Friday October 31, 2003
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Statement by Canadian Catholic Conference Head Takes Neutral Stand on Stem Cell Bill
CCCB Statement Selectively Quotes Vatican Instructions – Pro-Life Leaders Respond
OTTAWA, October 31, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Jacques Berthelet, Bishop of Saint-Jean-Longueuil and out-going President of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, has issued a statement on the passage by the House of Commons of Bill C-13, An Act Respecting Assisted Human Reproduction. The statement, takes a neutral stand on the legislation saying “we have recognized that there is much in the proposals that could be supported” but also noting it is “deeply flawed.”
In effect, all the heroic MPs and Senators who are now working to stop Senate approval of the bill have been deprived by the statement of critically needed active support from the leader of the Canadian Bishop’s organization.
The bill, as pro-life MPs in the House of Commons have stressed incessantly for over two years, is fatally flawed. It allows destructive research on human embryos ‘leftover’ from fertility clinics; it allows the specific creation of human embryos for the express purpose of research on IVF; it allows research on aborted baby body parts; it sanctions destructive in vitro fertilization and its allowance for homosexual couples.
Bishop Berthelet’s statement praises the legislation for “the prohibitions of reproductive and therapeutic cloning, commercial surrogacy (surrogacy itself is not prohibited), germ-line alteration, the marketing of sperm, ova and embryos, and the acceptance that it would be offensive to include ’embryo’ in the definition of ‘reproductive material’. Of note, MP Paul Szabo, who was responsible for a cloning amendment in the bill which the Bishop’s statement mentions as a positive, has said many times that the bill, despite his intervention, does NOT ban all forms of human cloning.
Rather than coming out forcefully, as did Pope John Paul II, indicating that Catholic legislators may not vote in favour of legislation which allows the destruction of human life, the CCCB statement instead read, “While Catholic politicians must always seek to protect human life and dignity to the fullest extent possible, there can be legitimate difference on how to achieve this objective. It is, therefore, not our intention to tell Catholic Senators how to vote because it is their responsibility to discern the best way to protect human life and dignity after reflecting on all of the resources available to them. This discernment certainly includes Church teaching, but also the Senators’ own personal reflections on the political and social realities they face.”
CCCB Statement Selectively Quotes Vatican Instructions
Particularly disturbing about the bishop’s statement was the incomplete quoting of the Pope and the Vatican. The statement mentions the “recent Doctrinal Note from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘On Some Questions regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life’, 24 November 2002”, but fails to quote the most pertinent sections regarding the question at hand. Namely, these statements: “John Paul II, continuing the constant teaching of the Church, has reiterated many times that those who are directly involved in lawmaking bodies have a grave and clear obligation to oppose any law that attacks human life. For them, as for every Catholic, it is impossible to promote such laws or to vote for them.” (see that full document here:
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docum… )
Moreover, Bishop Berthelet’s statement quotes Pope John Paul’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae at paragraph #73 saying, “A particular problem of conscience can arise in cases where a legislative vote would be decisive for the passage of a more restricted law, aimed at limiting the number of authorized abortions, in place of a more permissive law already passed or ready to be voted on.. In a case like the one just mentioned, when it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law, an elected official, whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well known, could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality. This does not in fact represent an illicit cooperation with an unjust law, but rather a legitimate and proper attempt to limit its evil aspects.”
The statement fails however to include the very sentence which precedes that quote. The preceding sentence reads: “In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to ‘take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law, or vote for it'”. The Pope has often stressed that the destruction of embryos for research is an equivalent evil to abortion. ( see Evangelum Vitae online here:
https://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/d… )
The Evangelium Vitae quote presented in the statement, has been the subject of much debate and thus was clarified in the recent Vatican document mentioned earlier on Catholics in Political Life. Directly after quoting the same passage from Evangelium Vitae mentioned in the bishop’s statement, the Vatican document added, “In this context, it must be noted also that a well-formed Christian conscience does not permit one to vote for a political program or an individual law which contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and morals.”
Pro-life Leaders Respond to CCCB Statement
Mary Ellen Douglas, National Coordinator for Campaign Life Coalition expressed the disappointment of the pro-life movement with the bishop’s statement. “No matter what good there possibly is in Bill C-13, no amount of good can cover the evil that’s in there with the sanction of destructive research on human embryos.”
Jim Hughes, President of Campaign Life Coalition Canada told LifeSite, “Imagine the CCCB bureaucrats coming out with a similar statement if we were discussing the lives of Jewish people rather than embryos. In Nazi times Hitler considered the Jews as less than human, just as our secular culture today falsely considers embryos as less than human. Would Catholic politicians in Hitler’s day be encouraged to discern based on ‘prudential’ judgments, whether or not to support a law which allowed deadly experiments on Jewish people, or would they be warned that they must never vote in favour of a law that attacks human life.” Ironically, the same argument used to justify deadly experimentation on the Jews in Nazi times – ‘they are going to die anyway’ – is today used to justify deadly experimentation on human embryos ‘leftover’ from fertility clinics.
See the Statement from Bishop Berthelet:
https://cccb.ca/PublicStatements.htm?CD=392&ID;=1417
See LifeSite’s New Bill C-13 page with comprehensive news and background on the bill
https://www.lifesitenews.com/features/stemcellembryo/c-13reprotec…
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