rigid feudal order with serfs at the bottom and the Pope at the pinnacle. The dangerous implication of the Copernican theory was that if the Church's credo of infallibility could be challenged in the cosmological arena then its social position was also cast into doubt.

[joeyfoto]

07:50 PM on 10/10/2010

Bruno told the Inquisition that the universe was "infinite." If there is anything that someone with elephantiasis of the ego can not tolerate is being reminded of the scale of their potency in an infinitely vast and eternal universe. The repetition of this all-too-obvioius fact gave the pope — Clement VIII, if memory doesn't fail me — such a case of performance anxiety that he had Giordano Bruno turned over from the Italian Inquisition to the civilian authorities to be burned at the stake; for, even then, the Church dod not bloody its hands while it could coerce civilian authorities — under pain of excommunication and therefore "eternal" damnation — to do its wet work.

The history of the Roman Catholic Church is a litany of perpetual disgrace, broken only by faithful and dedicatedly decent human beings who held (and hold) a benign vision of Christianity which has perpetually taken a back seat to mass-mind-control and officially sanctioned tyranny.

[edgraham]

10:00 AM on 10/08/2010

"...because it involves reproduction without the "conjugal act" of sexual intercourse"

So that's how God did it.

[been2there]

01:40 AM on 10/08/2010

Naturally he wouldn't understand why giving human beings more self-determination is a good thing. He comes from a tradition learned helplessness!

[blogisti]

09:08 PM on 10/07/2010

God works in mysterious ways, my son. It is not for us to understand everything God does. It is for us to have faith, hope and love.

[Dr Scott]

03:29 PM on 10/07/2010

The Vatican is perplexed? Well, that ought to be a familiar feeling!

[Bob Wood]

12:15 PM on 10/07/2010

The RCC has been pretty consistently on the wrong side of every scientific advance. Left to the RCC humans would still be living in the dark ages...(sigh)
Celebate old men are so far outside the realm of reality as to be irrelevent.

[hollace]

10:44 AM on 10/07/2010

I think The Catholiic Church should be silently doing penance, and not comment about ANYTHING 'till they have cleaned their own house. Like a person in Detox, they need to concentrate on themselves, getting well, and take their place in society only when they have.

[Leoncefalo]

09:29 AM on 10/07/2010

The Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican are the 21st century vestiges of the Roman
Empire protecting Christian teaching in the world. It is only because democracy has not yet
caught up (yes, I said it right) CAUGHT UP with the obsolete institution of absolute monarchy
that the Vatican is viewed as a 16th century relic. Philosophically and theologically the Vatican and the Papacy operate against the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Only by virtue of the Vatican's moral authority, and no other, can it still claim to have influence over hundreds of millions of human lives. It is time for the temporal institution of the church to allow democracy to influence its decisions. The visible papal authority and ritual must be set aside for a parliamentary body that includes non-clerical members, as most national assemblies are constituted. Only then will the trappings of monarchy and empire fade away and a true
congressional body conduct the affairs of Christian believers.

Clerical thinking, in ALL religions is an obstacle to all spiritual progress. Jesus clearly defined this problem more than 2,000 years ago, and it is worse now than ever, especially among the Christians and Muslims. Ayatollahs, cardinals, archbishops, and imams have no special
access to G-d and serve, at best, as servants.

They should be put "in their place."

[PWM]

08:23 AM on 10/07/2010

The Catholic Church is more concerned about conception than about genocide.

[Macready]

09:14 AM on 10/07/2010

so true . . . well said PWM .. it is also very concerned with maintaining control over its members

[jusathot]

08:14 AM on 10/07/2010

...And I for one am perplexed by the Church's handling of pedophile priests.